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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.  […]

George Monbiot of the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian has a must-read column in which he admits that because of a whole series of intellectual mistakes, the global green movement’s policy prescriptions are hopelessly flawed.Read the whole piece for a thoughtful and brutally clear expose of the intellectual bankruptcy of the green movement from one […]

President Obama has been able to announce the news that Americans have longed to hear for the last ten years:  Osama bin Laden is dead, his corpse flung into the sea.Better, he is dead at America’s hands.Better yet, he died a beaten man.  His bid for the leadership of global Islam had failed, and Osama […]

Those following the Stratblog posts know that we’ve been looking at sixteenth century grand strategy for a few weeks this spring.  Garrett Mattingly’s The Armada and Machiavelli’s The Prince both address the politics of that eventful period, but the worlds the two books describe can seem radically different.  Understanding the underlying similarities between Machiavelli’s apparent […]