WASHINGTON — “My job as commander in chief,” an exasperated President Obama told critics this week, “is to deploy military force as a last resort, and to deploy it wisely. And, frankly, most of the foreign policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American …
Continue reading “No, Mr. President, your critics aren’t just neoconservatives”
U.S. scholars’ mounting boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural institutions are ironic indeed, for they contradict everything that higher education is supposed to stand for – they are wholly ignorant and profoundly narrow-minded. That Israel is a perennial target on America’s college campuses is hardly breaking news. The Jewish state has long suffered from the …
Continue reading “Boycott of Israeli institutions is academically dishonest”
“First as tragedy, second as farce.” It’s Karl Marx’s line about history repeating itself but, per the Jonathan Pollard trial balloon of recent days, the line could just as easily apply to America’s foreign policy. We need not debate the merits of Pollard’s release, for which supporters and detractors each can mount a compelling case, …
Continue reading “U.S. Can’t Bribe Israelis, Palestinians To Make Peace”
As Vladimir Putin resurrects Russia’s empire, China flexes its muscles in the Pacific, and Syria descends further into unimaginable horror, U.S. President Barack Obama should check out a speech from a few years back by a dynamic Democrat with lots to say about what the United States should do on the world stage. In Europe, …
Rare is the moment when an unscripted comment from a Secretary of State symbolizes all that’s wrong with America’s foreign policy, but it appeared the other day in the context of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Asked at the Munich Security Conference about prospects for peace, John Kerry expressed hope and discussed the implications of failure, focusing …
Continue reading “John Kerry’s Comments On Israel-Palestine Encapsulate U.S. Foreign Policy”
Let’s be clear: the United States cannot single-handedly ensure the advance of freedom and democracy around the world. But, notwithstanding all too much conventional wisdom of late, America retains enormous diplomatic, economic, and other capacities to influence the course of events. So, it’s no coincidence that, as Freedom House reported late last week, freedom declined …
Continue reading “Freedom’s decline and U.S. silence move in tandem”
WASHINGTON — America’s top foreign policy to-do’s in 2014 include preventing Iran from reaching the nuclear threshold, addressing the humanitarian disaster in Syria, containing an expansionist Russia, managing a rising China and reclaiming its own voice on human rights. Let’s take these one at a time. Preventing a nuclear Iran: The global agreement over Iran’s …
Continue reading “Unwavering democratic doctrines will let US shape events again”