As U.S. forces withdraw from parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban is making gains in several areas of the country. The Afghan police and army are slowly giving way, despite the United States spending 13 years and tens of billions of dollars training those forces. When...
One reason that Barack Obama is slumping in the polls is that Republicans have successfully painted him as weak on foreign policy. Yet, during his tenure so far, Obama has used air power to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, surged American forces in Afghanistan to...
As President Obama visited China, he insisted that the United States welcomed China’s rise and wanted that country to play a bigger role in regional and global affairs; but that rhetoric is largely hokum. The United States has been either the premier superpower or the...
American and Iraqi officials are leaking a plan to battle the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). On the surface, the roadmap to victory seems plausible, but as I note in my book, The Failure of Counterinsurgency: Why Hearts and Minds Are Seldom Won, such...
After my recent appearance on the Fox News Channel’s morning show, "Fox and Friends," Donald Trump, appearing after me on the same show, asserted that my ranking of Barack Obama 34th out of 41 presidents rated – in the new, revised edition of Recarving...
The breathless news coverage of the minuscule number of people in the United States that have so far contracted the Ebola virus has led to a typical irrational response in some quarters. For example, schools have been closed, and the public and thus some politicians...
The questionable continuance of the NATO alliance after the Cold War ended is demonstrated by Turkey’s reluctance to help against the rampaging group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The alliance was originally supposed to defend NATO members against a Soviet...
President Barack Obama’s claim that he doesn’t need congressional authorization for his current war in Iraq and Syria is troubling. The country’s founders would pass out upon hearing his claim that the post-9/11 congressional approval of force in 2001 against the...
U.S. government officials recently began hyping the threat from a very small and little-known terrorist group called Khorasan and then striking it in Syria. Several of President Obama’s aides told the media that airstrikes were launched to foil an "imminent"...
After an intruder was able to jump over the fence and enter the White House, the Secret Service, an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is talking about augmenting security procedures and widening the White House security perimeter to include...
