A consistent theme of those who seek to cut the federal budget is that the government should begin using “zero-based budgeting,” in other words, starting each new budget year from zero. How much should be spent on food stamps, or sugar subsidies, or the military? Who knows, make your argument. For reasons that should be […]
Thinking About a Noninterventionist Political Alliance
Last month, Stephen Walt suggested that non- or less-interventionist people on the Right and the Left should get together to ally against the interventionist consensus. Walt rightly suggests this would be tough, and points to three main obstacles: the lack of a deep bench of personnel who could staff a restraint-minded presidential administration; internecine squabbles […]
The Iran Issue Is Not Going Away …and All of the Wrong People Are in Charge
It’s been easy to get caught up in the circus surrounding Brett Kavanaugh over the past several days, but I’d like to bring us back to the Only Foreign Policy Issue That Matters in the Near Term: Iran. With the administration having withdrawn from the JCPOA, the nuclear deal Obama signed with Iran, there was […]
Nutty Nonsense on NATO
Say what you will about Donald Trump, he makes the rest of Washington say remarkably dumb things. Especially when it comes to sacred totems that Everyone Knows Are True and Good but few people actually understand. Like NATO. To clear the air up front: Trump has not possessed laser-like precision or been a model of […]
How—and What—to Drink This Summer
Dick Young and I share at least two interests: sane foreign policy thought, and wine. As the owner of a wine bar here in DC, I come across, and taste, a lot of wine. So Dick thought it might be good to pull together a column on some suggestions for how to imbibe through the […]
John Bolton Is Still Winning
That North Korea summit didn’t stay in the headlines very long, did it? I suspect that’s all right by John Bolton, who was frequently cited as having lost out in the decision to hold the meeting. But the crucial thing to keep in mind about Bolton is that he’s not just a manic war-hawk. On […]
Remembering the Fallen, and How They Got There
Four years ago, a guy who looks like he went from online gaming to Christian rock made a bad argument on the internet. It’s probably not even right to call it an argument–it was a series of related assertions made in sequence. The headline foreshadowed a few of them: “You don’t protect my freedom: Our […]
I Have No Idea What’s Going on in North Korea. Let’s Talk Wine.
History moves slowly, then all at once. With that in mind, I am withholding judgment on what the heck is going on in North Korea, other than to note that it could be big, or it could be not much at all. For the geopolitical phrenologists among you, here is the text of the Panmunjom […]
Everyone Has Stopped Talking about Bolton. Now It Gets Dangerous.
If you’d told me I’d live long enough to see John Bolton as U.S. National Security Adviser, I’d be both relieved and unnerved. Relieved because it could only mean that the United States was even more secure than I had thought: so abundantly safe from danger that a person as clownishly wrong as Bolton can […]
Tillerson Will Be the Last of His Kind
A lot of ink has been spilled, and shade thrown, over the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The broad consensus in DC is that Tillerson was little more than a wrecking ball–a guy who did great damage to the State Department by depopulating it, demoralizing it, and overall degrading it. Some combined contempt […]
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