A decade ago your editor organized a policy conference in Washington DC with a group of national security experts that ranged from a former NSC senior staffer (and Kissinger aide who resigned in protest of the Cambodia invasion) Roger Morris to current National Security Advisor Susan Rice. The 2006 conference was inauspiciously called “Surviving Victory”
One has to ask after watching this week’s foreign policy speech from candidate Clinton, billed as a “major” policy presentation, where were the foreign policies and national security positions? The speech was an unrelenting attack on candidate Trump, yes, but Clinton tough talk and a ‘new neo-con’ confrontational foreign policy remains a major issue
Yes, it isn’t a line-up that one would expect, but with the Democrat’s top candidate seen as leaning toward neo-conservative interventionism, and the Republican’s ‘presumptive nominee’ on record opposing wars in the Mid East, what is one to presuppose is next with US national security policy
Miscalculation, mistake, a cyber attack or provocation that spirals out of control… the reality of cold war-legacy systems with hair-trigger response imperatives… escalating political conflict and threats… the development and deployment of a next generation of tactical / strategic nuclear weapons, bombers, missiles, submarines… The 21st century scenario is delivering ominous nuclear odds
World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers (WMEAT) was published by the U.S. State Department in December 2015. The report covers the eleven-year period from 2002 through 2012, the most recent year for which final data for many parameters were available in 2015
It is a volatile, dangerous mix. The money, weapons and foreign fighters that have flowed into Syria are part of a bigger story of religion and gas/oil supplies, of pipelines through a secular or new religious Syria… it’s about secular Russia versus Salafi-Wahhabism and the House of Saud and its allies. It’s about petrodollars and […]
As Presidents Obama and Putin meet in New York … the UN meets this week under a supermoon to talk of the state of the world. In DC and NYC the signs are ominous as the Pope returns from the U.S. to the Vatican and throughout the Mid East, catastrophe escalates as millions of refugees […]
As a strategic expert writes of an “unnoticed crisis”, strategic vantage points of those with vision offer clear outlines of nuclear ‘modernization’, escalation, resulting risks, and reduced security over time …. An Unnoticed Crisis: The End of History for Nuclear Arms Control?
This week, before the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. and beginning of the Christmas season, while the stock market is at historic highs and recent mid-term elections are producing after-election blues, vitriol, threats and increasingly polarized politics as the 2016 presidential election season arrives early…
Failed Policies, ‘Perpetual War’ War Costs — profoundly understated Definitions of national security — outdated Nuclear risks of a Cold War 2.0 are escalating The nation ignores larger existential security threats The U.S. is facing a crisis of governing, and loss of popular support. Decades of war have delivered deep costs, war costs […]
