When President Obama accuses President-elect Trump of not taking the Russian threat or our democratic allies seriously, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a very clever man, but he wasn’t internationally powerful until the United States gave him what he wanted during the Obama administration. Obama and both…
The Obama Administration’s Feckless, Heartless North Korea Policy
It is past time to take North Korean crimes against humanity and the North Korean military threat very seriously. The North Korean people have endured unimaginable and worsening horrors for too long, and the North Korean regime is demonstrating alarming progress in its decades-long quest to possess deliverable nuclear weapons. Let us contemplate the Kim…
Since the Iraq War
Since the Iraq War, many, if not most, Americans have succumbed to the either-or assumption that either we refrain from an active foreign policy or we’ll end up with “boots on the ground.” They recoil from attempts to influence events and ideas in dangerous parts of the world, fearing that influence will translate into military…
Latest US/Russia Deal on Syria was a New Low in American Foreign Policy
Even those of us who have long spoken out against the Obama administration’s moral and strategic negligence in Syria, and the way it handed Russia the lead in that land of suffering were astounded by recent developments. President Obama and Secretary Kerry not only succumbed to another Russian plan that handed Assad another unearned advantage;…
A Preview to Obama’s Final UN Speech
President Obama’s September 2009 speech at the United Nations General Assembly implicitly rejected both the idea that the United States has done anything exceptional for political freedom, and the idea that political freedom is an appropriate priority for US foreign policy. The speech instead emphasized shared “interests” and “collective action”; indeed, the words interests and collective appeared…
Why I Wrote ‘A Perilous Path’
At about the time of President Obama’s first inauguration, I began to compile material for a book on the foreign policy speeches of presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush. I felt no urgency. But as the foreign policy approach of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was articulated and put into…
Obama’s Reluctant, Specious Return to Deterrence
The Obama administration is playing an impossible game of catch-up. Having degraded America’s defenses and alliances, deemphasized America’s democratic principles and priorities, and delayed taking responsibility, it finds itself in a world so dangerous and hostile that it has no choice but to respond. With the world, in former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s own…
The Power of Words in American Foreign Policy
Responding to Donald Trump’s bombastic rhetoric, Marco Rubio recently said, “The problem is presidents can’t just say anything they want. It has consequences here and around the world.” Positioning herself as “kind” compared to combative Republican opponents, Hillary Clinton recently said, “Boy does it matter, when you are president, what you say, and how the…
Say It’s Not So: On Syria, the United States Defers Again to Russia and Iran
Is this the United States of America that continuously defers to Russia and Iran, and thereby to the Syria of Bashar al Assad? Do our own actions and words enable one of the most murderous and cruel, destructive and destabilizing, regimes the world has ever seen? Have we so lost our strategic sense and moral…
Obama’s American Values Charade
AP File Photo / Carolyn Kaster As 2015 comes to a close, our president is improbably reborn. Although he has advocated moral and political relativism by elevating adversaries, demoting democracies, ignoring human rights, downplaying American principles, and questioning American exceptionalism, he appears to have had a change of heart. Formerly reticent and skeptical about such…