President Obama receives high marks from many parts of the political spectrum for his foreign policy. I would argue that this is for three reasons: He has largely continued President Bush’s policies; he ordered the killing of Osama Bin Laden; and everyone is so focused on domestic policy that so long as no American city is being bombed, foreign policy falls into a distant second-place. | Read More »
Promoted from the diaries Most of my writing is on foreign policy. There are few other topic areas other than the law on which I’m comfortable writing. However, as streiff notes, I, like most other Catholics, got to hear a heartfelt letter from my Bishop — a living examplar of St. John Chrysostom’s famous (possibly apocryphal) maxim — explaining that clear out of nowhere, somehow, | Read More »
Foreign policy is hard. You wouldn’t have thought it was so from listening to candidate Obama in 2007 and 2008. Just a quick dialogue with batty dictators here, a wholesale troop withdrawal there, a quick invasion of Pakistan for garnish, and a drizzle of adoring crowds in the home of dangerous demagoguery, and voila! Receding seas, world peace, America’s foreign policy solved. So, here we | Read More »
As Americans, we take the rule of law as a given. We usually think of this in terms of national epigrams like “a nation of laws, and not of men,” and the idea that anyone high or low is entitled to the same procedural safeguards before he is deprived of life, liberty, or property. These things are true, and they are valuable rights our forebears | Read More »
There is something about political office that either drives many men to infidelity — and the belief that the old rules don’t apply to them — or attracts the sorts of men prone to infidelity and a belief in their own exemption from the rules. Just the last few years have been remarkable for the wave of public men confessing (or being found to have) | Read More »
As the 2012 primary jockeying starts up — we should count our blessings that so many waited for June 2011 instead of the now-traditional June 2009 — most of the energy on the right is aimed at finding the best contender who won’t continue the spending binge on which our country has embarked. Given the numerous crises facing us, this makes a great deal of | Read More »
In the West, we tend to ignore the Muslim countries of Southeast Asia too often in favor of the more rambunctious Middle East; whether this is because we are concentrating our limited energies on the larger problem spot, or ignoring places where things are going well, is probably a function of one’s particular outlook on life. Regardless of the source of this disregard, it is | Read More »
The Prime Minister of a majority-Muslim country, a strong U.S. ally, and one of the foremost voices for moderate Islam on Earth — real, serious Islam, the kind to which President Bush referred when he spoke of a “religion of peace” — gave a speech at Oxford today. It was a serious speech, a speech that grappled with real problems, and a speech that did | Read More »
It is a staple of American politics, when American politicians can be bothered to notice Malaysia, to sing the praises of Anwar Ibrahim, the more-or-less permanent opposition leader of that state. It is to the Obama Administration’s rare credit that it has started to distance itself from Anwar, recognizing that Malaysia’s government has made serious strides in the last several years, and that Ibrahim’s unsavory | Read More »
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