The Mittens Come Off
I see Br. Matthew has beaten me to the punch* on this one, but Mitt Romney is not dropping foreign policy science in his new book. From Time’s Alex Altman: It’s tempting to dismiss the section...
Tagged: Foreign Policy
Scrambled
I was going to write a longer post on this, but one interesting consequence of Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a decision I support, however tentatively) is the ad hoc redrawing...
defining American interests
Stranger things have happened, but this is still worth noting. It turns out that a slim majority of Republicans now believe [pdf] that it is not America’s responsibility to “actively promote democracy around the...
Kagan doesn’t get it
Of the four or five thinkers who have had the greatest impact on my thinking, I would probably rank Reinhold Niebuhr near or at the top. I’m not really in the mood to give...
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains . . .
I first read The New American Militarism a few years ago for a class in college. Then came Andrew Bacevich’s latest book, The Limits of Power, which I picked up just as soon as...
rethinking a strong national defense
Mark Levin’s response to The Weekly Standard’s Peter Berkowitz is surprisingly good. I find myself truly befuddled by the apparent twin-personalities of the man who is Mark Levin – the thoughtful, reasonable essayist vs....
The Madman of Tehran
Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish physician and theologian of Medieval Cordoba, had a tendency to refer to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad as “the madman.” Maimonides had reasons abundant to use this term. The Jews...
Stranger than Nonfiction
Looking for a glimpse into the conservative foreign policy id? Try National Review’s Rich Lowry, whose latest techno-thriller has just been published: After learning that an Iranian scientist is in the process of developing...
modesty in Afghanistan
I think Reihan is right to be distressed, given his inclinations for Afghanistan, by the perceptible shift in expectations for the country. And he’s right to note that it’s a major shift with some...
The more I know, the less I know
The funny thing about my political writing is that it has been, from the beginning, very public. And it’s gotten better over time, which is good, and bloggier, too. You learn the tricks. The...
