President Obama’s speech to State Department employees today was billed as a major address on recasting American foreign policy in the Middle East. It lived up to its billing.  President Obama has deep-sixed the ‘realism’ that marked the first two years of his approach to the Middle East.  He has returned to the foreign policy […]

Robert (“Rob”) Bell is a prominent figure in the Evangelical world, an author and pastor. In 1999 he founded the Mars Hill Bible Church, in Grandville, Michigan, a very successful megachurch attended every Sunday by 8,000 to 10,000 worshippers. Earlier this year he published a book with the less than modest title Love Wins: A Book […]

I‘m busy reading final papers for the grand strategy seminar at Bard this spring, and the students are finishing up their exams and thinking about summer.  It’s already time to start reading and thinking about the syllabus for the fall course in Anglo-American grand strategy.  British and American strategic thinkers and policy makers developed a […]

Late last week I had a chance to sit down for a talk with Matthew Hoh. You might remember his name from when he resigned his post with the State Department in Zabul Province in Afghanistan in 2009. Here’s a link to an article which was published around the time of his resignation. It ought […]

The news that George Mitchell is resigning as US special envoy closes a chapter in the greatest international failure of the Obama administration to date.  The President’s foreign policy team has some real successes under its belt — the reset with Russia, a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism, steady progress in Iraq, and […]

I don’t want to make this a habit, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but Paul Krugman and I are once again in (very) partial agreement.  We both think the American elite has intellectually and morally lost its way, and we agree that the problems our country faces today have more to do with elite […]

On April 27, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about atheists campaigning to have their own chaplaincy in the American military. The campaign is led by an organization called Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. Jason Torpy, its president (a former Army captain) identified the group’s faith as “humanism”. He stated the case […]

The taking of Osama was a defeat for Al Qaeda.  It was a disaster for Pakistan. The Assassination in Abbottabad was a strategic catastrophe for the military rulers of this slowly and painfully failing state.  On the one hand, it leaves the reputation of Pakistan as an effective partner against fanatical terror groups in ruins.  […]

As it turns out, I was brave enough to read this morning’s press. Let me follow up on my earlier posts with just two confirmatory comments.The first is that the U.S. military has reportedly killed two high-level terrorists in Yemen, two brothers named Mubarak, with a Predator strike. This operation derived from the intelligence taken […]

Today’s news brings yet more frustration with how the government, and the White House in particular, is handling the aftermath of the bin Laden killing. But at least the news is mixed. The good news is that the President has made the right basic decision not to release photographs that are gruesome, that would incite […]