The Problem of Intervention

With the election of Bill Clinton, the war in Vietnam ended—finally. George Bush sought to make it a campaign issue by talking about Clinton’s draft record, yet Americans pronounced such matters irrelevant to their concerns—economic concerns, which are not so different from those that once sustained the pre-Vietnam Democratic party. After a dozen years of voodoo economics, Americans are hurting.

Then, the evening news: starvation in Somalia, “ethnic cleansing” in...