The US needs a more restrained approach to its national security, but not all arguments for restraint – and not all policies of restraint – rest on solid foundations.
This is a guest post from Paul Poast, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Earlier this spring, Poast wrote a post about the Asshole...
This is a guest post from Paul Poast, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Earlier this spring, Poast wrote a post about the Asshole Theory of...
The other day, Emily McFarlan Miller--a journalist with Religion News Service--noted a sense of deja vu. The AP had an article on a delegation of US evangelicals who travelled to Saudi Arabia to...
I have written before about my Rummy experiences, but wanted tor revisit after seeing this post yesterday at vox. I was able to dig through Rummy's website and found the document that spawned a heap of paperwork at my desk on the Joint Staff. In the aftermath of 9/11, many allies, partners and others offered to help the US, and since Rumsfeld didn't want allies on the battlefield (with a few exceptions), he wanted to use these offers to get the US out of a variety of commitments around the world. Backfill refers to finding other forces to fill the gaps after one removes one's troops. I...
Last week Joe Scarborough from Politico raised the question of why US foreign policy in the Middle East is in “disarray.” Citing all of the turmoil from the past 14 years, he posits that both Obama and Bush’s decisions for the region are driven by “blind ideology [rather] than sound reason.” Scarborough wonders what historians will say about these policies in the future, but what he fails to realize is that observers of foreign policy and strategic studies need not wait for the future to explain the decisions of the past two sitting presidents. The strategic considerations that shaped...
Yesterday at ISA, I participated on a panel on technology and international security. One of the topics addressed was the “successfulness” of the Obama administration’s decapitation/targeted killing strategy of terrorist leaders through unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones.” The question of success, however, got me to thinking. Success was described as the military effectiveness of the strikes, but this to me seems rather wrongheaded. For if something is militarily effective, then is so in relation to a military objective. What is a military objective? Shortly, those objects that “by their...
We should stop using the term “isolationism” to describe policies tht entail a more restrained U.S. role in the world.