How to commemorate those who have laid down their lives for their country?  Memorial Day wasn’t much of an issue in my childhood.  100 years after the Civil War, most white Southerners still considered this a Yankee holiday.  Robert E. Lee’s birthday, a state holiday across much of the South, got more press.  White folks […]

The controversial US Supreme Court decision (pdf) that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates is more than a shockingly broad exercise of judicial power.  It is also an official declaration by the highest constitutional authority in the land that California meets the strict test of state failure: it can […]

Watching the political circus here in Washington, and not only in Washington, often throws up no little bit of frustration. People in this town say the damnedest things sometimes. The typical think tank event here is rich in posturing and positioning, far poorer in any capacity to recognize, let alone follow, rules of evidence normal, […]

I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week.  Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes […]

The National Interest, a periodical known for a staunchly realist stance in international affairs, carried an article by Jacob Heilbrunn about Samantha Power in its May-June, 2011 issue. Power, who presently heads the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights in the National Security Council, has referred to herself as the “genocide chick”. TNI has […]

The illusions, delusions and fantasies surrounding events in the Middle East never cease to amaze. The controversy over President Obama’s Middle East speech the latest bizarre development, with Prime Minister Netanyahu and commentators like Dore Gold and Tim Pawlenty denouncing the President’s statement that the 1967 borders (which were actually the ceasefire lines dating back […]

After President Obama’s May 19th address on his Middle East policy, I sat down with AI Editor Adam Garfinkle. In his previous life, Adam was speechwriter for both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice when they served as Secretary of State under George W. Bush. He’s been writing a series of line-by-line analyses of President Obama’s […]

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 […]