Alan Bock

One can understand the shock, the horror, the unbelief as the war most Americans didn’t know was going on or didn’t choose to acknowledge came home in such a brutal, deadly fashion in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. This was obviously a coordinated attack, carried out with skill and stealth. Its success reflects a failure … Continue reading “The Price of Empire”

Beyond the day-to-day news out of Palestine or Macedonia, Sudan or Indonesia, a question keeps nagging at some of us. Why is it that politicians, and particularly American politicians, seem so compliant and lackadaisical about the ramifications of endorsing war as a means of doing business? Never mind whether sending somebody else’s children to be … Continue reading “War on X … When the Metaphor Becomes Too Real”

Asa Hutchinson, who left his job as a Republican Congressman from Arkansas to take the position, was confirmed as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration by a 98-1 vote, probably as a courtesy to a congressional old boy. While he has made a few noises suggesting that he is open to some minor reforms in … Continue reading “Sticking with an Andean Disaster”

Most Americans have still not gotten beyond the end of the Cold War and associated changes in the nature of the world when it comes to thinking about the Middle East. For decades, both before and after the formation of Israel, the United States has believed it has had a special relationship with the area … Continue reading “Middle East Status is Quo”

There are essentially two types of peace agreements: those that ratify a peace that is in place for whatever reason (conquest, surrender, war-weariness) and those that seek to push forward a “process” that has not yet brought anything resembling an actual peace. One may hope that the Macedonian peace accord signed Monday is in the … Continue reading “A Macedonian Fantasy?”

It is a symptom of the consensus disease in American politics that veteran Justice Department bureaucrat Robert Mueller was confirmed as head of the FBI without a single dissenting vote in the U.S. Senate. Despite a good deal of posturing in the Judiciary Committee, accompanied by some reasonably telling critiques of the direction and culture … Continue reading “FBI Taking Wrong International Path”

Our political culture – insofar as it is intelligible to speak of such a concept – seems to have a gift for asking the wrong, mostly irrelevant, questions and then obsessing about them at great and usually unhelpful length. Thus in recent weeks we have heard a great deal about “unilateralism” and various talking and … Continue reading “Defining Terms Unilaterally”

It is tempting to have a sneaking admiration for the “anti-globalization” protesters who assembled in Genoa, Italy to protest the leaders of the world’s industrialized nations meeting at their G-8 summit over the weekend. They showed up and they took the spotlight from the pompous blowhards who lead the countries that industrialized long before this … Continue reading “European Overtures”

The House of Representatives on Thursday will give as much consideration as it is likely to give this year to the ongoing US involvement in Colombia’s civil war and cocaine manufacturing and trafficking crisis. At issue will be the government’s foreign operations budget, which contains some $676 million for Colombian operations (another $80 million or … Continue reading “Further into the Colombian Morass”

You can make a case that while Taiwan is mentioned often as a key player in US-China relations, relatively little current reporting is done about the island itself. That’s the impression I got from talking with Ambassador John R. Malott, a retired career diplomat who is currently President of the World Affairs Council of Orange … Continue reading “Taiwan Changes More Important Than US Policy?”