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Washington Is Preparing for a Long War With China
Tweet Share on Facebook March 31, 2011 Comment (21)In my upcoming book about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, I argue that Washington’s refusal to tolerate China as a regional power will render a Sino-American war all but inevitable. It now appears the Pentagon’s war horse has officially left the barn.
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From Red Dawn to Homefront, Paranoid Nonsense Thrives
Tweet Share on Facebook March 29, 2011 Comment (5)In the mid-1980s, I embarked on a cross-country road trip from California with a friend who was to attend law school in Virginia. Along the way, after checking into a roadside inn, we settled into our room with a short case of beer and watched a film called Red Dawn.
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Libya No Fly Zone Shows NATO's Usefulness Has Ended
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2011 Comment (7)It’s time to put NATO out of its misery.
In spring 1999, I was a Middle East correspondent whisked from my regular beat to Brussels, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was administering air assaults on Serbian forces as they advanced on poorly equipped Kosovars. Of course, the NATO aegis was nothing more than fig leaf for what was in fact a nearly exclusive American operation. With the exception of plucky Great Britain, alliance constituents were scandalously unprepared to do their bit. Their defense budgets had declined precipitously with the collapse of the Soviet Union--the sine qua non of the alliance, after all--and the weapons systems they did employ were incompatible with each other and often redundant.
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No, Libya's Not a Core National Security Interest. But So What?
Tweet Share on Facebook March 24, 2011 Comment (3)For those with memories that exceed the half-life of a midyear election cycle, there was a tinny ring to gripes from lawmakers and pundits about how President Obama was dragging the nation into a war with no vital interests at stake. Foreign policy specialists like former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have insisted there is nothing in Libya worth a major U.S.-led military operation. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, meanwhile, has written that Libya’s proximity to core U.S. interests is “tangential at best.”
Spot on, but so what?
, will be published in August by Crown. You can follow him on Twitter 
