After three decades of foreign policy based on Fukuyama’s End of History, the Strategy of Wishful Thinking, it is over.
Trump is putting his foreign affairs team together and we do not know what strategy they will develop, and we may not know for a while. His appointees have various backgrounds, and they have many immediate, ongoing, problems to address quickly. They will need to coordinate…
During the Cold War the United States had a clear strategy on which it could hang its foreign policy. That strategy changed from containment to Reagan’s “We win, they lose” strategy so the policies changed, but there was always a strategy.
To prevail in foreign affairs, a strategy is the first requirement to provide guidance for policies which, in turn, guide actions taken in individual…
Sudden, violent, disruptive events in the Middle East cause big oil price jumps and front-page headlines about gasoline prices – don’t they? But, not lately. Like the dog that did not bark, why not?
Russia, one of the world’s three largest oil producers, invaded Ukraine and started a war which has been going for two-and-a-half years now. Europe imposed sanctions on Russian oil and gas supplies…
After the fall of the Iron Curtain the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) embraced the concept the world would be run by a group of benign democracies forevermore as a basis for foreign policy. It was a fantasy; the world did not work out that way – it is a dangerous place with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and pending conflict in many other places.
Because Donald Trump, as a businessman…
Democracies are inherently unstable and, therefore, short-lived. That was true for the first “cradle of democracy,” Athens, in the fifth century B.C., and is demonstrably true now.
Madison noted in Federalist Articles 10, 14, 19, and 39, 240 years ago, reasons the United States was established as a republic; not a democracy. Socrates pointed out to the Athenians their democracy would not last…
The Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) brings out the big guns for its second week of the On the Ballot project to undermine Trump’s campaign for president. This week’s edition is mostly devoted to portraying Trump as an isolationist and to depicting isolationism as an out-of-date and inappropriate basis for foreign policy.
Kori Schacke is the most blatantly and explicitly Trump critic with…
Over the weekend, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), supposedly one of our elite organizations for foreign policy considerations and analysis, sank to the level of mainstream media talking heads.
CFR announced to its Foreign Affairs subscribers a full propaganda campaign of weekly publications titled On the Ballot. With blatant language inversion, this series claims its readers should…
Two books. Two visions of the world. One influenced American foreign policy for 30 years. The wrong one.
In the late 1980s the Iron Curtain was becoming quite rusty. Premier Gorbachev of the Soviet Union confirmed the situation with a speech to the UN on December 7, 1988, that the Soviet Union was releasing the countries of eastern Europe from Soviet control. With that, 1989 became a year in…
I write this on D-Day with the commemorations playing on television. These all note this is a special commemorative time: 80 years since D-Day and probably the last with living veterans in attendance. I have visited the invasion beaches, Pointe du Hoc, and the cemeteries. A cousin’s husband was in the 82nd Airborne. He jumped into that night, fought his way to Germany, and helped liberate…
The front page of yesterday’s Friday’s Wall Street Journal had a picture of a large public TV screen in Beijing showing a satellite image of Taiwan off the coast of mainland China and how the Chinese military is conducting “maneuvers” encircling Taiwan. The headline: China Sends Taiwan Message With Military Drills. This message is not for Taiwan; it is for the US.
China has made it clear in…
