Brent Scowcroft
All Over the Map
Robert Gates Is Right About Iraq
Does China Have Any Friends Left in the Obama Administration?
Over the last few months, China has had several fairly nasty public rows with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Robert M. Gates, the two highest-ranking members of Barack Obama’s foreign policy team. And that raises an interesting question: Does China have any friends left at the top levels of the Obama administration? READ MORE >>
“For The First Time I’ve Not Been Asked About Human Rights:” Auguries From Obama’s Egypt.
A vivid report by Ashraf Khalil in Friday’s Wall Street Journal and an AP dispatch on the same day evoke a moribund Egyptian politics coming to life because of the death of a 28-year old in Alexandria. The murder—and it was a murder!—was committed by the police. Out in the open or, to be precise, down the alley from an internet cafe out of which Khaled Saieed was dragged. READ MORE >>
A Response to Michael Kazin
Sometimes Michael Kazin’s reasonableness disguises an apologetic lack of argument. His little reflection on my piece is a small anthology of the president’s foreign policy shibboleths. READ MORE >>
The Cabinet Of The Damned
Steve Clemons, with whom I worked at the New America Foundation in 1999, has some advice for President Obama: READ MORE >>
Did Gates Blow the Call on the Soviets?: A Dissent
As I argue in my recent print story on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the prevailing view in Washington foreign policy circles is that Gates, as an anti-Soviet hardliner at the CIA in the late 1980s, misread the import of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and failed to see the USSR's collapse coming. But here's a dissenting view, via email, from Andrew Hamilton, a former national security council staffer, among other government posts, as well as a longtime writer on foreign policy issues (who now write READ MORE >>
Washington Diarist: In Which We Engage
Is it really possible that in a Democratic administration the championship of human rights and the promotion of democracy will no longer figure conspicuously in the foreign policy of the United States? It is really possible. Oh, the stirring words will be spoken; the stirring words are always spoken. But in the absence of policies one may be forgiven for not being stirred by words. And so far even the language has been wanting in ardor. Idealism in foreign policy is so 2003. After all, the opposite of everything that George W. Bush believed must be true. READ MORE >>
Earlier this week, I described John McCain's "League of Democracies" as an attempt to create a world order based on moral clarity--to sideline the UN and divide the world into "good" and "bad" states, much as President Bush's coalition of the willing did. It seemed McCain was simply dressing those fundamentals up in banal Cold War rhetoric about alliances and internationalism. Now, here's Charles Krauthammer on the proposal: READ MORE >>
