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With Libya Victory, Obama Should Exit NATO
Tweet Share on Facebook August 25, 2011 Comment (9)"Why are we still in NATO?"
I've fielded this question a half-dozen times over the last week while on radio talk shows promoting my book about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. Listeners instinctively know, it seems, what our security fetishists in Washington do not: that America's resources at home are badly outstripped by security commitments abroad, particularly at a time of near recession and draconian spending cuts. When the subject comes up I want to turn the microphone on Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's secretary general, and let him explain to cash-strapped callers why job security is more important for alliance bureaucrats than it is for the people who are paying for this Cold War relic in the first place.
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It's Time for the Pentagon to Get Realistic About Its Budget
Tweet Share on Facebook August 18, 2011 Comment (3)After a decade of throwing money at the Pentagon—its budget has grown at an annualized rate of about 6 percent a year over the last 10 years—it now appears the nation's defense budget is on the deficit-chopping block. Given the epic waste associated with our national security accounts, a scandal that Congress routinely abets by demanding the military purchase needless weapons for assembly in districts back home, it is high time the Pentagon establish realistic spending priorities and budget accordingly.
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S&P Credit Downgrade Shows American Un-Exceptionalism
Tweet Share on Facebook August 11, 2011 Comment (4)So how's that "American exceptionalism" thing working out for ya?
Rating agency Standard & Poor's last week offered a contrarian take on what right-wing elites, from shadow presidential contender Sarah Palin to declared candidate and dangerous nut Newt Gingrich describe as the nation's divine entitlement to tell the world to get stuffed. Blessed with the Lord's pleasure and the world's reserve currency, so goes the exceptionalist narrative, there is no international norm or convention Washington cannot flout, either by waging unnecessary wars or by swamping the global economy under the weight of a giant and unsustainable housing bubble.
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America Not Alone With Debt Problems
Tweet Share on Facebook August 4, 2011 Comment (7)
, will be published in August by Crown. You can follow him on Twitter 
