U.S. policy makers have all too often clung to orthodoxies even as they fail. Yet a select few have managed to turn the ship of state around, to a better course.
In the wake of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Americans cried out for catharsis. The 9/11 Commission delivered. What we are left with is an ill-conceived bureacracy in the guise of reform.
Al-Qaeda has accomplished the unthinkable: establishing an embryonic recruitment, radicalization and operational capacity on our shores. Our current strategy risks another 9/11.
It has long been said that there are wars of necessity and wars of choice. But enemies always adapt, especially in our world of terrorists, failing states and delinquent regimes. Every war is a war of choice.
One doesn’t need to be a Russian domestic radical or a foreign Russophobe to see major flaws in the way Russia is ruled. The population, however, is satisfied with the status quo...for now.
Anti-interventionists allege our leaders traded a strong, austere republic for a weak and sprawling empire predicated on a military might that could not match our own ambitions. This narrative negates real threats and real victories.
The inevitability of republicanism as the answer to infinite governmental woes seemed clear. Yet the belief that the world abhors an ideological vacuum was mistaken.