From the pro-CIA Cipher Brief This network of Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, and possibly elsewhere is what makes Tehran so deadly in the region. It’s a clever method of power projection, honed over decades, because it allows the Iranians to weaken their adversaries and achieve their strategic aims with the fewest...
Category: Regime Change
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How Cognitive Empathy Could Have Prevented the Ukraine Crisis
I’m now going to do an extended thought experiment that involves putting ourselves in the Russian leader’s shoes—so extended that it goes back to 1998, before Putin was Russia’s leader. And I’m going to argue that a series of American presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—have led us toward the current crisis by...
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After Afghanistan: Time for Realist Internationalism
A large part of this disagreement also lies in our differing attitudes towards the course of US and allied foreign and security policy over the past generation. The ‘breakthrough moment for the restraint school’ was most certainly not the rise of Trump, as Ikenberry and Deudney allege. It was the disasters that followed the...
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From the National Security Archive, the 20-Year War in 20 Documents
The non-profit National Security Archive at George Washington University is the place to go to understand the debacle of Afghanistan. The Archive provides original sources. not opinion. In Afghanistan 20/20: The 20-Year War in 20 Documents, the Archive enables you to go beyond recycled punditry The documents detail ongoing problems that bedeviled the American war...
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Afghanistan: A Failure of U.S. Regime Change Policy
Let the buck passing begin. The military people say Aghanistan was an intelligence failure. The intelligence community says it was a policy failure. They are both right. Above all, it was a failure of U.S. “regime change” policy that arrogates to the United States the “right” to replace adversarial governments. “There is an old...