The Geneva II talks on the Syrian civil war in Switzerland started today. In the lead up to the conference, the media focus, unfortunately, had been on which parts of the Syrian opposition would attend and whether or not Iran, the Assad regime's close ally, would...
Today at Al Jazeera America I argue that the U.S. should stop occupying South Korea, not only because they don't belong there but because the highly militarized alliance between the U.S. and South Korea doesn't actually weaken North Korea, but helps sustain the regime...
Robert Gates's new memoir, which I've mentioned I'm making my way through, has a nice example of how dangerous entangling alliances can be. Not only does Gates write frankly about how U.S. interests are subordinated to those of our weaker allies, but he is unusually...
In recent months, President Obama has been pressured in the face of widespread public outrage to make two important speeches on national security. In May, he gave a lengthy talk on U.S. drone policy in which he placated public concerns by saying that America needed to...
Governments use fear of threats at home and abroad to increase their power and abridge individual freedom. If there is any singular lesson in Antiwar.com's motto, War is the Health of the State, that is it. Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern...
The excited media coverage of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's new memoir Duty as an unusually frank retelling of his time in the Bush and Obama administrations caused me to make an exception to my lifelong moratorium on reading the memoirs of politicians or...
Denny Roy, a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, writes at The Diplomat that the crux of the tensions between the U.S. and China is a contest for power in the Asia-Pacific region. The squabbling over competing sovereignty claims of this or that island chain in the...
Here's a rare on the ground look the daily battles being fought between illegal Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. From Al Jazeera America:
Senator Diane Feinstein took to the floor of the Senate to argue against the bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran in the interim period between the 6-month agreement and a final deal down the road. She said this attempt to foil negotiations is really "a march...
This piece from the New York Times reports on Hamas boot camps in Gaza where teenagers receive military training and repeats oft-cited claims about Hamas textbooks that don't recognize Israel. It is a one-sided depiction of an ugly reality that exists, of course, on...
