Understanding American Security

Understanding American Security, with Luke Coffey, Heritage Foundation Special Report, November 29, 2012. "As long as Americans value independence and liberty, the U.S. will need powerful armed forces to deter and defeat its enemies. But what we have to do to stay secure changes over time. A hundred years ago, we did not need an air force. Today we do. We know we need to provide for the common defense. But how should we do it now?"

What New CPS Guidelines Tell Us About the UK Forum Bar

Extradition: CPS Guidelines & The Paradoxical Forum Bar, with Andrew Southam, The Commentator, November 15, 2012. "In late October, the Crown Prosecution Service, in a step that attracted little public attention, issued new, enforceable guidelines on how to prosecute alleged extradition crimes. The guidelines are interesting partly because they reinforce both modern extradition practice and longstanding tradition."

Bloggers Briefing Comments on ATT

VIDEO: The Bloggers Briefing featuring the Food Marketing Institute, and Ted Bromund, Heritage Foundation Foundry, November 13, 2012.

In the UN, More ATT

The Arms Trade Treaty Moves Forward, Heritage Foundation Foundry, November 13, 2012. "On Wednesday, the First Committee of the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution to hold a final negotiating conference on the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) on March 18–28, using the treaty text from last July’s conference, and under the rule of consensus (i.e. any nation can block the treaty by objecting to it). The General Assembly must now consider the resolution, but it is a foregone conclusion that they will approve it by an overwhelming margin."

A Post-Election Review

"Don’t Criticise Romney, Just Blame A World That’s Changing," Yorkshire Post, November 13, 2012, not available online. "Republicans are taking Mitt Romney’s defeat at the polls hard – especially because he seemed to have a chance of victory. That proved to be an illusion. In politics, defeat produces nothing as reliably as blame, and the usual place to put the blame is on the candidate and his campaign."

A View of the Election from Ohio

Message From the Heartland Tells Obama That The Battle Isn’t Over Yet, Yorkshire Post, November 6, 2012. "As it happens, I’m from Ohio. I don’t claim any great insight into the state, as I moved away when I went to college, over 20 years ago. But I happened to visit last weekend and was struck by what I saw."

Back to the UN Arms Trade Treaty

The U.N. Arms Trade Treaty Is Back (and Actually, It Never Left), Heritage Foundation Foundry, November 1, 2012. "The First Committee of the U.N. General Assembly is considering a resolution to convene “the Final United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty” in New York next March. Last July, a U.N. conference to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) collapsed when it because obvious that the draft treaty was not ready for prime time. But as I wrote at the time, the conference’s collapse was “not the end of the process. It is the end of a phase.” That next phase of the ATT is now well under way."

Live Blogging the Final Presidential Debate for the BBC

Obama and Romney in Final Push, BBC News, October 23, 2012. A heavily edited set of responses to the final presidential debate, matched with opposing responses from P.J. Crowley.

Live Blogging the Final Presidential Debate

Heritage Experts Live Blog the Final Presidential Debate, Heritage Foundation Foundry, October 22, 2012. "The discussion of the U.S.’s place in the world in tonight’s debate was unsatisfactory. To the extent that it focused directly on that subject, both Obama and Romney sought to reduce it to a question of defense spending, which the President was eager to cut. That is the wrong approach; much better is to assess what the U.S. needs to carry out its responsibilities and budget accordingly. But both men largely fought shy of presenting any larger vision of the U.S.’s role in the world, and sought to focus their remarks on domestic policy."

Pre-Debate Post on US Role in the World

Debate Prep: The U.S. Role in the World, Heritage Foundation Foundry, October 22, 2012. "At the Heritage Foundation, we agree on the centrality of American leadership. But leadership is just a word: anyone can say that they believe in it. To be real and effective, leadership needs to be backed up by priorities, by policies, by budgets, and by the strength of the nation. And that is a good place to start."

Dispelling Mythologies About US-UK Extradition

The McKinnon Case and the U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty, Heritage Foundation Foundry, October 18, 2012. "On Tuesday, British Home Secretary Theresa May announced in the House of Commons that Gary McKinnon, who has acknowledged hacking into U.S. government computers, would not be extradited to the U.S. because he was mentally ill, and extradition would therefore violate his human rights."

Extradition By The Numbers

The Numbers Behind the Extradition Controversy, with Andrew Southam, The Commentator, October 15, 2012. "But if you want to talk about numbers, consider this: the ratio between U.S. and U.K. extradition requests is not going up. It is going down. Since 2003, U.S. requests have outnumbered British ones by over two to one (130 to 54). By comparison, between 1964 and 1994, the U.S. filed almost three times as many extradition requests (301) in Britain as Britain (108) did in the U.S."

The EU: Effect, Not Cause, Of Peace

The EU’s Nobel Peace Prize: Not Just a Laughing Matter, Heritage Foundation Foundry, October 12, 2012. "The lesson of the EU’s prize—taken with the three prizes that the U.N. has won in various guises over the past decade and President Obama’s award in 2009 for promising to be more multilateral—is that the Nobel Committee, like a lot of elites, think that the way to promote peace is to diminish national sovereignty and the democratic control of politics by relying on supranational institutions of regional (or global) governance."

Rapid Debate Responses

LIVE BLOG: Biden, Ryan Square Off in Vice Presidential Debate, Heritage Foundation Foundry, October 11, 2012. Instant reaction on various subjects, including Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, and the economy, raised in the debate.

A Case for Public, Not Private, Austerity

As Spain and Greece Burn, Estonia Offers a Lesson, with Ryan Bourne, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 28, 2012. "Usefully, the Eurozone crisis has provided a natural experiment in how to deal with a severe downturn. The results of that experiment have not favored the unsophisticated Keynesian view that more borrowing is the answer. The highly indebted Southern European states decided to run big fiscal deficits in the aftermath of the crisis, and now face suffocating debt burdens and still-uncompetitive labour markets. On the other side of the spectrum, the Baltic nations (especially Estonia and Latvia) cut government spending and liberalized their economies. While the short term effects were painful, these two countries grew by 8.3 percent and 5.5 percent last year—remarkable when you consider that Greece, Spain, and Italy are in recession."

The Failings of Private Austerity

Why Larry Summers Is Wrong About the British Economy, with Ryan Bourne, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 20, 2012. "Despite all the talk about huge spending cuts, spending has actually increased in real terms since 2010, while new tax hikes have been piled on top of the tax rises implemented by the previous Labour government.

The O'Dwyer Extradition Case

Why It Is Fair to Extradite Yorkshire Web Piracy Suspect, Yorkshire Post, September 20, 2012. "I do not expect that a defense of Richard O’Dwyer’s extradition will be popular. But I do believe that the extradition arrangements between Britain and the U.S. are fair, and that O’Dwyer’s case illustrates why."

The Transnationalist Strategy and the First Amendment

Re: WH Asks YouTube to Pull Anti-Islam Video, Contentions, September 19, 2012. "The problem with the White House’s efforts is not just that they are wrong in principle and feeble in practice. It’s not just that it has handed all the agenda-defining power to Islamist radicals, and refused to recognize that the video is an act of political judo against the U.S., and a pretext for violence, not its cause, in the Middle East. It’s not even just that it plays into the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s seemingly-lost campaign for U.N. action against the ‘defamation of religion,’ which the Obama Administration rightly opposed."

Defending the US-UK Extradition Treaty

Why the US-UK Extradition Treaty is Good Law, ConHome, September 17, 2012. "Hard cases make bad law, the saying goes, and some of the cases that have attracted British attention – and condemnation -- to the 2003 Extradition Treaty between the U.S. and Great Britain are indeed hard. But not all of them are. Indeed, most extraditions from Britain to the U.S. – and all of them from the U.S. to Britain – excite no public controversy at all. The Treaty deserves more than to be condemned by anecdote; it deserves to be examined on its merits."

Arms Control and the Need for Verification

Missing the Point on Arms Control, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "Over the last several weeks, Rose Gottemoeller, the Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, has given speeches in Stockholm and Helsinki that, while focusing on Europe, set out the Administration’s broader philosophy on arms control and verification. This philosophy is profoundly misguided."

Stolen Valor and the Origin of the 'Crazy Vet'

Re: The ‘Crazed Veteran’, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "The virtue of Stolen Valor is the way that it methodically and systemically uses documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests to reveal fraud after fraud, fake after fake, and lie after lie from supposedly traumatized veterans who in reality rarely even served in the military or saw combat at all."

The EU's Explicitly Elite Approach

The EU’s Pursuit of Stability Über Alles, Contentions, September 12, 2012. "The EU turned from an instrument for restoring a degree of stability to one dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. That approach – and Dalrymple is absolutely right about this – is bound to fail. It means the EU, which still talks a lot about increasing Europe’s power in the world, is more interested in pursuing policies which guarantee Europe’s continued relative decline. It also means that the reality of German dominance of the EU – politics win in the short run, but economics win in the long haul – is becoming ever more obvious to most Europeans, which is one reason why the EU is less popular now than ever."

UN Programme of Action Lives On

U.N. ‘Programme of Action’ Does Little Damage, So Far, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 11, 2012. "The 2012 Review Conference for the U.N.’s “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects” (PoA), concluded with a consensus agreement on Friday. The agreement continued the PoA’s track record of over-promising and under-delivering, but, in the context of the PoA, that is about the best outcome the U.S. could realistically have achieved."

The PoA --Time for the US to Quit This Farce

U.S. Should Quit U.N.’s ‘Programme of Action’, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 4, 2012. "So let’s sum up: The PoA has achieved little of use, has a constantly expanding agenda, promotes restricting civilian firearms ownership, and seeks to advance this agenda by the slow elaboration of international norms. It is high time for the U.S. to quit this farce."

Defending the US-UK Extradition Treaty

The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty: Fair, Balanced, and Worth Defending, with Andrew Robert James Southam, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #2723, September 4, 2012. "The 2003 Extradition Treaty between the United States and Great Britain is intensely controversial in the United Kingdom. The treaty resulted from a British process and is a modern and praiseworthy approach to extradition that is based on an objective evidentiary test, requires dual criminality in all cases, and has a proportionality standard. The European Union’s European Arrest Warrant does not have these virtues and therefore urgently needs reform, as does Britain’s participation in the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Extradition and acceptance of the jurisdiction of the supranational European Court of Human Rights. While Anglo–American cooperation on the treaty and on extradition and international criminal justice can be improved, the 2003 U.S.–U.K. Extradition Treaty is fair, balanced, and worth defending."