Our new Contributing Editor Lucy Steigerwald appared on HuffPost Live today to discuss the Obama administration's apparent embrace of an "an FBI plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance - laws that would make it easier to wiretap those who communicate using the...
The dispute between China and Japan over territorial claims to the Senkaku/Diaoyu island chains has become the front line in the Sino-Japanese realpolitik rivalry. But it is at least as much about the geo-political contest between the U.S. and China, with Japan as a...
Harold Koh, formerly the Obama administration's top State Department lawyer, has criticized the systematic secrecy surrounding the drone war. The New York Times: In a speech Tuesday at Oxford University, Harold H. Koh, a Yale law professor who as the State...
Writing in The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins runs through the Obama administration's reluctance to further intervene in Syria. There are many cons White House officials articulate, but here's two that stood out to me. Unintended Consequences Filkins quotes a senior White...
Much has been made of the Obama administration's decision to set up shop in Jordan under the pretense of containing the Syrian conflict and of training so-called moderate elements in the Syrian rebel opposition. That is the pretense that has so far been publicized in...
Israel's bombing of Syria this week represented a very serious escalation in the civil war that carries a high risk of internationalizing the conflict. The supposed justification for the attacks was to eliminate a depot of Fateh-110 missiles, shipped from Iran and...
Bill Keller's piece in The New York Times yesterday got a lot of attention, and for all the right reasons. The absurdity of the piece wasn't lost on most people: Keller lays out how terribly wrong he was for supporting the Bush administration's war of choice in Iraq,...
Bolivian President Evo Morales recently announced he has expelled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), saying such "institutions" "continue to conspire." USAID, thanks to lots of propaganda, is thought to be a wonderful, almost charitable...
A recent New York Times article ascribing the label "isolationist" to those skeptical of military intervention in Syria and North Korea has generated a flurry of commentary about the overall foreign policy debate. Matt Duss summarizes the controversy well: Ask...
There are rumors going around that President Obama "is preparing to send lethal weaponry to the Syrian opposition," although he has said no such thing publicly. Nevertheless, the rumors are sparking a new debate on the wisdom of directly arming the Syrian rebels. I...
