Free Republic

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

On my first trip to the United States, aged 22, I was in a bar in New York, where a young Democrat lady from the Mid West started apologising to me about America's foreign policy and dominance of Europe and the world, McDonald's, Reagan etc. She was a bit shocked when I turned on her, explaining that the only reason we could sleep safely in our beds in Europe, without fearing a knock at the door and a "come wiz us, please, comrade", was because Truman, Ike and co had chosen not to leave us to our own mess in...

How many nations could genuinely say that they had the real potential to conquer the world or destroy it? How many nations had an arsenal capable of obliterating any other nation without risking retaliation? How many nations, with an army and navy superior to any others, an industry and economy capable of producing more weapons and material than any other, with forces already deployed for conquest, how many nations would try to conquer the world while they had such advantages? Sixty years ago, this was exactly situation in which the United States of America found itself. American military forces were...