Vice President Joe Biden and rival Republican Paul Ryan battled fiercely over foreign policy and the economy in a lively debate on Thursday, with Biden aggressively defending the administration’s policies and dismissing Ryan’s criticism. Seeking to win back the momentum for the Democrats‘ campaign after a poor debate performance by President Barack Obama last week, […]
You hear it routinely during congressional events involving defense issues, when a defense secretary wants to protect his budget (or his legacy), and when candidate Barack Obama or hisoperatives defend the administration’s national security record: The American armed forces are “the best in the world.” It has become such an unremarkable bit of conventional wisdom that the comment is usually prologue to some […]
President Obama, who is putatively a civil libertarian—or, at the very least, the preferred candidate of most civil libertarians—has achieved something remarkable over the course of his term. He has led an expansive war against America’s enemies using lethal flying robots that not infrequently incinerate innocent civilians, and he’s been rewarded for it. According to […]
Every morning that President Barack Obama chooses to receive the daily intelligence briefing in person, Vice President Joe Biden sits by his side in a matching armchair in the Oval Office. Biden attends — and often speaks volubly at — the “principals meetings” of the president and his top national security officials, as well as at […]
HOW did it come to this? That’s what Barack Obama’s supporters are asking in light ofMonday’s Pew poll that shows Mitt Romney leading the president by four percentage points. This represents a 12-point shift from the mid-September Pew poll that had Mr Obama comfortably ahead by eight points, and it represents a coda of sorts to […]
Mitt Romney may have talked about the Middle East yesterday in what was billed (and panned) as a major foreign policy address, but ad spending by both candidates’ camps shows that global affairs are still low on the list of key campaign topics. Fewer than 10% of ads aired in the U.S. presidential race to date have made […]
Mitt Romney has delivered a lot of dishonest speeches in recent months, but Monday’s address on foreign policy may be the most mendacious yet. It was expected that he would distort President Obama into a caricature of Jimmy Carter. But it was astonishing to watch Romney spin a daydream of himself as some latter-day George Marshall, bringing […]
Earlier this year, Bob Carr, Australia’s foreign minister and a longtime friend of the United States, observed with Aussie clarity: “The United States is one budget deal away from restoring its global preeminence.” He added a caution: “There are powers in the Asia-Pacific that are whispering that this time the United States will not get […]
U.S. President John F. Kennedy‘s skillful management of the Cuban missile crisis, 50 years ago this autumn, has been elevated into the central myth of the Cold War. At its core is the tale that, by virtue of U.S. military superiority and his steely will, Kennedy forced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to capitulate and remove […]
