The Hill February 10, 2015 The Obama administration has released its long-awaited update to the “National Security Strategy.” While ostensibly a report to Congress on the president’s priorities for safeguarding U.S. interests globally, around which to base funding and procurement discussions, a fair amount of the domestic political agenda inevitably creeps in. This go-around, though,…
Author: James Joyner
The National Interest February 10 , 2015 The Obama administration’s long-overdue update to the National Security Strategy hit the streets Friday morning. It is in many ways a remarkable document, lucidly describing the foreign (and domestic) policy vision of the only global power, nodding to an enormous number of allies, partners and stakeholders. It is, however, only…
Christian Science Monitor February 6, 2015 Matt Bennett and Mieke Eoyang, both former Washington staffers, explore “Why Congress is AWOL on national security policymaking today.” Contrasting Rep. Ron Dellums’s two-decade-long campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, they argue that today’s members lack the staying power to exert major influence. The American public, with its fleeting…
The National Interest January 15, 2015 One hesitates to pile on to the criticism coming from the usual suspects about the Obama administration’s decision not to send a high-level representative to march in Paris to express solidarity in the wake of the outrageous attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, but the White House itself now admits that…
The National Interest December 11, 2014 Despite more than a decade of reports that the U.S. government had tortured high-level terrorist suspects, including a frank, if detached, admission from President Obama that the nation had “tortured some folks,” Tuesday’s release of the Senate study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program was chilling. We learned…
The National Interest November 26, 2014 To the surprise of many, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel resigned his post Monday, apparently under heavy pressure. According to some accounts, this development has been brewing for weeks. In reality, it was presaged nearly two years ago in the former Army sergeant and Nebraska Senator’s farcical confirmation hearings before his one-time…
Christian Science Monitor November 21, 2014 The secretary of Homeland Security and the counsel to the president (OLC) directed the Justice Department to investigate whether the president had the authority to take contemplated actions with regard to illegal immigrants via executive order. In a letter dated Nov. 19, they found he did not. On Nov.…
The National Interest September 12, 2014 Two weeks after declaring that he had no strategy for dealing with ISIS, President Obama declared his existing policy a strategy. Given that he came to national prominence and won the presidency almost solely on the basis of having been alone among the serious Democratic aspirants to have opposed…
Christian Science Monitor September 5, 2014 Dan Froomkin has returned to blogging at Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept. His debut posting is a doozy: In a lot of ways, we’re worse off today than we were under George W. Bush. Back then, Bush’s extremist assault on civil liberties, human rights and other core American values in the name of…
Christian Science Monitor August 28, 2014 Having spent a number of years living in Alabama, I’m well acquainted with the phrase, “Thank God for Mississippi.” While we had a lot of problems, we could always point to our western border for a state that was even more backwards. Perhaps it’s time for that slogan to…