The rules are different for Hillary Clinton. No non- incumbent in the history of contemporary U.S. presidential politics ever looked so formidable three years before an election. Ask almost any Democrat and the automatic assumption is that Clinton will be the party’s 2016 nominee; a top West Virginia Democrat predicts she would carry that state, […]
The wars of the 21st century will be dominated by three overlapping types of conflict: Wars of Silicon, Wars of Iron, and Wars in the Shadows. The United States must design a new readiness and investment strategy in order to effectively deal with all three. Yet today it continues to pour scarce resources chiefly into […]
The United States has waged three wars since Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001: against Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. The first two were forced upon the US, but the third was the result of a willful, deliberate decision by former President George W. Bush, taken on ideological grounds and, most […]
“The problem with this administration,” one senior official who works for an Obama cabinet department and is a loyal and enthusiastic supporter of the president told me, “is that we don’t do strategy, we do deliverables.” This is a common lament in modern Washington. Trapped within the news cycle like hamsters within a plastic exercise ball, the […]
A decline in America’s leadership role and the emergence of a highly unstable world is a serious possibility. In reality, decline is not a foregone conclusion but a deliberate political choice that builds from a failure to define what matters most to the nation. It is imperative for the United States to articulate principles to […]
Even as Obama hesitates to thrust the United States into the rolling cauldron that is Syria, critics accuse him of coddling a dictator in Cairo. Read Here – Foreign Policy
The White House likes a bit of threat. In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama wanted to nudge Congress yet again into passing meaningful legislation. The president emphasized that America‘s enemies are “seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, and our air traffic control systems.” Read Here – Foreign […]
The United States often uses exaggerated civilian casualty numbers to make a case for military intervention in strife-torn regions. Since the 1990s, the West has justified its military interventions on liberal grounds — to remove noxious leaders who oppress their people or who have begun to conduct policies that appear genocidal. Buoyed by the intervention […]
U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White is best known as one of the leading architects of the Bretton Woods system that shaped the global economy after World War II. But he was also a spy for the Soviet Union, providing secret information and giving advice on economic issues. Why did he do it? Newly uncovered […]
It wasn’t Barack Obama’s doing — at least not fully. The crowds in Paris and Berlin, and the Muslims in Cairo and Karachi, eager to be done with President George W. Bush, took the new standard-bearer of American power as one of their own, a cosmopolitan man keen to break with the embattled certitude of […]
