Alan Bock

The U.S. global financial crisis has gone global, which illustrates the still potent impact of the U.S. economy on the rest of the world. It also highlights the fact that central banks and other financial institutions in other parts of the world were too highly leveraged, or too highly exposed to investments whose risks had … Continue reading “Moving Beyond Empire”

I have had to listen to the presidential and vice presidential debates and comment on them, often enough in real time, as part of my job, but sometimes it feels as if it’s a form of penance for my sins. To keep this as understated as possible, these are not outstanding people. They are seeking … Continue reading “Evidence of Decline”

If the presidential debate Friday night told us anything, it was that whichever of these candidates is elected, we can expect more wars, or at least more conflicts that put U.S. forces or citizens in danger for dubious reasons. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama came close to questioning the "bipartisan" consensus on U.S. foreign … Continue reading “No Matter Who Wins,
Expect More Wars”

It should be becoming increasingly obvious that the present arrangement with Pakistan is simply not working for the United States. Although various U.S. military leaders keep traveling to Pakistan to try to tweak things around the edges, it is of course unlikely that this administration will do anything substantive, not only because it is still … Continue reading “Time for a New Pakistan Policy”

It looks as if 9/11 is on the verge of becoming a national holiday. It is curious that this should be so, on a number of levels. The cable news channels, whose attention span is already amazingly limited, couldn’t get enough of remembrance, with Fox replaying its entire 2001 coverage and the others featuring lengthy … Continue reading “Seven Years of Incomprehension”

You can definitely count me among those who are skeptical of the official cover story that Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide recently as the FBI seemed to be closing in on him, was solely responsible for the series of anthrax attacks on people in Congress and the media in September-October 2001. What is missed in … Continue reading “Mass Destruction or
Mass Distraction?”

Among the reasons the Russians have offered to justify their aggressive counterattack into Georgian territory proper during the recent (ongoing?) Russo-Georgian war was Kosovo. When the United States strong-armed (wheedled? persuaded? bribed?) most of the Western countries into recognizing Kosovo as an independent state (although one completely dependent on NATO for almost all government services … Continue reading “Kosovo and Georgia:
The Larger Picture”

There’s not much point denying it, even though many people who have long opposed this stupid war might want to do so. One of the reasons, of course, as renegade neocon Francis Fukuyama wrote recently (in the Wall Street Journal, of all places!), is that if you do say that Iraq has become more stable, … Continue reading “Blowing Opportunities”

George Orwell once made an important distinction between patriotism and nationalism, one that has since been elaborated upon many times by others, notably the quirky but often insightful historian John Lukacs, but that still has not caught on sufficiently, apparently, to have much of an impact on what we might call our national consciousness: "By … Continue reading “A Familiar Enemy”

Before considering whether this week’s outcome means the commissions are out of commission or not, wasn’t there supposed to be a tradition called an Olympic Truce, whereby active hostilities were supposed to stop for the duration of the Games? But of course, the best time to start a war – whoever did it, about which … Continue reading “The End of the Military Commissions?”