The American national security system is broken. Forged in the aftermath of World War II, the national security state was invented to prevent the kind of problems the United States suffered in the fight against Germany, Italy, and Japan, when it had to build a large military and intelligence complex essentially from scratch.
The Chinese want to regain Taiwan as much as Abraham Lincoln desired to keep the southern states in the Union. Since the day that Taiwan became home of Chiang Kai-shek and his displaced Chinese Nationalist forces, the United States has vowed to uphold Taiwan’s place as an independent country. China views Taiwan as
For the last 20 years, Venezuela has been a major threat to the United States in the Western Hemisphere—outstripping even the threat of Castro’s Cuba—because of its oil wealth, rabid anti-American leadership, and its support of global terrorism (namely, Iran’s Hezbollah). Now, however, the country’s economy has imploded. Meanwhile, the entire society is
When President Donald J. Trump was elected, one of his first decisions was to fulfill an early campaign promise: he abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that the Obama Administration negotiated. The reason for withdrawing was simple: it disproportionately would have harmed American middle-class workers and their already-ailing communities.Yet the decision to remove the United
President Donald Trump is not playing three-dimensional chess while everyone else is playing checkers. Certainly, compared to his rivals—Republican and Democrat alike—the president is running circles around them. But the political feats that Trump has been performing are rooted in common sense. If anything, Trump has disproportionately benefited from the efficient combination of
In recent weeks, two seminal events have occurred that make war with Iran more likely. First, Iran (currently struggling with growing domestic unrest because of the horrific economic conditions in that country) has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz. Second, Iranian-backed Houthi Rebels in Yemen have attacked two Saudi Arabian-flagged oil tankers
Three decades of rocky Russo-American relations have been the result, mainly, of a lack of planning on the part of Washington. As the West—specifically, the George H.W. Bush Administration—basked in its victory over Communism and the Soviet Union, few appreciated the fact that, unlike the end of World War II in which the
FBI agent Peter Strzok held one of the most important national security positions in the entire bloated federal government. Strzok was the chief of the counterespionage section of the FBI. While working in that capacity, Strzok oversaw the FBI’s much-maligned investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. Strzok’s fingers were in several other major
The Russian Federation controls one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. In fact, Russia’s nonstrategic nuclear weapons arsenal is likely larger and more advanced than its counterpart in the United States. To compound matters, the Russians have stationed a large portion of those nonstrategic nuclear warheads in a part of Europe
Whenever neoconservatives speak about the bounties that endless wars of “liberation” will provide, I am reminded of a Jonah Goldberg column from 2002, expounding upon the many upsides of invading Iraq: The most compelling substantive reason, from my point of view, is that Iraq should be a democratic, republican country, with individual rights
