Search Results for: De Re Militari

Madison’s Examination of the British Doctrine

Patrick J. Garrity +
June 15, 2015

We cite Madison’s Examination as a classic of American strategy and diplomacy because it set the stage for one of the last, and in the end unsuccessful, efforts of the Jeffersonian Republicans to realize one of the principal goals of the Revolution in international affairs.  The Founders – including Adams’ father – had hoped that entrance of the United States into the Euro-Atlantic state system would bring about a new configuration of international power, one favorable to liberty and reformist domestic politics.  This more peaceful and republican world would be underwritten by norms of international behavior that followed an increasingly liberal law of nations. 

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Geography and World Politics

Colin Dueck
February 18, 2015

Becoming the world's only superpower can cause strange dreams. In the case of the United States, which achieved this status over 20 years ago, many who should know better have dreamed that economic interdependence, multilateral institutions, technological change, global democratization, the rise of non-state actors—even Barack Obama's charming personality—will have a transformational effect on world affairs, rendering irrelevant the geopolitics underlying American national security. But geopolitical competition between major world powers obviously continues, and these dreams, which are recognizably liberal dreams, remain delusive and dangerous.

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Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776)

Patrick J. Garrity +
February 18, 2015

Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, published in Philadelphia in January 1776, is properly recognized as a major turning point in the American Revolution.  Paine effectively publicized the basic argument that Patriots like John Adams and Richard Henry Lee had been making privately in the Continental Congress – that the cause of the

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