Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell is given credit for popularizing the "Pottery Barn" rule of foreign policy. Though he denies using that exact phrase, in arguing against what became the disastrous 2003 US attack on Iraq Powell made the point that, as in Pottery...
Was Monday’s hyperactivity mostly theater? The Pentagon raised the alert status of 8,500 troops reportedly to bolster NATO’s Quick Response Force, while emphasizing that no final decision had been made to deploy them. And NATO announced that some members were sending...
No one knows whether the recent talks between the US and Russia will produce results. But they happened. And they have led to the promise of further talks. What, after a quarter century of Russian cries, brought Biden to the table? The US long ago left its place at...
In his first major foreign policy speech as president, Joe Biden pledged to end U.S. involvement in Yemen’s bloody war. Beginning in the summer of 2015, the United States actively aided the military intervention by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, especially the...
Just five months after President Biden’s high profile troop withdrawal from Afghanistan the country is in crisis. According to the United Nations World Food Program, 23 million Afghans are living in conditions of "severe food insecurity," and conditions are...
For a decade American presidents have sought to concentrate on Asia, the center of global economic growth. For a decade they have been diverted to Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. President Barack Obama famously announced a "pivot," later renamed...
Who even remembers when President Bush – no, not George W. but his father! – exclaimed, "By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!" That was in the wake of Operation Desert Storm (aka the First Gulf War of 1991) and it was indeed true that the U.S. military...
