A recent incident at West Point involving my wife and our little daughter has given us much to ponder. The initial responses, and later silences, of the military authorities were both surprising and perplexing. I became even more reflective and pensive, however, after my own well-informed and honest and very candid West Point classmates further...
Post
When Incarnation Is Considered Idolatry
In his trenchant 1919 Introduction to Scott Montcrieff’s translation of The Song of Roland, G.K. Chesterton was especially stirred by the Old French epic poem’s final stanza, after “Charlemagne the Christian emperor” had already victoriously fought on the Spanish March against encroaching Islam and seemed, at last, to have “established his empire in quiet.” But...
Post
Nation-Building and the U.S. Military
America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq is the title of a 240-page strategic and historical study released in July 2003, four months after we invaded Iraq, by the RAND Corporation, an influential national-security institute that originally conducted special research for the U.S. Air Force. The early intellectual leadership of the RAND Corporation is...
Post
America’s Unthinking Military
It was in the autumn of 1960, after our Plebe Summer and the test of “Beast Barracks,” that I first heard about the revisions that the West Point academic curriculum had recently undergone, which would be experimentally applied to our incoming class of some 800 men. Colonel Lincoln’s Social Science Department, as it was presented...
Post
Knowing What We Don’t Know
Before publishing his essay “The Lonely Superpower” (Foreign Affairs, 1999), Samuel Huntington had spoken more candidly in an address to the American Enterprise Institute in May 1998. On that occasion, he had identified himself as an old-fashioned Burkean conservative. Huntington’s central thesis is that “global politics has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at...
Post
Revolution and Natural Law
To what extent (if at all) does natural law entail religious liberty? To put it another way, is religious liberty a natural right? An attempt to answer this question should elucidate the long and sometimes equivocal tradition of natural law. What, for example, is the proper relationship between tolerance and the truth? When does tolerance...