Column Archive

Half a century ago, Latin America experienced golpes, or military coups, on a regular basis. In a pattern that varied little across the continent, citizens would simply wake up one morning to the sound of gunfire near the presidential palace. Before long, a military man would head a new regime. Always, he had acted “for the good of the country.” Through varying degrees of repression, he would quickly push aside the opposition, install his cronies in positions of influence and personal enrichment, shut down opposition media, and take control of all the country’s levers of power. Today that style of […]

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when Somali clans across East Africa imagined a “pan-Somalia” encompassing former British, Italian and French colonies, in addition to portions of eastern Ethiopia and northern Kenya. The former British and Italian colonies — Somaliland in the north, and the southern U.N. Trust Territory of Somalia, respectively — had taken a tentative first step towards realizing this greater Somali state, when they merged in 1960 to form the Republic of Somalia. But the greater union was not to be. The former French colony declared independence, as Djibouti, and Ethiopia and Kenya each […]

President Barack Obama’s praiseworthy effort to establish a bipartisan national security team, epitomized by his decision to maintain Robert Gates as secretary of defense, continued with his and Gates’ appointment of Kenneth A. Myers III as the new director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Myers previously worked on the personal staff of Sen. Richard Lugar, who himself has a long history of reaching across the aisle to build bipartisan coalitions on behalf of various national security initiatives. Along with then-Sen. Sam Nunn, Lugar helped launch the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program at the Defense Department in 1991. In […]

These are nerve-racking times at the Pentagon. For “Big War” adherents, Iraq is not looking like the “one off” that many hoped it would be, as Afghanistan-Pakistan appears to be, if anything, an even harder slog. None of the dominant Big War scenarios are looking good, now that Iran is ever closer to nuclear deterrence, North Korea ever closer to collapse, and Taiwan ever closer to a peace deal with Beijing. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, meanwhile, is locking in a more balanced take on small wars versus large, and the serious Leviathan budget-cutting has begun. Clearly, a tipping point […]