Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (2 page)

“When a great writer is falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and decides to write a tell-all non-defensive account, the result is likely to be riveting. Conrad Black’s memoir does not disappoint.”

—Alan M. Dershowitz

“Conrad Black’s
A Matter of Principle
is a fascinating, erudite, and defiant prison memoir—must-read for lawyers, politicos, and gossips alike!”

—Margaret Atwood, on Twitter

“Authoritative and highly readable . . .”

—Andrew Roberts,
The Daily Beast

“[A] gripping memoir of [Black’s] nightmarish trek through America’s justice system and business governance culture.... Black is a writer of great force and panache.”

—The New Criterion

“The former international media baron’s observations from prison are funny, poignant, touching, sympathetic (except for prison authorities) and beautifully chronicled.”

—Ottawa Citizen

“A remarkable work—unlike any of its kind that I’ve ever read.... Conrad seems to have total recall of everything, and he lays it out coherently and colourfully. . . . Precise, blunt, succinct. A fascinating book about the trial.”

—The Huffington Post

“
[A Matter of Principle]
is a brutally honest memoir of [Black’s] turbulent run-in with American injustice.”

—Irish Independent

“A big book by a big man.... A hard-eyed and detailed indictment of that legal system, from U.S. attorneys to our federal prisons.”

—The American Spectator

“
A Matter of Principle
is Conrad Black’s most personal and gripping book.”

—Troy Media

“A riveting memoir and a scathing account of a flawed justice system.”

—IndieBound

“
A Matter of Principle
is a laudable achievement.”

—Winnipeg Free Press

ALSO BY CONRAD BLACK

Render Unto Caesar: The Life and Legacy of Maurice Duplessis

A Life in Progress

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom

Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full

A Matter of Principle

FOR LOYAL AMERICAN FRIENDS, IN PARTICULAR

Tina Brown and Harold Evans, Shelby Bryan and Anna Wintour, Domenico Buccigrossi, Ann Coulter, Thierry Despont, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Mica Ertegun, Miguel Estrada, Pepe and Amelia Fanjul, Jack Fowler, Ron Genini, Carolyn Gurland, Roger and Susan Hertog Laura Ingraham, Robert Jennings, Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Roger Kimball, Parker Ladd, Leonard Lauder, Rush Limbaugh, Seth Lipsky and Amity Shlaes, Norman and Sarah Murphy Peggy Noonan, John and Melissa O’Sullivan, Larry Perotto, Robert Pirie, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, David Pringle, Chris Ruddy, Donald and Melania Trump, Robert Emmett Tyrrell, George Will, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Wright, Jayne Wrightsman, Ezra Zilkha, and Mort Zuckerman; and the late Bill Buckley and Bill Safire.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Henry A. Kissinger

A society’s national strategy defines the goals it seeks to achieve and the contingencies it attempts to prevent. It unites a people’s core interests, values, and apprehensions. This effort is not an academic undertaking, nor an element in a particular political platform. If it is to be effective, it must be embedded in the convictions and actions of a society over a period of time.

For the United States, the development of such a strategy has been a complex journey. No country has played such a decisive role in shaping international order, nor professed such deep ambivalence about its participation in it.

The United States was founded in large part as a conscious turning away from European concepts of international order. The founders declared independence during the heyday of the Westphalian international system, brought about at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The premises of this system were the sovereign control of states over their territories, domestic structure as the prerogative of the government—hence a doctrine of non-interference in other states’ affairs—and an equilibrium between the great powers (expressing itself in the concept of a “balance of power”).

The Founding Fathers skillfully used this system to establish American independence and security. Yet they stood intentionally aloof from it, declining to send fully empowered embassies to European courts. The European balance of power was useful to the new country, but not to the point of participating in its practical conduct. Rather, the United States relied on Britain to play the role of balancer and used the resultant equilibrium to ban a European role in the Western Hemisphere via the Monroe Doctrine.

When the United States reentered European affairs during the World War I, President Woodrow Wilson announced America’s war aims as a rejection of Westphalian principles. He denounced the balance of power and the practice of traditional diplomatic methods (decried as “secret diplomacy”) as a major contributing cause of war. In their place he proclaimed the objective of self-determination as the organizing principle of the coming peace. As a result, the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, abandoned many of the established principles of the balance of power and of non-interference in domestic affairs. With the map of Europe redrawn, the United States thereupon withdrew from day-to-day global diplomacy.

When the United States assumed a global role in World War II, it did so in pursuit of historic objectives—preventing Europe or Asia from falling under the domination of a single power, particularly a hostile one. When this heroic undertaking succeeded, many Americans, including some in government, expected to be able to withdraw from the conduct of global policy.

Yet America was now the dominant country in the world. Concern with the balance of power shifted from internal European arrangements to the containment of Soviet expansionism globally, turning the international order operationally into a two-power world. The United States had emerged as the essential guarantor of allied security and international stability. Particularly in the North Atlantic region, America concentrated on mobilizing resources for an agreed mission. Washington saw its role as the director of the common enterprise of countering a specific challenge to peace, rather than as a participant in an equilibrium.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international system gradually grew more multipolar. China emerged as a global economic power with an increasing military capacity. Traditional power centers ended periods of isolation, colonial rule, or underdevelopment and began to play influential international roles. Something like a global version of Westphalian diplomacy began to emerge—an equilibrium balancing the sometimes-compatible, sometimes-competitive aims of multiple sovereign units.

Through all these transformations, the United States has been torn between its faith in its exceptional nature and global mission, and the pressures of a public opinion skeptical of open-ended commitments in distant regions. The ideal of universal democracy-promotion, if adopted as an operational strategy, implies a doctrine of permanent domestic engineering across the world. Yet the prevailing American view has regarded foreign policy as a series of episodes with definitive conclusions; it recoiled from the ambiguities of a historical process in which goals are achieved incrementally, through imperfect stages.

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