Commentary

While the challenges of foreign policy change over time, the principles do not. In this first of three articles written in 1993-94, Roger Donway highlights the difference between government’s role in domestic and international affairs. Part 2 of "Rethinking Foreign Policy Part 3 of "Rethinking Foreign Policy During the almost 50 years of the cold war, most Americans grasped that Moscow was the sworn enemy of the United States and had to be opposed. By focusing on that single truth, U.S. foreign policy maintained a rough coherence—although it was riddled with pragmatism, altru­ism, and compromise. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, this organizing truth of U.S. foreign policy has vanished. The elements of national self-interest that inhered in America's anti-Soviet pos­ture, and thereby leavened all of the country's foreign policy, have diminished greatly, and the formerly diluting elements of pragmatism, altruism, and com­promise have become the policy's main theme. The results can be seen around the world, in the actions and inactions of the post-cold war Bush and Clinton administrations.

Nov 1, 1993

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Editor's Note: This article, from 1991, references "The institute." The Atlas Society was orginially founded as the Institute for Objectivist Studies. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. -Arthur Hugh Clough June 1, 1991 -- Ideas are the primary source of a society's culture and political life, and we look to intellectual change as the path to freedom, individualism, and a culture in which our values will be honored. History throws this connection into bold relief. With the accuracy of hindsight, and a vantage point that lets us take in centuries at a sweep, we observe how the ideas that flourished in the Renaissance and Age of Reason led to the Enlightenment and its political reforms, and then to the Industrial Revolution.

Jun 1, 1991

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David Kelley, Ph.D.

Part 4 of at the Young Women's Leadership Summit in Dallas last week ends with our interview with Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman.

Jun 26, 0207

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Super User

The current debate over the safety of oil trains is the latest front in the anti-industrial movement's war on fossil fuels.

Mar 3, 0205

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January 24, 2004 -- One reaction to President Bush's plan for a permanent Moon base and a trip to Mars is "Great! It's about time NASA stops going around in circles in low Earth orbit and returns to real science and exploration." Unfortunately, there's not a snowball's chance in the sun that the same agency that currently is constructing a down-sized version of its originally planned space station, decades behind schedule, at ten times its original budget, a few hundred miles up in orbit, will be able to build a station several hundred thousand miles away on the Moon. If Americans are again to walk on the Moon and make their way to Mars, NASA will actually need to be downsized and the private sector allowed to lead the way to the next frontier.

Apr 4, 0201

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Edward Hudgins

April 18, 2009 -- Spring has sprung at last here in Montreal. Leaves are sprouting on the trees, birds are chirping outside my window, and young women are baring their legs prematurely. The arrival of spring also means that in a few days time, millions of people throughout the world will celebrate another Earth Day to express their worries about the state of the planet. Though global temperatures have stagnated and even fallen somewhat in recent years, concern about global warming is still high on environmentalists’ agendas. The frigid winter we just experienced, they say, is due to La Niña and solar cycles . Then again, the disconnect between continually rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and recent global cooling could also reflect our imperfect understanding of feedback mechanisms in the climate system. Uncertainties about the complex role of clouds, especially, translate into substantial uncertainties in scientists’ computer models. According to self-described heretics like physicist Freeman Dyson, those models “ do not begin to describe the real world that we live in .” And yet, despite all the missing pieces of the puzzle, we continue to worry.

May 6, 0010

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