It’s been clear for some time that neoconservatives would prefer Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, for a host of different reasons–and one big reason. Writing in the New York Daily News, Michael Tracey judges the neocons-for-Hillary alliance a “strange relationship,” and worries that by using her neocon endorsements as a political cudgel, Clinton risks “rehabilitating” […]
Money, Think Tanks, and Who’s Working for Whom?
Based on the reception to another New York Times piece about how money and power pass through Washington think tanks, everybody wants to believe that he’s losing the argument because of the other guy’s Evil, Nefarious Money. That might be true, but any particular big contribution or purported pay-for-play scheme doesn’t prove it. First of […]
Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy Will Be Short-Lived
Barack Obama took office with a pretty high sense of his place in history. Beyond the indisputable significance of his being the first black U.S. president, Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in 2008 by hoping aloud that his election would be looked back on as the moment when we began to provide care for the […]
Trump’s NATO Heresy
Donald Trump got into some trouble last week when he told the New York Times’ David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that when it came to NATO allies who might come under attack but had not pulled their own weight in the alliance, “I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, ‘Congratulations, you will be […]
U.S. China Policy: Hic Sunt Dracones
To the chagrin of foreign policy wonks, U.S. presidential elections are almost never about foreign policy. This one is no exception. The American people, quite reasonably, care more intensely about things that impact them more directly than U.S. foreign policy. America’s size, power, and remoteness insulate voters from grave danger. The think-tankers churn out reams […]
The United States and China: Who’s Balancing Whom?
American defense officials, in their less guarded moments, will concede that the central object of U.S. defense posture in East Asia–and indeed Asia as a whole–is to “balance” China. What they don’t realize is what this statement reveals about their own thinking. The balance of power is a hoary concept in international politics. From Macchiavelli […]
A New Nationalist Era? Part Two
Carlos Arredondo is an immigrant from Costa Rica whose 20 year old son Alexander was killed in the Iraq War in 2004. When the Marine casualty assistant officers showed up at his home to tell him his son had been killed, Arredondo broke into the Marines’ van and set himself on fire, covering much of […]
A New Nationalist Era? Part One
Between the Brexit vote, Donald Trump’s under-predicted emergence, squirming about refugee flows and assimilation in rich countries, and a growing ambivalence about globalization, it’s hard to think we’re not entering a new nationalist era. Lots of people are overstating things, of course. For some in England, the European Union was actually the Third Reich. For […]
McCain Blames America First
John McCain has said something nutty about American foreign policy. Shocking, I know. Asked about gun control proposals in the wake of the terrorist attack at a gay club in Orlando, McCain said, Barack Obama is directly responsible for [the attack], because when he pulled everybody out of Iraq, al-Qaeda went to Syria, became ISIS, […]
Would Libya and Syria Be Better Off Without Their Revolutions?
To look at US policy toward those two countries over the past five years, the general view seems to be that things couldn’t get worse, so Washington has pushed for change. In both countries, change has come, and things have gotten worse. And while it’s solipsistic to suggest that those countries’ politics turned on what […]
