Syrian rebels, in a stalemated conflict with the autocratic Bashar al-Assad, predictably are trying every trick to suck more help out of the United States. They are using the same tactic that developing nations used against U.S. policymakers during the Cold War to get...
Although the surge of “insider attacks” on U.S.-NATO forces has dominated coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2012, an even more important story has been quietly unfolding: the U.S. loss of the pivotal war of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to the Taliban. Some...
Romney is fond of invoking Ronald Reagan and Harry Truman — and now George Marshall — as though their 20th century foreign policy legacies could lend his own cobbled-together worldview some indomitable burnish. But he seems loath to even utter the name of the American...
CAIRO — Civilians in the town of Bani Walid, 170 km southeast of Tripoli, are facing a humanitarian crisis as Libyan security forces lay siege to the stronghold of Moammar Gadhafi supporters, cutting off water, food, and medical supplies. Local doctors told Amnesty...
In diplomacy, always leave your adversary an honorable avenue of retreat. Fifty years ago this October, to resolve a Cuban missile crisis that had brought us to the brink of nuclear war, JFK did that. He conveyed to Nikita Khrushchev, secretly, that if the Soviet...
My first reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s exhibition of comics at the U.N. General Assembly was shame. Shame that the supreme elected representative of my country would stoop to such a primitive rhetorical device, bordering on the childish. (One Israeli commentator...
Samuel Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." H.L. Mencken expanded that definition when he said, "Patriotism, in truth, is the great nursery of scoundrels.… Its chief glories are the demagogue, the military bully, and the spreaders of libels...
On the front page of a prominent newspaper the news is grim: a Middle Eastern country run by a ruthless dictatorial regime has been secretly developing “weapons of mass destruction.” While in public they deny it, in their underground labs their scientists are busy,...
