Free Republic

Economic crisis, mounting national debt, excessive foreign commitments -- this is no way to run an empire. America needs serious strategic counseling. And fast. It has never been Rome, and to adopt its strategies no -- its ruthless expansion of empire, domination of foreign peoples, and bone-crushing brand of total war -- would only hasten America's decline. Better instead to look to the empire's eastern incarnation: Byzantium, which outlasted its Roman predecessor by eight centuries. It is the lessons of Byzantine grand strategy that America must rediscover today. Fortunately, the Byzantines are far easier to learn from than the Romans,...

Reset Button The gaffes of Hillary Clinton. Michael Crowley November 16, 2009 | 12:00 am /snip As a senator, after all, she had made her name as a policy wonk who actually enjoyed reading to the end of her briefing books--and one who, moreover, was known for an almost animatronic ability to stay on message. Barack Obama is said to have marveled at her relentless message discipline over two dozen Democratic primary debates. In selecting her a year ago, The New York Times reported, aides said he “recognized that Clinton had far more discipline and focus than her husband.” A...

Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican known for his efforts to block influence domestic immigration and health-care issues, has scored a foreign-policy coup by helping to compel the Obama administration to shift its stance on strife-ridden Honduras. After demanding for months that deposed Honduran President Mel Zelaya be restored to power, senior State Department officials now say they'll accept the outcome of Nov. 29 elections in the Central American country even if Zelaya doesn't reclaim his post. "We support the elections process there," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Thursday. "We have provided technical assistance. ... These elections will...

Former president George W Bush thought that the United States could turn Kabul into Peoria, the archetypal American city in the state of Illinois. President Barack Obama thinks that Kabul is just as good as Peoria. America has shed idealist delusion - that imposing the outward form of democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan would implant its content - in favor of an even stranger delusion, which refuses "to elevate one nation or group of people over another", as Obama told the United Nations on September 23. It was mad to believe that America could remake the world in its own...

And so the captain ordered the entire ship’s company was assembled. Suddenly, Ahab cried out to them, “What do ye do when ye see a Middle East conflict, men?" "We negotiate!" was the rejoinder from a score of the sailors. "Good!" cried the captain, "And what do ye next, men?" “We offer unilateral concessions!” "And what tune is it ye sing as ye give them, men?" "The Peace Process Chanty!" More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the captain at every shout; while the mariners themselves began to get excited, especially the Conflicts’ Management...

Via RealClearWorld comes this article from the Hindu. India is a fairly pro-American nation, and it serves to reason that this article is written by a Russian. Some of its funnier parts are: The American ideology produces a sublimated version, so to say, of human equality. It stresses that lineage, education, ethnicity and so on do not matter in making one a full-fledged member of the community or a citizen of the world. As the American Dream has it, anyone can get rich, become President… Such democracy brings unexpected fruits — it makes ordinary Americans conceited, and totally unlike, say,...

"God Is Dead." No. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, he thought that in the modern, scientific world people would soon be unable to countenance the idea of religious faith. By the time The Economist did its famous "God Is Dead" cover in 1999, the question seemed moot, notwithstanding the rise of politicized religiosity - fundamentalism - in almost every major faith since the 1970s. An obscure ayatollah toppled the shah of Iran, religious Zionism surfaced in Israel, and in the United States, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority announced its dedicated opposition to "secular humanism."

Five years after his painful loss to George W. Bush, ending a presidential campaign in which he was accused of being an Iraq war defeatist who was too willing to talk to America's adversaries, Sen. John F. Kerry has finally found his place in the foreign policy spotlight. Not only has President Obama advanced many of the Massachusetts Democrat's ideas but Vice President Biden's election vacated for Kerry the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the legislative branch's leading foreign policy pulpit.

Try making sense of President Obama’s foreign policy and you might start wondering what it is that guides this Administration. Most of our leaders have followed a few guiding principles, whether it be promoting freedom and democracy, containing the spread of communism, or resisting terrorism. Whether right or wrong as judged by history, each American President has sent a clear message to the world that America was squarely on the side of freedom. What about Obama? Candidate Obama stressed that he would change the “failed policies of the past eight years.” He said he would do this on the economy...

Obama’s envoys at risk of becoming a flop By Daniel Dombey in Washington Published: October 22 2009 23:53 | Last updated: October 22 2009 23:53 The  Obama administration’s policy of appointing special envoys to sort out the world’s biggest problems could turn out to be a spectacular flop. Just look at this week’s news from Kabul. President Hamid Karzai’s decision to agree to a run-off election was a rare moment of success for Washington’s effort to get to grips with Afghanistan’s raging insurgency and the country’s recalcitrant government. But who was the US official standing at the podium next to Mr...

The significance of Israel to the west is out of all proportion to her size and in direct relation to her place, on the front line. The country is unambiguously western, and not only her institutions but the way they operate leave no doubt of this. When, for instance, there are allegations that Israeli troops have committed crimes, in the course of military operations, there is an investigation. The contents and conclusions of that investigation are invariably made known. There will most certainly be open public discussion, and Israel's press is remarkably free.

Part of the problem with the president’s agenda is that it is predicated on a number of radical ideas that are asserted, rather than proven. His experts and the elites assure us of a reality that most people in their own more mundane lives have not found to be true. In short, they may find Obama personally engaging, but they no longer believe what he says.

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged. To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president's various apology tours through Europe...

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged

The U.S. dollar isn't the only currency headed to new lows. After months of drifting along in "the winds of change," America's diplomatic credibility is sinking alongside the greenback. The Obama White House and the so-called mainstream media -- preoccupied with hoopla over "health care reform," meaningless drivel about the 2016 Olympics and the vacuous award of a Nobel Peace Prize -- barely have noticed the water flooding into our ship of state. Unfortunately, the Iranians, North Koreans, Russians and the Taliban all have been paying attention. Don't count on any of them to help bail out our boat. On...

The notion that Mr Obama is a weak leader is now spreading in ways that are dangerous to his presidency. The fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday will not change this impression. Peace is all very well. But Mr Obama now needs to pick a fight in public – and win it with a clean knock-out.

Russia pushed back Tuesday at U.S. efforts to threaten tough new sanctions if Iran fails to prove its nuclear program is peaceful, a setback to the Obama administration's desire to present a united front with Moscow.

After visiting Tegucigalpa last week and meeting with a cross section of leaders from Honduras's government, business community, and civil society, I can report there is no chaos there. There is, however, chaos to spare in the Obama administration's policy toward our poor and loyal allies in Honduras. In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya's ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

Whether it was rewarding Jimmy Carter for criticizing the Iraq War or supporting Al Gore in his crusade against global warming, the Norwegian Parliament - which chooses the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize - has sought to use the award as a political tool to influence American politic s. Its prestige and moral power make the prize a potent weapon with which to help steer the direction of the colossus beyond the seas that controls a quarter of the world’s economy and most of its military power.

President Obama last week flew to Copenhagen to persuade the International Olympic Committee to award the 2016 games to Chicago, his hometown. He and first lady Michelle Obama delivered their now well-known inspirational stories about their Chicago neighborhood experiences. They even had Oprah in tow, along with a number of other Chicago big shots.

This may have been the big business news of the day. The move would see oil priced not in dollars but in a unit based on a basket of currencies including the Chinese yuan, the Japanese yen, and a new currency intended for use by the Gulf emirates, according to a report in Tuesday's Independent newspaper. The paper added that the transistion from the dollar to a new currency will take almost a decade. Finance ministers and central bankers have held meetings in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to discuss the idea, which the Americans are aware of, the Independent...

President Barack Obama may have shelved the term “Global War on Terrorism,” but he praised the intelligence community’s worldwide fight against al Qaeda during a speech at the National Counterterrorism Center Tuesday. “It should now be clear — the United States and our partners have sent an unmistakable message: We will target al Qaeda wherever they take root; we will not yield in our pursuit; and we are developing the capacity and the cooperation to deny a safe haven to any who threaten America and its allies,” Obama said at the McLean, Va. center. Obama’s comments Tuesday made clear that...

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went through Generals the way that Liz Taylor goes through husbands. His most controversial firing was of that of George McClellan. McClellan then went on to represent the Democrats in 1864 as their Democratic candidate for president. I'd love to find some old newspapers from that time but I suspect that the media criticized Lincoln for his often short fuse with Generals. Whether or not Lincoln gave some of his Generals enough time to allow their strategy to work is a matter of debate. Given that Lincoln won the war eventually we will have...

Out of Afghanistan by: Sarah Carlsruh, October 05, 2009 The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan was held at the Cato Institute on September 25th, soon before the October 7th eight-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Ted Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, had a few questions for the Obama Administration and its military intentions in Afghanistan. He wanted to know what the specific U.S. objectives are for Afghanistan, what the U.S. strategy is to achieve those objectives, and the probability that the country can, in fact, achieve those objectives. In seven years...

There is a great movie scene from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross that most people involved in sales can recite verbatim. In the movie, Jack Lemmon is salesman, who gets up to get a cup of coffee during a sales meeting. The new Sales Manager (Alec Baldwin), screams at him “Put That Coffee Down!” Lemmon looks at him quizzically. Baldwin screams at him again, “Put That Coffee Down! ---Coffee is For Closers.” Even more than coffee, foreign policy is for closers, and unfortunately for the future of the United States, the man running our foreign policy is not a closer.

That's Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. If Kelly's sources are solid, then President Sarkozy views our president in much the same way as many of his opponents, naive and arrogant. That's of course the worst sort of a combination for any leader. I can't find video of the entire interview and that's too bad. That's because prior to this bombshell Kelly also said that Sarkozy pushed Obama to reveal Iran's secret nuclear site in his speech at the UN. He said that Obama didn't do it because he didn't want anything interfering with the resolution he wanted passed...

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran said it successfully completed two days of missile tests that including launching its longest-range missiles on Monday, weapons capable of carrying a warhead and striking Israel, U.S. military bases in the Middle East, and parts of Europe.

A photo and article summary showing Obama's unmistakable love affair with tyrants.

President Obama's speech to the United Nations has been called naive and even "post-American." It was something else, as well: the most extravagant excursion into self-worship we have yet seen in an American leader.

Here’s the lead from the Associated Press’ Havana bureau feed early on the morning of September 23, 2009: “HAVANA - Barack Obama's call for action on climate change and his admission that rich nations have a particular responsibility to lead has received strong praise from an unusual source - U.S. nemesis Fidel Castro.” Now, here’s the problem with that lead: we now have a President of the United States whose most avid plaudits come from two-bit, tin-horn Marxist dictators who have spent their entire adult lives imprisoning, murdering, and maiming their enslaved minions. And to make matters worse, that President...

It's not enough that our own president gave the speech that he did yesterday. It's not enough that he sounded like a Central American dictator, or that if another leader had come from another country and said what Obama said about America at the United Nations, our own delegation would likely have stood up and walked out (in better times, at least). Now, Andy McCarthy over at National Review is reporting that the president has requested the State Department to contribute $400,000 to a foundation operated by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi's two children. Read more...

Although much of the US continues to focus solely upon the health care debate, stories surfacing in recent weeks elude to a shift in US foreign policy that the world has not experienced since 1919. Throughout the 2008 election we warned that then candidate Obama's foreign policy objectives and rhetoric mirrored the idealistic and failed foreign policy objectives sought by President Woodrow Wilson. Candidate Obama's objectives were built upon an idealistic goal of global governance in which the US would abrogate its obligation to protect US interests and surrender global leadership to other nations. Upon taking office, we warned of...

Long after the 98-minute fever dream of Libya's Moammar Khadafy, with his warning of flu viruses cooked up in Western labs, came the main event of the UN General Assembly: the deadly serious diatribe of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. The man's been called crazy. Wrong word. He's a canny leader with ambitions to dominate the Mideast. And he's inching ever closer to the means to do it. Wednesday night's speech was vintage

For a second, you might assume Barack Obama is rooting against America and her democratic allies. In fact, it seems that every day Barack Obama finds a new democratic ally to throw under the bus. Among other examples, the Obama Administration has: * Cut aid to the impoverished Honduras and refused to recognize the pro-democratic, entirely legal administration in power * Scrapped plans to build a protective missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland (tactfully done on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, by the way) * Offended Israelis by speaking of moral equivalence between Palestine...

Sarah Palin, in what was billed as her first speech overseas, spoke on Wednesday to Asian bankers, investors and fund managers. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Jeff Topping/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Jonathon Stone, the chairman and CEO of CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, with Sarah Palin at a meeting in Hong Kong on Wednesday. Blog The Caucus The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion. More Politics News A number of people who heard the speech in a packed hotel ballroom, which was

Obama’s Afghanistan policy is the result of a political expediency, but may also be driven by a personality disorder. The expediency is easy enough to explain. Most Americans accept the premise that we must actively pursue, engage and destroy known terrorists, especially those with any connection to the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were in Afghanistan and that was the place to go. Hence, Afghanistan became the “good war”. While this may have upset the extreme anti-war, anti-American faction that backed Obama’s candidacy, it was necessary to attract more reasonable voters. If Obama were not the malignant...

Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country. Those nine words define the Obama doctrine with respect to American security policy. All three elements were much in evidence in the president's benighted decision last week to cancel the "third site" for intercontinental-range missile defenses in Eastern Europe. They will be on display as well during this week's several conclaves with foreign leaders. The cumulative effect is predictable: A world in which the United States has fewer friends, more enemies and fewer options for assuring its security. Let's start with the decision to abandon defense of our allies and the...

John McCain's campaign foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, has emerged as an advisor to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as she attempts to build a serious public profile and begins to build a network of aides and advisors typical of a national politician. Scheunemann confirmed this evening that he's with Palin in Hong Kong, where she is delivering a paid speech at a conference hosted by the brokerage house CLSA, which has in the past heard keynotes from Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Then there is the catalogue of Mr. Obama's embarrassing moments on the world stage, a list which includes: giving England's Queen Elizabeth II an iPod with his speeches on it; giving British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a collection of DVDs that were not formatted to the European standard (by contrast, Mr. Brown gave Mr. Obama an ornamental desk-pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet, among other historically significant gifts); calling "Austrian" a language; bowing to the Saudi king; releasing a photo of a conference call with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the president...

At the height of their anti-Iraq War fever, Democrats accused Pres. George W. Bush of cooking up the war for political reasons. It must have been their guilty consciences speaking. Democrats are the party of extreme situational politics on national security. Almost every major Democrat with presidential aspirations voted to authorize the Iraq War, then turned on it. As the Iraq War spiraled downward, many Democrats called for more troops, then resisted the surge. It has practically been mandatory for all good, card-carrying Democrats to trumpet the centrality of the Afghan War since 2003, using it as a rhetorical club...

President Obama may not be leaving the country this week — but it’s likely his global support will be put to the test during the meetings of the U.N. here in New York and the G-20 in Pittsburgh. As Mr. Obama meets with world leaders and addresses issues like climate change, the global economy and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East — there’s no question that this president is better liked overseas than his predecessor, George W. Bush. A recent Pew survey finds significant support for President Obama still throughout Africa, Europe and Latin America. Attitudes toward the U.S....

Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it's not just that they're saying no, it's also the way they're saying no. The Saudis twice said no to his request for normalization gestures towards Israel (at Barack Obama's meeting with King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, and in Washington at meetings with Hillary Clinton). Who says no to the American president twice? What must they think of Obama in the desert kingdom?

I'm in New York this week, where I will be blogging live from both the U.N. General Assembly and the Clinton Global Initiative throughout the week. My first experience at CGI was a rare privilege, a "blogger roundtable" with former President Bill Clinton. Discussion was limited to issues related to the initiative's work (so much for all those Kim Jong Il questions I had come up with on the train), but I managed to sneak a national-security question in by asking Clinton what he thought about the military taking on more traditional civilian NGO responsibilities in Afghanistan as the military...

Perhaps the most discussed passage in Barack Obama's Inaugural Address was his peace offering to dictators and leaders of rogue states. "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent," he said, "know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." The man who had campaigned on direct meetings with rogue leaders "without preconditions" appeared to be toughening his approach just a little. The words were conciliatory and intended to signal a shift from the Bush administration, but...

HONG KONG, China (CNN) — Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will be in Hong Kong Wednesday to address about 1,000 investors from around the globe in what is billed as her first speech outside North America. Palin, who recently stepped down as Alaska's governor, will make the keynote speech on Wednesday to the 16th CLSA Investors' Forum. She will cover governance, economics and current events in the United States and Asia, said Simone Wheeler, head of communications for CLSA. "What we look to do is invite our keynote speakers who we feel are opinion makers, who are newsworthy...

On September 17, 1939, Russia invaded Poland and ironically, seventy years later, the Obama administration rewarded Russia by caving in to its demands regarding the European phase of our anti-ballistic missile defense program. The plan, negotiated by the Bush Administration with two loyal Eastern European allies, was expected to place a ground based interceptor site in Poland and tracking radar on a site in the Czech Republic. Jan Firscher, Interim Czech Prime Minister told reporters that "Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the...

HONG KONG — Former US vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is expected to speak about US foreign policy and China in her first keynote speech outside North America, Hong Kong organisers said on Monday.

Uncle Barack's American Fun House Vision

In the wake of Obama’s controversial missile shield decision, it is important to consider the big picture. America spends a lot of money on military expenditures and both the Right and the Left feel strongly about this figure. As of 2008, America is spending a quarter of it’s expenditures on Defense and about 9% on welfare (this number is important) out of roughly 2.5 Trillion. Missile defense is the single most expensive DoD project costing over 8 billion dollars annually, twice as much as the F-22 Raptor procurement. (Source: Page 5) with a significant portion of the costs going overseas....