Politics and personal misjudgments, not process, bears the largest share of the blame for U.S. national security blunders.

Security assistance is ill suited to winning wars. So why does Congress keep asking it to?

Yes, Citizen Kane is great, but that’s not the half of it. The more Orson Welles was forced to improvise and budget down, the better he got.

The Trump Administration faces some of the same dilemmas as did the Obama Administration in Syria.

Donald Trump isn’t the first President to have a contentious relationship with the intelligence community.

The civil service, once the elixir to ensure good government, has become a cancer killing good government.

The U.S. government must do a better job anticipating the ways crises and conflicts in weak states can spread far and wide.

An open memorandum to President Trump on retaining the U.S. leadership role in Africa and remaining competitive with China.

By standard scholarly definition, Russia today is not an illiberal democracy: It is an early-stage fascist state.

Volume four of The Pumphrett Papers.