In case you have missed this American phenomenon, allow me to introduce Julie Hartman. Originally from Los Angeles where she was a record-setting swimmer and winner of the Yale Book Award as the outstanding member of her class and at age 22 is already an outstanding radio broadcast host, she graduated cum laude from Harvard […]
The President at Mount Rushmore
On July 3, President Trump delivered at Mount Rushmore what was arguably his best speech as President. It hit many bases, but primarily its thrust was to rally our country in defense of its founding principles that are under unprecedented and radically intensive attack. Highlights included reminding us of the central idea of the Declaration […]
A Memo to the Current and Future Leader of the World of Order
If you’re like me, you grew weary over the Christmas holidays of the constant droning on all the talk and interview shows about the “war on terror”, the polls on whether we’re winning or losing, whether Obama has a strategy to defeat ISIS or not, if so, what is it, will there be American “boots […]
Willful Ignorance?
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has described the Obama administration’s policy in the Middle East as one of “willful ignorance”, and it is hard to disagree with that assessment. In fact, it can be mind-boggling to watch as this incoherent strategy unfolds on a daily basis. But as difficult […]
Good for the Scots
It was encouraging that the voters in Scotland rejected the separation from the United Kingdom. Let’s hope they did it for mostly the right reasons. Self-determination is a noble concept, developed and championed by Woodrow Wilson in the Fourteen Points that became the organizing principle of the Treaty of Versailles, and it can be applied […]
The Roots of American Exceptionalism
Dr. David Armitage, Professor of History at Harvard University, has written a great essay on the Declaration of Independence in The Wall Street Journal over July 4th weekend, “The Words Heard Around the World”. In it, he makes many good points, but the most insightful is the importance of recognizing and separating two distinct elements […]
A Failure to Lead
In her 2002 book, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, Lady Margaret Thatcher reflects on what the American Revolution means to the world and what America meant to her, and she writes, “These reflections lead me to certain conclusions about the conduct of international politics: * America alone has the moral as well as the […]
The Plight of the Essential Nation
The current thinking among many foreign policy experts, including those with particular expertise in Iranian relations, seems to be that the new foreign policy alignment in the Obama administration–State, Defense, CIA–combined with the instincts of the President and Vice President, will have the most pro-engagement bias since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This comes into […]
A Waning Power (Published August 2011)
Reasonable people can and do disagree about the purposes of American power in the world. Some are close calls, for example, should we be in Libya today or is it our business what form of government prevails in Egypt? But some of the calls should be rather obvious if the premise is still valid that […]
The New American Century
The 20th was popularly and widely known as “The American Century” for a lot of reasons, some of which are embodied in something I wrote at the end of the last century in response to a request by a publication to characterize it in 50 words or less, as follows: “They (the Americans) reluctantly assumed […]