Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Old Ghosts

From the May 1999 Print Edition

Venona:  Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr.Yale University Press.  475 pp. $30. The Haunted Wood:  Soviet Espionage in America––The Stalin Era.By Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev.Random House. 402 pp. $30. To label the period after . . . . Continue Reading »

The New Populism

From the August/September 1998 Print Edition

The Great Betrayal By Patrick J. Buchanan Little, Brown. 384 pp. $22.95 Readers of a certain age will recall when the tariff seemed the very stuff of American history. So at least we were led to believe. Once the standard textbook narrative got past 1865, arcane controversies over trade policy . . . . Continue Reading »

The Irony of American Power

From the March 1998 Print Edition

I The overarching theme of twentieth-century geopolitics has been America’s success in prevailing over its competitors for global power. A century ago, the United States was a continental power exercising only a peripheral influence on international politics. Today, having outlasted, exhausted, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Seed of the Church

From the June/July 1997 Print Edition

Their Blood Cries Out: The Growing Worldwide Persecution of Christians by Paul Marshall Word, 304 pages, $12.99 This book bears all the earmarks of being a loser. The title alone will induce a cringe from prospective readers for whom detachment and irony comprise the reigning hallmarks of . . . . Continue Reading »

Who Are You?

From the May 1997 Print Edition

The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order By Samuel P. Huntington Simon &Schuster, 367 pages, $26 Widely heralded prognostications to the contrary notwithstanding, history has not ended. Rather, it continues to advance, implacable and perverse as ever. Indeed, according to this . . . . Continue Reading »

Our Culture, Our World

From the December 1996 Print Edition

For students of strategy, the most persistent controversies revolve around elementary issues. Is strategy an art or a science? How far beyond military operations does the realm of strategy extend? What precepts should guide strategic analysis? Or is it an error even to presume the existence of such . . . . Continue Reading »

Thinking Big

From the August/September 1996 Print Edition

The End of the Nation-State By Jean-Marie Guéhenno Translated by Victoria Elliott University of Minnesota Press, 145 pages, $19.95 This is a very small book with very large aspirations. As a display of intellectual panache, it is also unmistakably European—the literary equivalent of a sleek . . . . Continue Reading »