The Anglo-American Analogy on Defense Cuts

As in Britain, Discontent Portends Danger for Defense, Heritage Foundation Foundry, February 16, 2011. "A look at Britain’s experience reveals the problem with making decisions about freezing or cutting defense spending on the basis of allegations about inadequate financial controls. In 2009, British politics were rocked by a series of leaks and then an exhaustive report that made many of the same allegations of mismanagement, waste, and lack of control in Britain’s procurement budget."

Restraint and Containment

The Other Thing Containment Requires, Contentions, February 16, 2011. "Excessive taxation and borrowing hands over an ever-increasing portion of our economy to government control. This is incompatible with the strategy that won the Cold War, and completely incompatible with any future U.S. use of that strategy. We are not just borrowing the next generation into oblivion, as Pete points out. Our lack of restraint is reducing our ability to play future foreign-policy problems long: playing it long only makes sense if you’re gaining in relative economic strength."

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."

Iran, the USSR and the Containment Analogy

Containing a Nuclear Iran: Difficult, Costly, and Dangerous, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #2157, with James Phillips, February 14, 2011. "Proponents of a containment policy toward Iran are ignoring the harsh realities inherent in seriously pursuing such a policy. First, the U.S. has been trying to contain Iran since the Iranian revolution in 1979, with little success. If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, it will become even more difficult to contain. A serious containment policy will require the U.S. to maintain a credible threat of force against Iran. This will be even more difficult if Iran goes nuclear because the U.S. will have lost credibility. A containment policy will also require the U.S. to support the undemocratic governments in the countries neighboring Iran, which will pose many political dilemmas. Instead of pursuing a policy of containment, which would be a policy in name only, the U.S. should keep the military option alive, defend itself and its allies, and seek both to weaken the regime’s economic base and to empower and encourage its domestic adversaries."

Journalism Schools and All That

Pretending to Teach a Trade: From the Progressive Era to Today, Contentions, February 10, 2011. "Journalism schools are useless, argues Michael Lewis, but they prosper because they appeal to our worship of professionalism. That’s a nut graph — a nutshell paragraph — one bit of journalism jargon that Michael Lewis doesn’t grasp in his wildly entertaining piece on the Columbia School of Journalism."

More State-Centered 'Solutions'

Two Cheers for David Cameron on Multiculturalism, BigPeace, February 10, 2011. "I am slightly less encouraged than some commentators by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech on “the doctrine of state multiculturalism.” The speech is certainly worth two cheers, and the fact that Cameron has said much of this before is no reason for him not to say it again, especially since he has never said it so clearly."

Questions Without Answers on New START

Is New START Compatible with the U.S.-U.K. Mutual Defence Agreement?, Heritage Foundation Foundry, February 9, 2011. "The Special Relationship between the U.S. and Britain has many facets, but at its core is close cooperation in the military and intelligence realms. And at the heart of our military cooperation is the U.S.-U.K. Mutual Defence Agreement. Signed in 1958, and renewed every ten years – most recently in 2004 – the Agreement provides for Anglo-American collaboration in nuclear technology. It provides the legal basis for the transfer to Britain of U.S.-made Trident II missiles, which are the launch platform for Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and for the much broader sharing of nuclear information between the two countries."

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."

Skybolt and New START

That Good Old 'Pattern of Cooperation'," Contentions, February 8, 2011. "Over the last few days, the conservative media and blogosphere in the U.S. and Britain have been roiled by WikiLeaks documents suggesting that, in order to secure Russia’s agreement to the New START Treaty, the U.S. agreed to disclose information about the Trident missiles it transfers to Britain. Media Matters predictably claims that there is nothing untoward involved, it’s all an invention of the “right-wing media.” And P.J. Crowley argued that New START simply “carried forward and updated this notification procedure” from the 1991 START Treaty. Yet a careful reading of the 1991 and 2011 treaties reveals significant differences between the U.S.’s obligations vis-à-vis Britain and Russia in these treaties."

Another New START Problem

New START and the Special Relationship: A Case to Answer, Heritage Foundation Foundry, February 8, 2011. "Last Friday, British newspapers reported that the U.S. had agreed to supply Russia with sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent in order to win Russian agreement to the New START Treaty. Over the weekend, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described this claim as “bunk” and asserted that New START simply “carried forward and updated this notification procedure to the new treaty” from the 1991 START Treaty. The Wikileaks document on which the original story was based, and the treaties of 1991 and 2011, tell a different story."

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."

OAS Shows Why We Don't Need CIFTA

CIFTA: Treaty Without a Purpose, Heritage Foundation Foundry, February 4, 2011. "CIFTA is a bad treaty: It poses serious risks to liberties guaranteed by the First and Second Amendments and would undermine U.S. sovereignty by legally binding it to fulfill obligations that some current signatories already disregard. The OAS’s latest statement on “Reducing the Threat of Arms and Munitions in the Americas” demonstrates that the treaty is pointless as well as bad."

Reagan's Writings

Reagan As Draftsman, Contentions, February 4, 2011. "Perhaps it’s not in keeping with Reagan’s legacy to lose hope. But I can’t help wondering if Reagan will be our last president who had the ability – even if none of them can be expected to have the time – to write his own speeches. If so, we will have lost something important. A president who cannot write clearly cannot be expected to think clearly either."

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."

A Review of a Blair Review

On Kirchick on Blair, New Ledger, February 2, 2011. "Jamie Kirchick has a thoughtful review up for Policy Review of Tony Blair’s memoirs. It’s difficult to quarrel with Jamie’s conclusion, which is that the more Labour becomes a creature of the trade unions, the less likely it is to win an election. And I certainly endorse Jamie’s stout defense of Blair’s policies in Iraq and, more broadly, Blair’s support for close Anglo-American relations. But to my mind, the overall picture is less clear, and less favorable to Blair, than Jamie has it."

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."

More On The "Sputnik Moment"

Re: Re: Oh, Man, Not Another Sputnik Moment . . ., Contentions, January 28, 2011. "J.E. Dyer’s reaction to my post on the “Sputnik moment” theme prompts this reflection: as a conservative, you can cite examples like the academy’s treatment of the Cold War all day long. If you’re a historian, you can point to the Arming America saga, which revealed that a few Second Amendment supporters and amateur historians had a better grasp of historical methodology and reality than the distinguished committee that awarded the Bancroft Prize to that faked book (and then was forced to take it back)."

The U.S. on Britain in Europe

A Policy That Pleases No One, Contentions, January 28, 2011. "In a private meeting with British MEPs on Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador to Britain Louis Susman is reported to have said: “Washington wants a clearer British commitment to remain in the EU. … [A]ll key issues must run through Europe.” He was not expressing a personal preference. He was reiterating the administration’s policy. After all, it was the vice president who last May described Brussels as “the capital of the free world.” But this is not a policy that is likely to achieve results satisfactory to anyone."

A Very Brave Aussie

Australian Courage in Afghanistan, Heritage Foundation Foundry, January 27, 2011. "An Australian member of the Special Air Service Regiment, Corporal Ben, has received the Victoria Cross For Australia, the nation’s highest military honor."

The Pretension to Expertise

A Tiger Mother in a Legal World on Fire, Contentions, January 27, 2011. "I don’t know much about parenting, so I’m not going to comment on the merits of Amy Chua’s much-discussed book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. What strikes me about the uproar is entirely unrelated to her Stakhanovite views on how to raise children: she’s a tenured professor at Yale Law School."

Hitchens, Churchill, and The Monarchy

Churchill, Edward VIII, and ‘Arms and the Covenant’, Contentions, January 26, 2011. "Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like The King’s Speech. Not because of its cinematic qualities, which he appreciates, but because of its political ones. According to him, the movie is a “a gross falsification of history” because it shows Churchill as “generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication” and because it neglects to portray Edward VIII as “a firm admirer of the Third Reich” and George VI as an appeaser and anti-Churchill."

Obama Uses Another Bad Historical Analogy

Oh, Man, Not Another Sputnik Moment . . ., Contentions, January 26, 2011. "I keep a list of historical analogies — derived from years of grading papers — that tell me that the individual using them is (to be polite) more interested in rhetorical impact than historical accuracy. Before last night, the list began with “we need a Marshall Plan for X,” where X usually equals Africa or the Middle East, and ended with “the United States is a young country.” Both are fallacies: the Marshall Plan was a pump-priming program, not an effort to rebuild the infrastructure and remake the culture of half a continent; and while European settlement of North America is fairly recent, the U.S.’s political institutions have a longer continuous existence than those of any other country except, arguably, the United Kingdom. Now, thanks to President Obama, I’ve got a third analogy to add to the list: 'Sputnik moment.'"

Response to State of the Union

Reaction Roundup: Heritage Responds to the State of the Union, Heritage Foundation Foundry, January 25, 2011. "In the opening section of his address, the President referred to the need to “sustain the leadership that has made America not just a place on a map, but a light to the world.” Those are certainly words that conservatives can endorse and respect, just as they will agree with his statement that America is “the first nation the be founded for the sake of an idea.” As Matthew Spalding has stated, the American creed 'is set forth most clearly in the Declaration of Independence, . .. a timeless statement of inherent rights, the proper purposes of government, and the limits on political authority.' Unfortunately, this was not the creed that the President proclaimed in his speech."

Reforming the Treaty Process

If We Care About American Exceptionalism, It’s Time to Reform Our Treaty Processes, Conservative Home USA, January 19, 2010. "As an exceptional nation that values its sovereignty, the United States has much to gain from the practice of responsible diplomacy. After all, diplomacy was invented to allow sovereign states to interact and negotiate. Unfortunately, responsible diplomacy is at risk."

Citizenship and Historians

Historians and Civic Responsibility, Contentions, January 18, 2011. "The American Historical Association is on a roll. Last month, I felt compelled to read not one but two articles in its monthly newsmagazine, Perspectives on History. This month, the count is two again. Next thing you know, they’ll be hiring British historians in the academy. Well, let’s not get carried away."