A Tale of Two Strategies

What’s At Stake in U.S. Strategy in Syria, Newsday, October 4, 2014. "The Obama administration's strategy for Syria relies on using U.S. air power to support local forces. If this approach fails, as it has failed in the past, the United States will find itself still lacking an effective, politically viable strategy for fighting Islamist terror more than a decade after 9/11 attacks."

The New Nixon

"Nixon and Obama . . . Two Presidents, Two Eras and the American Path They Share," Yorkshire Post (UK), not available online, January 9, 2013. "With the exception of George Washington’s on February 22 – now shamefully amalgamated into Presidents Day – Americans have never paid much attention to presidential birthdays. So Richard Milhous Nixon’s one hundredth anniversary on January 9 will occasion no parades. But Nixon is relevant nonetheless. President Obama’s admirers like to compare him to Franklin Roosevelt, to John F. Kennedy, or – most commonly – to Abraham Lincoln, an allusion that Obama echoed by opening his campaign in 2007 in Springfield, Illinois. The comparison to Kennedy – an iconic figure with an exaggerated reputation – is not bad. It’s certainly better than Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas’s celebrated 2009 declaration that Obama is “sort of God.” But best of all is the comparison to Nixon, America’s disgraced president."

The Fiftieth Anniversary of Kennedy's Inaugural

Kennedy’s Myth May Not Be Reality, But It Shows Us What Obama Lacks, Yorkshire Post, January 19, 2011. "FIFTY years after his inauguration on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy remains America's most popular president in the last half-century. A recent survey by Gallup finds that 85 per cent of Americans retrospectively approve of Kennedy. The next highest ranking president, Ronald Reagan, scores only 74 per cent. Kennedy not only leads: he laps the field."