Institutions rarely vote themselves out of existence. Not if they still have money in their budgets. Large institutions in particular have an almost genetic propensity to cling to life even after their reasons for being have vanished. That’s why I don’t expect NATO, which will gather in Chicago later this month, to suddenly declare game… Continue reading NATO vs. Rogues
It’s easy to dismiss diplomacy as feckless. The art of negotiation always appears amateurish until it manages, against all expectation, to succeed. Even then, an agreement is only as good as its longevity. The February 29 pact between the United States and North Korea, the result of painstaking negotiations, lasted all of 12 minutes after… Continue reading Debating Syria
Military spending combines the two certainties in life: death and taxes. U.S. taxpayers are paying more than anyone else on Earth to support an industry devoted to death. Last Tuesday, Tax Day, Americans were treated to the news that our nation has increased its overall spending on the military. In 2011, the United States spent… Continue reading Death and Taxes
We are all trust fund babies living off the wealth of our ancestors. I’m not talking Mommy and Daddy. I’m talking Barney. That cuddly T-Rex and all his dinosaur friends, along with those giant ferns and tiny trilobites, died millions of years ago only to become, very gradually, the energy that fuels our modern life.… Continue reading Scraping the Bottom
Every year, in the last two weeks of their final semester, a group of seniors in the 20th-century world history class at my high school played a mysterious game. They were honor-bound not to tell anyone what they were doing. All we knew was that, while their fellow seniors goofed off and marked time until… Continue reading Arms Down
Elections are decided by economics. Voters respond to pocketbook issues and are swayed by the huge sums that candidates lavish on advertising. Foreign policy issues, by contrast, are what the British call “noises off,” those sounds from off-stage that you hear occasionally to punctuate the main actions, sounds like exploding bombs and the distant cries… Continue reading Obama: The Foreign Policy President?
The bully came to Washington. The American president told him in no uncertain terms that the United States would not support a military attack on Iran at this moment. The bully met with 13,000 of his U.S. supporters in an effort to pressure the White House. It didn’t work. The bully went home empty-handed. This… Continue reading Bribing Israel
There is a terrible rule of war. Whatever new weapon that you introduce onto the battlefield, your adversary will eventually acquire it as well. Indeed, they will often use an industrial-strength version of that very same weapon against you. Hiram Maxim invented the modern machine gun – automated and oil-cooled – but the British army… Continue reading Blowback, TINA-Style
Stop the Russians from spreading south. This was a primary objective of the Great Game of the 19th century that centered on Central Asia and particularly Afghanistan. The empires of the time – British, Russian, French, Chinese, Ottoman – expended much wealth and endured considerable human suffering during the course of the game. No empire… Continue reading The Not-So-Great Game
In his State of the Union address last night, President Barack Obama began with what is widely perceived to be his strong suit: foreign policy. The nation is safer under his watch, he reassured his audience, now that Osama bin Laden is gone, al-Qaeda is broken, and U.S. troops are out of Iraq. It’s too… Continue reading State of the Union’s Foreign Policy
A century ago, the Ottoman Empire was falling apart as a result of disastrous wars and economic decline. Dubbed “the sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman Empire was not ultimately able to pull itself together. It expired in the flames of World War I, but not before pulling down a good chunk of the world… Continue reading The Sick Man of North America
Particularly over the last eight years, the United States was one big mouth. We lectured the world. We berated the world. We threatened and wheedled and roared. From the world’s perspective, however, the United States was like the teacher in the Peanuts comic strip: an incomprehensible wah-wah sound in the background. You generally ignored this… Continue reading Listen: Afghanistan
Last week, shortly after being inaugurated, President Barack Obama ended the “global war on terror” (GWOT). Or so The Washington Post reported. The new president countermanded the Bush administration’s extralegal approaches by mandating the closure of Guantánamo within a year, outlawing the use of torture in interrogations, and putting the CIA out of the secret… Continue reading GWOT’s End
He was focused on domestic issues. He promised a “compassionate conservatism.” In a 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore, he recoiled from the image of an arrogant United States offending the rest of the world. “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us,” he said. “If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.”… Continue reading Bush’s Path from ‘Humility’ to ‘Bring it On’
Early on in his administration, George W. Bush decided not to focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Did the president consider the problem too difficult to solve? No, that wasn’t quite it. Too much of a domestic hot potato? Wrong again. Instead, the 43rd American president had his eyes on the prize. And not in a… Continue reading Lame Legacy
The United States currently spends more than $400 billion a year on the military. This is nearly one-half of the entire global expenditure on military affairs. Two nearest U.S. rivals in military spending, China and Russia, are not even close: combined, they spend only one-fourth of what the Pentagon does. North Korea spends about 1… Continue reading The Perils of Imperial Indigestion