On A Contradiction in US Cold War Grand Strategy

Reagan Kept Faith in America, BigPeace, February 6, 2011. "One of Reagan’s greatest contributions was to return to the commonsense faith that America worked, that the Soviet Union could not, and that we should, and could, win the Cold War by playing to our strengths and against their weaknesses. He was a remarkable orator, and one who was not afraid to speak simple truths plainly: his statement that the Soviet Union was an evil empire shocked an intelligentsia unused to hearing the obvious about an enemy that many no longer regarded as such. But he was more than an orator. Reagan believed that values could drive strategy, that if the U.S. and the West returned to freedom, if they abandoned the controls of the Nixon and Carter era, if they reduced taxes, if they put government back in its proper place, the U.S. would not only be doing the right thing. It would be fighting the Cold War to win."

What Brings Nuclear Disarmament?

Democracy, Not the U.N., Brings Nuclear Disarmament, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 23, 2010. "If the President wants to move towards reducing the undoubted dangers that nuclear weapons pose to the security of the U.S. and its allies, the place to start is not the United States, or Britain or France or Israel—it is with understanding where, and why, nonproliferation has worked in the past."

The Five Myths of US Defense Spending

Demystifying Defense: Exposing Myths About US Military Expenditures, Harvard International Review, Spring 2009, Vol. 31, No. 1. "The most serious impediments to a serious discussion of defense spending are the myths that surround it. Until these myths are cleared away, no rational debate regarding what the US and its allies around the world should do to secure their interests is possible. The most urgent need, therefore, is for politicians and the public to know how much the US and other powers spend, to place these expenditures and their trends in historical context, to weigh the dangers of both excessive and insufficient defense spending, to understand why the US and the world's democracies maintain armed forces, and why the US spends so much relative to its potential adversaries. Absent this knowledge, the political process that shapes defense spending in democracies will not work effectively, and their defense will suffer. In short, for today's democracies, defense spending is not an economic problem. A people who lack the will to pay will eventually find they are a target for those who have the will to fight."