Who Do We Want to Win?

Which Side is Obama on in Mideast?, Newsday, April 18, 2015. "Every war poses a basic question: Whom do you want to win? After six years, the Obama administration's answer to that question in the Middle East is hopelessly confused."

The Enemy of Our Enemy . . . Is Our Enemy

In the Middle East, An Avalanche of Disasters, Newsday, June 27, 2014. "The past weeks have brought an avalanche of disasters for the United States in the wider Middle East. Unless the Obama administration changes course, the coming months will bring worse."

The Troubled European Periphery

Europe Must Wake Up to New Danger, Newsday, March 7, 2014. "If you looked out from Europe in the 1990s, you could see sunshine on the horizon. With the end of the Cold War, NATO appeared to be on the road to irrelevancy. But the sunshine has faded. Russia's dismemberment of Ukraine should remind Americans and Europeans that European security, for which all of us paid a high price over the past hundred years, is not assured."

Obama's Three Failed Middle East Aims

Barack Obama’s Mideast Strategy Has Failed, Newsday, January 17, 2014. "The damning report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Benghazi confirms that the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. compound was planned and carried out by al-Qaida."

The Coming Slaughters

What About All the Other Massacres?, Newsday, September 15, 2013. "The Taliban will return, and they will take vengeance. Today, you can easily find savage videos of Taliban atrocities online. When they are back in power, they will be worse. And when they execute people for the crime of being friendly to the United States, we should remember that — as across the Middle East — we had the power to make a difference. We just chose not to use it."

The U.S., Sadder But Wiser, Maybe

Optimistic America Deludes Itself About Democracy, Newsday, August 16, 2013. "American enthusiasm for foreign upheaval is as old as Thomas Jefferson's naive admiration of the French Revolution. But that led to the Reign of Terror, and then the Napoleonic Wars. We will be lucky if the Middle Eastern war spawned by the Arab Spring does not spread beyond Syria."

This Isn't the Africa Policy You're Looking For

Obama Travels in Style But Fails to Reach the Right Conclusions, Yorkshire Post, July 26, 2013. "Barack Obama is one of the best-travelled Presidents in US history. During his first term in office, he visited 35 countries, and he’s made another 12 trips since his re-election. But quantity does not imply quality. Indeed, given the results of his travel, he’d be better off staying home."

Again with the Marshall Plan Analogy

Back to the Future, Again: A Mini-Marshall Plan for Egypt?, Heritage Foundation Foundry, May 19, 2011. "Absolutely none of the conditions that conduced to the success of the Marshall Plan are present in Egypt, which is a poorly-governed, corrupt, ill-educated country with a backwards economy and a political system that is trending strongly towards an alliance of military authoritarians and radical Salafis. The Marshall Plan does indeed show that, given good domestic governance, certain kinds of U.S. assistance can work. But the Marshall Plan was not a hand-out: it was conditioned in many ways, it was predicated on a shared acceptance of democracy and economic freedom, and it rested on the competent administration of Europeans."

The Other Ones

The Dictators We Forgot, Contentions, March 4, 2011. "In the face of the Middle East’s revolutions, it’s easy to believe that the world’s dictators are comprised of autocrats we worked with (Mubarak), dictators we were trying to (Gaddafi), and dangerous regimes that won’t play ball (Iran). If only. The biggest category of all is the dictators we forgot."

A Huge Missed Opportunity

Internet Freedom, Back Again, Contentions, February 17, 2011. "It’s too soon to accept that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were simply caused by Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet. Technology enthusiasts naturally say such things, but theirs is the faith of the true believer. Still, the fact that these regimes tried to control the Net, and clamped down even harder when the streets started to stir, is strong evidence that they viewed online freedom as their enemy. America — with Congress playing a constructive and serious part — was set to play a leading role in advancing that freedom. That would have been the right thing to do — it is still the right thing to do — even if it meant confronting the Chinese. Instead, we did nothing, and we are still doing nothing. That is an embarrassment — almost as embarrassing as Secretary Clinton’s trotting out a supposedly revolutionary policy after a year of doing nothing about it."

Fantasies and Realities in International Relations

Fear Rules In The Nations Where Politics Is A Blood Sport Played Out In Real Blood, Yorkshire Post, February 15, 2011. "Yet the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, should remind us of one simple truth. The leaders of these countries, like autocrats around the world, were afraid. The autocrats are not just afraid of Western military power, though that does scare them. Nor are they simply afraid of freedom, though they know that if it triumphs, they will have lost. Nor are they worried about losing elections, for the simple reason that they never hold an honest one. They are afraid of their own people."

This Is Just What I Was Talking About

A ‘Marshall Plan’ Sighting in Egypt, Contentions, February 9, 2011. "A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned my list of inaccurate historical analogies that warn of further fallacies to come. The leading such analogy was “We need a Marshall Plan.” Sure enough, reliable as a broken watch, along comes Roger Cohen in the New York Times, demanding just such a plan, contradicting himself up and down, and posing a wonderful false dichotomy to boot."

The Shah As Good Guy

Cold War Revisionism Run Wild, Contentions, February 3, 2011. "As J.E. Dyer pointed out a few days ago, the standard treatment of the Cold War in the academy of the 1970s and 1980s was that it was a bad idea. That argument had many facets, but among the most consistently presented of them was the theme that the artificial Cold War scare had been used to justify close American relations with anti-Communist dictators. This anti-Cold War bias has, to my mind, waned slightly, in part because of the work of historians like John Lewis Gaddis, and in part because it’s now history, and as such is safe for everyone to be in favor of. Indeed, it’s so safe that President Obama is free to call for Sputnik moments. Still, the argument about American foreign policy endures."

Kirkpatrick, Now More Than Ever

Go Read Kirkpatrick. Again, Contentions, February 1, 2011. "Now more than ever, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships & Double Standards” essay deserves to be read and pondered. If this isn’t the greatest essay COMMENTARY has ever published, it’s certainly the most influential."