Jon Basil Utley

Jon Basil Utley

Jon Basil Utley was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1934 and emigrated to America in 1939. He is Associate Publisher of The American Conservative, a Robert A. Taft Fellow for International and Constitutional Studies at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a Fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. He has written widely on third-world development economics and foreign policy.

He is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, with language studies in Germany, France, and Cuba. He worked from 1956-75 in South America, starting in the insurance business (American International Group in Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia). He later founded the Bogota Bulletin, Colombia's first English-language news publication, and managed a mutual fund and insurance sales organization in South America. He also worked as a foreign correspondent in South America based in Peru for the Journal of Commerce and Knight-Ridder newspapers.

He was Associate Editor of The Times of the Americas for 12 years and a commentator on the Voice of America from 1985-2003. He has written for the Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, National Review, Human Events, and the Miami Herald and is listed in Who’s Who in the World & Who’s Who in America. He also worked in the oil development business in Pennsylvania and in real estate development in Washington, D.C. In 1990 he was a cofounder of the Committee to Avert a Mid-East Holocaust, which opposed the attack on Iraq.

He is now Chairman of Americans Against World Empire, a.k.a. ConservativesForPeace.com. He has served on the Board of Directors or Advisory Councils of many leading conservative and libertarian organizations, including Accuracy in Media, Conservative Caucus, Council for Inter-American Security, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Reason Foundation, and Solidarity America. His articles have been widely disseminated. He is fluent in French, German, and Spanish.

In 2004 he visited Vorkuta, the northernmost former concentration camp in European Russia, where his father was executed in 1938. He has written the account of researching the archives and his visit to Vorkuta and the Perm concentration camp museum in the Urals. It is accessible by searching for Vorkuta Perm on Google.

Links to some of Jon Basil Utley's articles:
Tribes, Veils and Democracy

Proportional Representation Creates Dysfunctional Democracies

The Cost of Boots on the Ground in Iraq

America Is Not Rome

Why We Can't Win Against Guerillas

Obama and the Alternative Energy Fiasco

Understanding Dictatorships:
From Iran to Cuba,
the question of legitimacy is paramount

Alaskan Oil Abundance Versus
Washington's Wasted Billions:
The case for new oil drilling in
Alaska and off America's coasts

Sun Tzu and America's Way of War

• April 2, 2009 – Taking on the Military-Industrial Complex:
A 10-Point Plan for the Right and the Left

• January 23, 2009 – How Bin Laden Bankrupted America: The Five Ways

© 2009 Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation