Unsurprisingly, John Bolton doesn’t like the new START. Also unsurprisingly, his arguments against the treaty are severely flawed. He believes countries like Iran and North Korea will perceive the treaty as a signal of U.S. weakness and warns of the resulting dangers: Faced with the Obama mindset, Iran and North Korea are now more likely […]
Charles Krauthammer tears into the Nuclear Security Summit. Max Bergmann tears into Krauthammer. Enjoy.
By now we all undoubtedly know that the new START requires the U.S. and Russia to limit their strategically deployed nuclear warheads to 1550 each. Though one wonders… Why 1550? A CNN article from last week begins to answer the question. The article notes that if the number of strategic nukes falls below a certain […]
Last week the NYT ran an editorial by Peter Feaver of Duke University that explains really well what the Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) actually says. I completely agree with Feaver that “the changes in terms of doctrine aren’t nearly as epochal as the White House would have us believe or its critics would have […]
Want an excuse to lament the sad state of American democracy? Look no further than Dianne Feinstein and Jon Kyle’s bizarre debate about the new START on the PBS Newshour:
Victor Davis Hanson last week repeated a now familiar mantra: Obama = Bush. I wrote about this viewpoint before. As far as I can see, regarding national security, there’s nothing controversial about this conclusion. However, Hanson focuses on the liberal hypocrisy aspect of the issue and overstates his case. Obama campaigned on leaving a residual […]
I’ve seen relatively little Western press coverage of Israel’s recent Gaza bombings, so I thought it might be worthwhile to provide some links. It began a couple weeks ago in response to the Ansar al-Sunna rocket attacks. Reports emerged yesterday about Israeli drones dropping leaflets on Gaza warning of further attacks, which have already commenced. […]
Here is an editorial I came across earlier this week about deterrence. Penned by Russ Wellen for Huffintgon Post, the piece surveys some arguments and counterarguments about the effectiveness of deterrence. It is important to think about deterrence in the wake of the START news from last week. Though many have bought the party line […]
Last week Patrick Vilbert of the FPA Lebanon blog wrote a great post outlining the history and possible future of the UN Security Council-established investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri. If any of the likely suspects are implicated, there could be seriously negative effects for the region. Vilbert writes: In 2009, an article in […]
One curious headline in yesterday’s New York Times was this: “Treaty Advances Obama’s Nuclear Vision”. The article was about START II, which Obama and Russian President Medvedev agreed to sign this week. Under START II, the number of legal strategically deployed nuclear warheads will be capped at 1,550 for each signatory. The “nuclear vision” to […]
The Democrats’ drive to pass health care reform has resurrected ancient legal demons. As The New York Times reported last week, nullification, typically considered a pretty-much dead 19th century notion of the relationship between states and the federal government, is experiencing a resurgence. The early American debates about the relationship between state and federal power […]
Joel Davis of FPA’s U.S. Role in the World blog accuses the U.S. of not being an honest and impartial broker in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He notes that the U.S. threw a “temper tantrum” after Israel’s housing development announcement last week and asks why the U.S. did not throw a similar tantrum after a […]
This week, a series of maps caused the blog-o-sphere to erupt in lively debate over the origins and future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The maps in question… …were posted by Juan Cole last week, picked up by Andrew Sullivan the next day, and subsequently criticized by Jeffrey Goldberg. It turned into Cole and Sullivan vs. […]