Column Archive

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s midterm elections, President Barack Obama again sounded the theme of bipartisan cooperation, speaking of the need to find “common ground” and calling on both Democrats and Republicans to unite around solving the country’s pressing challenges. In theory, bipartisanship is a golden rule when it comes to foreign policy, where politics is supposed to stop at the water’s edge. That notion was first articulated by a Republican, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, who at the outset of the Cold War, under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman, argued that America’s position in the world would be weakened […]

On the same day that voters in the United States went to the polls to throw a punch into the gut of the political establishment, some 5,000 miles away, police in Greece had their hands full with a series of bombs mailed to foreign embassies. Greek investigators say the bombs, 11 of them in all, were probably the work of militant activists who, in their own violent way and to a much greater degree, also aimed to overturn the political and economic order. In recent months, angry efforts to take on the system have gained steam throughout the developed world […]

Expeditionary warfare is built into the DNA of the British military establishment. Historically, Great Britain conducted war not by creating a great continental army, but rather by using the Royal Navy to deliver the relatively small British army to its enemies’ weak points. Wellington’s expedition to the Iberian Peninsula helped defeat Napoleon, and even the great formations sent to France in 1914 and 1939 were called the British Expeditionary Force. The idea that wars should be fought at a distance has informed British military policy for centuries. To this end, the United Kingdom has historically structured its military forces with […]

Although opinion polls show that foreign policy will have little impact on today’s congressional elections, the war in Afghanistan will certainly be an important subject of concern for the new Congress. And last week’s unprecedented joint Russian-U.S. drug raid against several narcotics laboratories in Afghanistan is a hopeful sign. The raid suggests that Russian-American differences over the war are narrowing, and raises the possibility that Moscow will provide additional support to the coalition’s war efforts in Afghanistan in coming weeks. In a commando operation that took place in the early morning hours of Oct. 28, Russian counternarcotics officers for the […]

Writing recently in the Financial Times, long-time economic journalist Gideon Rachman lamented the passing of a post-Cold War “golden age,” in which “countries shared a belief in globalization and Western democratic values.” In Rachman’s calculation, that consensus has been battered by the global financial crisis, which ushered in a “new, less-predictable era.” Rachman, whose book entitled “Zero-Sum Future” comes out next February, is clearly prepping the literary battlefield by positioning himself as an “anti-Robert Wright.” The latter’s book, “Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny,” argued that human progress has been characterized by — and thus depends on — our increasing […]