To the foreign policy left, Obama is a turncoat who spoke out against the George W. Bush Administration’s expansion of executive power during the 2008 campaign only to adopt some of Bush’s security-over-civil-liberties policies on taking office. To those on the right, Obama is a turncoat determined to cede American global preeminence to a combination of rising powers like China and India, and multilateral institutions like the United Nations.
Rick Perry is still laboring to articulate a clear position on Afghanistan.
Former Obama Administration budget director Peter Orszag has not exactly worked hard to maintain friendly ties with the White House since he left his post in the summer of 2010. First, he took a job writing columns for The New York Times, the first of which ran in September 2010 and suggested extending the Bush [...]
Tim Pawlenty looked to turn the page on his summer slump Tuesday morning with a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations bashing Barack Obama — and elements of his own party — over the course of U.S. foreign policy. Titled “No Retreat From Freedom’s Rise,” Pawlenty’s speech aspired to be a Reaganesque declaration of [...]
One of the few truly reliable campaign strategies for Republican presidential candidates over the last 40 years has been to run to the right of Democrats on foreign and national security policy no matter what the issue, no matter what the context. So why are two GOP contenders for the presidency risking an early soft [...]
It’s about to start in a matter of moments. I’m at a pub, The Red Lion, across from 10 Downing Street — just about the only pub in London that’s broadcasting the debate so far as I can tell. CNN also found it extraordinarily difficult to find a pub willing to switch from the big [...]
An excellent primer lies below from TIME’s London bureau chief, Catherine Mayer, of what to expect from Thursday night’s second ever debate of British prime ministerial candidates. The first debate catapulted Nick Clegg into newfound stardom – he’s even overtaken or tied Prime Minister Gordon Brown in some polls — so it’ll be interesting to see [...]
Walter Russell Mead, usually a very fine foreign policy thinker, has a piece in the new issue of Foreign Policy that sort of compares Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter…and to Thomas Jefferson in his attitudes about America’s place in the world. I don’t find it very convincing. Here’s Mead’s definition of a Jeffersonian foreign policy: [...]
