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.
The price America pays in blood for its overseas initiatives rarely gets mentioned in political debates surrounding such policies, but it deserves more attention.
The GOP candidate both faces a puzzle and represents one. The puzzle he faces concerns the domestic political forces driving his party’s foreign-policy outlook. Meanwhile, his own foreign-policy views are equally difficult to decipher.
Despite poor reviews from most historians, Silent Cal presided over a robust economy, surpluses, serious reductions in the national debt and generally very good times.
Robert Merry’s new book explores the academic impulse to assess the presidents—but with a twist. He melds contemporaneous judgments of the electorate with academic polls to yield an engaging history.
Robert Kagan has issued a cri de coeur urging Americans to reject calls for reduced U.S. military spending, curtailments in the country’s global commitments and restraint on its interventionist impulses. But his prescriptions are shortsighted.
