Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Foreign policy

Interventionist Hypocrisy

Daniel Greenfield writes The Imaginary Non-Interventionist in his excellent blog, The Sultan Knish The non-interventionist, like the pacifist, is a mythical woodland creature who appears in the fables of many cultures. He isn’t however to be found in the vicinity of

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The 51% Solution

from Iraq War Regrets in The National Review, a compendium of analysis. Victor Davis Hanson Despite the postwar errors of occupation (among them most prominently the dismissal of the Iraqi army and the failure to use sufficient force to ensure order) that

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Safe, Benign, and Confident hands.

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: Should any of this have come as a surprise? Probably not: With Obama, there was always more than a whiff of the overconfident dilettante, so sure of his powers that he could

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Inherited Dilemmas

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: Then again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama

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Supremely Comfortable With His Own Ignorance

Hillary’s Foreign Policy Failures a comprehensive look, also scan the 80+ commments at AT. A similar look, though more focused on Obama,  from Bret Stephens in Commentary: The Meltdown excerpts: Even the ordinarily sympathetic Washington press corps has cottoned to

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Planned Chaos

from Iraq War Regrets in The National Review, a compendium of analysis. Michael Pakaluk The term for the main virtue of practical intelligence, prudence, comes from a contraction of the word for foresight, “providentia.” So it should cause no surprise that in

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The Questions of 9/12

From The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes The Neo-Neocons: So now liberals want the U.S. to bomb Iraq, and maybe Syria as well, to stop and defeat ISIS, the vilest terror group of all time. Where, one might ask,

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A Failure to Finish

from Iraq War Regrets in The National Review, a compendium of analysis. PETE HEGSETH Those who made the case for war in Iraq — and defended the war throughout — should not feel the remorse of responsibility about recent developments. The Islamic

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Marginalizing Buchanan

“Instead, then, of trying to distance himself from the anti-Semitic associations of the old America First movement, Buchanan moved with all due deliberation in the opposite direction, and kept right on moving for the next ten years. By the time

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Terrorist Sponsored States

Excerpts from Destabilizer-in-Chief by Mario Loyola in National Review: The Arab Spring began with great hope around the world. But the Arab Spring was no mere rebellion against authoritarian regimes. It was the crisis of legitimacy of the brittle Arab states that arose

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Choosing Not to Finish

from Iraq War Regrets in The National Review, a compendium of analysis. DAVID FRENCH I don’t feel remorse for advocating that America topple Saddam Hussein. I don’t feel remorse that Americans also fought long and hard to defeat the subsequent

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Sacrificing the Bad for the Worse

“In any event, Richard Nixon was gone, and the doctrine bearing his name was not about to be disinterred by a president who saw no need for it and even thought that the United States would be better off without

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Destabilization

Excerpts from Destabilizer-in-Chief by Mario Loyola in National Review: Influence is a function of power. Commitments have to be backed by real resources. Otherwise, as Walter Lippmann argued, your foreign policy is bankrupt. Once the Iraq War was over, the key task facing

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It Is about More than Iraq

Excerpts from Destabilizer-in-Chief by Mario Loyola in National Review: The most basic reason to keep forces in Iraq after 2011 was not to continue the war — which was already over by the time Obama was sworn in as president — but rather

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Foreign Aid and Moral Supremacy

from The Folly of the 0.7% Foreign-Aid Solution by Ian Birrell in the WSJ: Yet this concept is increasingly discredited in both donor and recipient countries. Study after study has found aid to be ineffective and even counterproductive: Big flows

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Korean Lessons Unlearned

Excerpts from Destabilizer-in-Chief by Mario Loyola in National Review: The Korean War is justly remembered as a valiant struggle. And yet the conflict could have been avoided but for a major blunder on the part of the Truman administration. The year before

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Ending a War Badly

Victor Davis Hansen writes in the National Review How Obama Lost the Middle East The more Obama campaigned in 2008 on a failed war in Iraq, a neglected war in Afghanistan, an ill-considered War on Terror, and an alienated Middle

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Kurdish Success

Victor Davis Hanson writes in Investment Business Daily, Revisionists Have A Field Day On Why We Invaded Iraq. Excerpt:  Prior to our invasion, the Kurds were a persecuted people who had been gassed, slaughtered and robbed of all rights by Saddam.

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Iraq Revisionism

Victor Davis Hanson writes in Investment Business Daily, Revisionists Have A Field Day On Why We Invaded Iraq. Excerpt: Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq? He

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The Path to Greater Inequality

“For 17 years, I waited in vain for the democratic revolution to come to Soviet Russia to complete the socialist dream. But it did not come. Oh, there was a spring in Prague. But Soviet tanks again rolled across the

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