Section: The American Conservative (USA)
Our Impulsive Foreign Policy Establishment
Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons,” they claim, “would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” In brief, to strengthen the hand of our...
The House GOP’s Stale Foreign Policy Agenda
Jacob Heilbrunn isn’t impressed with the House Republicans’ proposals on foreign policy: Instead of a far-sighted document that sets out a fresh course for American foreign policy, it offers a mishmash of neocon foreign-policy bilge that has already led the GOP and the United States badly astray. Heilbrunn is right in dismissing what...
Clinton Rejects ‘America First’
“Clinton to Paint Trump as a Risk to World Order.” Thus did page one of Thursday’s New York Times tee up Hillary Clinton’s big San Diego speech on foreign policy. Inside the Times, the headline was edited to underline the point: “Clinton to Portray Trump as Risk to the World.” The Times promoted the speech as “scorching,” a “sweeping...
Obstacles to Foreign Policy Restraint
Emma Ashford reviews the recent Advancing American Security conference, and adds this: Despite these attempts at engagement, realist and restraint-oriented perspectives, whether from inside or outside the Beltway, remain a relative rarity in Washington, where broadly interventionist ideas tend to dominate among both Democrats and Republicans....
Out of the Cold War?
Is America stuck in the Cold War or headed into a new one? Over the last 25 years, American grand strategy has had to do some heavy lifting to address the rise of terrorism—but it may have lost sight of the more dangerous threat posed by great power wars. Worry over the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations was a common theme earlier this week...
Sweden and Finland Won’t Pursue NATO Membership
The Swedish government is ruling out making a bid to join NATO: Sweden will not make a formal bid to join NATO for fear of escalating further the already tense situation that exists between the West and Russia over the annexation of Crimea and the continued crisis in Ukraine, the country’s defence minister said on 17 May. That’s the...
Clinton’s Hawk-in-Waiting
The other day, a question popped up on a Facebook thread I was commenting on: “Where is Victoria Nuland?” The short answer, of course, is that she is still holding down her position as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. But a related question begs for a more expansive response: Where will Victoria Nuland be after...
Trump The Destabilizer
Ross Douthat lays out what he calls “the conservative case against Trump.” He says that electing Trump would mean the end of Reaganism, but concedes that for some conservatives, that would not be a bug, but a feature. Here is the heart of the argument: Trump would not be an American Mussolini; even our sclerotic institutions would resist him more...
Kasich’s Foolish Hawkishness
John Kasich finally dropped out of the race yesterday. Foreign Policy describes his departure this way: Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the most experienced Republican on national security remaining in the 2016 election, suspended his campaign Wednesday — leaving one of the least experienced presidential candidates to the GOP presidential nomination....
Who Started the Second Cold War?
Friday, a Russian SU-27 did a barrel roll over a U.S. RC-135 over the Baltic, the second time in two weeks. Also in April, the U.S. destroyer Donald Cook, off Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was twice buzzed by Russian planes. Vladimir Putin’s message: Keep your spy planes and ships a respectable distance away from us....
