To adapt to secular use a phrase from medieval mysticism, "the cloud of unknowing" deepens as the war-waging countries of North America and Western Europe approach their NATO "summit," beginning Friday in Lisbon. The phrase is appropriate because in the past it spoke...
Asia Trip: Obama Sticks to Failed Foreign Policy
Nuclear Armament Still Our Central Issue
Of all of the sources of strategic delusion and political illusion today, nuclear weapons undoubtedly make the most prodigious contribution to hypocrisy and useless expense. This certainly is true for Britain, which is set to make major decisions on military...
Are Obama’s Hands Tied?
A splendid and courageous new book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War, by Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University (and for many years previously, the U.S. Army), describes with lucidity the degree to which the power of the American presidency over war...
US Could Be Alone as Europe Turns Inward
The relationship between Western Europe and the colonies that became the United States was complicated from the beginning, when the North American settlements were mere appendages of the European powers, and were drawn into their conflicts – King William III's and...
A New Season in Military Fashions
President Barack Obama has promised a fundamental review of American policy towards Afghanistan this December. In the meantime, his decision seems compromised by the continuing military and civilian "surge" to Afghanistan ordered soon after Obama took office in...
There Can Be No ‘Graceful Exit’
Gen. David Petraeus, the man who replaced his former Central Command subordinate Gen. Stanley McChrystal, when the latter was cashiered last month for insubordinate criticism of his civilian superiors, denies that President Barack Obama has given him the assignment to...
How the EU Keeps Its Peace
SIENA, Italy - The latest in a series of meetings on reform in the function of the European Union, sponsored by the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies, concluded here last week at the splendid restored palazzo of Nobel Prize-winning Canadian...
When the ‘Right War’ Goes Wrong
The increasingly dangerous Afghanistan situation is worth analysis at two levels, that of the war itself, the ultimately doomed attempt by the United States to conquer the Taliban insurrection and impose a pro-American government, and the domestic political effect of...
Runaway Defense Spending Not Winning Any Wars
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, the major places of military interest to the United States today (disregarding the hundreds of other places where American soldiers and agents or mercenaries have been dispatched to suppress one or another outbreak of ethnic,...