Category: The American Interest

Twenty years ago Leon Hadar published Quagmire: America in the Middle East, an eloquent plea for U.S. disengagement from the region.  He warned that American leaders had neither the knowledge nor the power to manage long-standing disputes involving faraway people of whom we know little.  Attempts at meddling, he wrote, invariably made the various actors...

Barack Obama’s re-election, while socially, culturally, and morally disastrous for the country, may prove the lesser of two evils when it comes to foreign policy, according to some pundits.  Perhaps, but only because Obama’s primary focus is on irreversibly changing the character and ethnic composition of the United States. Republicans, in the meantime, learn nothing...

On September 24 I embarked on a week-long tour of Tunisia, hoping to learn more on the aftermath of last year’s revolution and the state of political play ahead of the elections, which are due before the year’s end.  The findings are surprising.  The country looks and feels civilized, roadside trash notwithstanding.  It is safe...

In an election campaign dominated by domestic issues, foreign themes have appeared as isolated snippets.  Questions regarding what to do about Syria or Iran, or how to manage relations with China and Russia, produce stock responses unrelated to the broad picture.  These are among the most important questions facing political decisionmakers, foreign-policy practitioners, and their...

Attending a “holiday party” at the State Department in December 2010, President Obama congratulated himself on appointing Hillary Clinton and declared that “there’s a consensus building that [she] may be one of the best secretaries of state we’ve ever had in this country’s history.”  She is relentless, tough, and does not quit, Obama said, “so,...

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.  The ongoing enthusiasm of the Western elites for Islam, in general, and for the misnamed Arab Spring, in particular, is a case in point.  The bitter fruits of the latter—simultaneously visible but differently manifested in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria—are rooted in the character of the...

NATO leaders concluded a two-day summit in Chicago on May 21, with the pending withdrawal from Afghanistan dominating the proceedings.  According to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, two other items dominated the agenda: The alliance will continue to expand its capabilities in spite of economic austerity, and “we have engaged with our partners around...

This column was written on Orthodox Easter, but the reminder that Christ is risen is not the only reason for its upbeat tone.  There is good news on several foreign fronts, making a major new war less likely today than at any time since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq was announced last October....

On January 17—less than 24 hours after presenting his credentials—the new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, met with a group of Russian opposition figures, “civil-society activists,” and street-demonstration leaders at the U.S. embassy in Moscow.  It was a provocative first move, the equivalent of a new Russian ambassador in Washington ostentatiously hosting the leaders...

The rhetoric of “Europe” in its recognizably modern form dates back to the Thirty Years’ War.  After all that they had done to each other between 1618 and 1648, Europeans were rightly embarrassed to talk of “Christendom” as a serious political concept.  The last mention of a Christian commonwealth was made in the Peace of...

It takes neither  unique intellectual brilliance nor supernaturally honed intuitive skills to predict the consequences of hazardous foreign-policy moves.  On numerous occasions over the past decade and a half, I have advised against U.S. military interventions not because of my visceral isolationist zeal, but because I deemed the consequences of those actions to be contrary...

For all its many faults, the Obama administration has scored one notable success: It has done significantly better than its recent Republican and Democratic predecessors in normalizing relations with Russia.  Washington’s visceral antagonism toward Moscow needed to be replaced by a more pragmatic, mutually beneficial relationship.  The “Reset” has been imperfectly applied, but its conceptual...

All imperial projects eventually come to grief.  The causes, time spans, and forms of decline differ from one great power to the next and from one century to another, but they all have in common one important feature: At some point the weakening hegemon is no longer able to bear the economic and financial burden...

Liberal interventionists and their neoconservative twins on both sides of the Atlantic were jubilant as Libyan rebels took Tripoli.  From now on, “The right question for the United States and its allies isn’t whether to help oppressed people fight for freedom, it’s when,” declared the Washington Post on August 24.  The answer to that question...

In the U.S. mainstream media, the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously underreported.  The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc.  It now seems obvious that the turmoil has undermined the region’s authoritarian...

“I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower, and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position,” outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Newsweek on June 19.  “[F]rankly I can’t imagine being part of a nation, part of a government . . . that’s...

All too many speeches by major political figures are heralded as historic in advance of delivery yet prove to be irrelevant in the grand-strategic scheme of things.  Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” address in the wake of Dunkirk, for example, and his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton six years later were rich in...

Trying to spread democracy in the Middle East has always been a bad idea.  The quagmire in Iraq is largely thanks to George W. Bush and his team extending the original mission from depriving Saddam of his (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction to the establishment of a democratic Iraq as a first step to transforming...

In the aftermath of September 11, President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror.  It was the first war in U.S. history—declared or undeclared—against a phenomenon, a method, or an emotion, rather than against a state (or a subgroup such as the Barbary pirates or the Viet Cong).  The concept evoked Xerxes’ War on...

The fall of Hosni Mubarak came as a complete surprise to experts and policymakers.  Why did the shadowy leading figures in Egypt’s political-military establishment, men who have profited handsomely from Mubarak’s three decades in power, risk their own power and privilege by pulling the plug on him? As Cairo returned to its chaotic daily routine,...

The events of recent months present the eurozone as a dysfunctional bourgeois family, the latter-day Buddenbrooks morphing into Karamazovs.  At the plot’s core is the loveless marriage of two incompatible, increasingly embittered partners.  Teutonius is a rich yet parsimonious workaholic who abhors mortgages and long holidays.  His much younger spouse, Meridiana, has inherited all the...

A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death on December 13, Hillary Clinton told a group of top U.S. diplomats at a State Department Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.”  Her assessment is correct: Holbrooke’s career embodies some of its least attractive and most deeply flawed traits. Holbrooke started as a...

NATO’s new “Strategic Concept” (SC), adopted at the summit in Lisbon on November 20, is neither new, nor strategic, nor much of a concept.  The 11-page document avoids issues of high strategy and refrains from conceptual daring.  It is worth pondering mainly for what it does not say. Its six enumerated goals are largely conventional. ...

The Ground Zero Mosque and the Koran (non)burning are but two recent examples of overreported and misrepresented stories that reflect the sorry level of media discourse in the United States.  Meanwhile, an event took place on September 12 that has vital importance for the United States’ declared strategy in the Muslim world, in general, and...

“Defeat in detail” is a military concept that denotes the rout of an enemy by dividing and destroying segments of his forces one by one, instead of engaging his entire strength.  A brilliant example was Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, when his force of 17,000 beat three mutually unsupported Union commands almost four times...

Hillary Clinton’s appointment as the third woman U.S. secretary of state is likely to deepen the crisis of the once-venerable institution at Washington’s Foggy Bottom, to which her two female predecessors have contributed in different ways. Madeleine Albright will be remembered for her hubris, coupled with studied callousness.  (“If we have to use force, it...

Strategy is the art of winning wars, and grand strategy is the philosophy of maintaining an acceptable peace.  America is good at the former and often confused on the latter.  Making the world safe for democracy (Wilson 1917) or fighting freedom’s fight ordained by history (Bush 2002) may be dismissed as tasteless yet harmless rhetoric...

It is professionally vexing and personally alarming for a world-affairs analyst in today’s America that neither rationality nor consistency can be taken for granted among the foreign-policy community in Washington, D.C.  That much has become obvious from the crisis in relations between the United States and Russia over Georgia. This crisis heralds a particularly dangerous...

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s order to attack South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was a breathtakingly audacious challenge to Russia, to which she was bound to respond forcefully.  That response was promptly exploited by the American mainstream media machine and the foreign-policy community in Washington to paint Russia as a rogue power that is not only dangerous...

The media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 was based entirely on the doctrine of nonequivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated; Muslim crimes are understandable.  This doctrine was spectacularly reiterated a month before Karadzic’s capture, when the Muslim wartime commander of...

The coalition of multicultural fanatics, postnational technocrats, neo-Marxists, and crooks who run the European Union had warned, until the very day of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (June 13), that its rejection would sound the death knell for the “united Europe” and mark the end of the world as we know it.  But...

Several years after he was forced into retirement, Otto von Bismarck was asked what could start the next major war.  “Europe today is a powder keg,” he replied, “and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you...

The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia.  By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...

The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault.  You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it.  When a tremor occurs, you often fear it could be the Big One and sometimes panic, but then, when the dust settles, you sigh with...

Last December 10, after four months of futile shuttle diplomacy, the mediating effort by the U.N. Contact Group “troika” to reach an agreement on the final status for Kosovo predictably collapsed.  “Neither party was able to cede its position on the fundamental question of sovereignty,” the U.S.-E.U.-Russian group reported to the U.N. Secretary General.  The...

Iraq will continue to top the list of American foreign-policy concerns in 2008.  While tactical successes in Baghdad and the Anbar Province were achieved in 2007 through the U.S. forces’ marriage of convenience with various Sunni Arab tribal leaders and former Saddam loyalists who detest Al Qaeda even more than they dislike the Americans, translating...

Seven years is a well-rounded time span, for better (“Behold, there come seven years of great plenty”) or for worse (“And there shall arise after them seven years of famine”).  As we enter the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, it is time to look at his septennial foreign-policy scorecard without malice, which his...

Those of us who grew up under communism remember well the ritual of the Leader’s Speech.  At a Party congress—invariably dubbed “historic” even before it began—or on the occasion of the opening of a new steel mill, the Dear Comrade would deliver a much-heralded oration.  It usually contained three main ingredients: “We” are making great...

A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947.  That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...

A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making.  An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe.  The United States, by contrast, entered...

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to yield to Western pressure and accept Kosovo’s independence at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm has prompted a new round of Russia-bashing at both ends of the political spectrum.  Editorial columns were filled with references to Putin’s “posturing,” “bluff,” “intimidation,” and “empty rhetoric.”  His “hard line” may “reignite ethnic violence,”...

On May 1, at a hearing on the future of Kosovo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrat Tom Lantos of California, made a truly remarkable statement: Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the...

In a sane world, Dinesh D’Souza would not merit a single inch of this column.  The greater Middle East, Islamic terrorism, Korea, the Balkans, the imperial mind-set, and many other problems and challenges America faces around the world would take precedence over the musings of a self-designated “conservative intellectual” with few original ideas and little...

Imagine yourself at a fashionable party, a century ago, in Belgravia, the Upper East Side, or the Ballplatz.  After-dinner brandy is served, Augustas are lit, and the talk turns to world affairs.  The host asks his guests what they deem to be the issue that threatens peace and stability more than any other. A senior...

The outcome of last November’s mid-term elections reminded us for the umpteenth time that democracy in America is a corrupt “democratic process” controlled by an elite class that conspires to make secondary issues important and to treat important issues as either irrelevant or illegitimate.  One party may be in; another, out; but the regime is...

The Democrats’ victory on November 7 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure a day later marked the beginning of the end game in Iraq.  The moment is reminiscent of December 1970, when President Nixon decided to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of the following year.  The major difference is that...

President George W. Bush’s highly anticipated prime-time speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America was supposed to be nonpartisan and conciliatory.  It offered him an opportunity to present mature thoughts on one of the most momentous events in this country’s history, to correct several manifest flaws in his conceptual approach...

If you did not know beforehand that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad was one of the most important men in the most neuralgic region of the world—and, by extension, in the world itself—you’d never have guessed it.  One of the few things he has in common with President George W. Bush is a forgettable face.  In...

Given the wars and rumors of war from North Korea to the Middle East, the last thing America needs is to reignite the proverbial powder keg in the Balkans, a region that has been fairly stable for the better part of this decade, especially when compared to the bloody 1990’s.  That precarious stability could be...

The looming amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants is deeply unpopular with millions of Americans, and for good reason: If the immigration bill the Senate passed in June gets through the House, this nation is finished.  The bill would not only legalize some ten million illegal aliens but bring in five times that many—legally—over the...