Nearly five years into his presidency, Barack Obama still has nothing approaching a unified vision of foreign policy. To the extent that there’s an “Obama Doctrine,” it’s never been articulated. We simply have to suss it out from his actions. As best I can tell, it operates on the following principle: Give your allies the back…

Nearly half a decade after he won the presidency, we can now look back on Barack Obama’s rise to power with perspective that wasn’t available at the time, when his status as a dashboard saint of American politics made it difficult to subject the soon-to-be chief executive to any critical scrutiny. As I’ve written in the past, successful…

Four presidential speeches in Berlin manifest the worrisome trajectory of American vigor, the contrasting stature of three presidents and the miniaturization of Barack Obama.  In June 1963, John F. Kennedy stood near a Berlin Wall erected two years earlier and defiantly proclaimed, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of…

James Lileks, the great wag of Minnesota, recently opened his National Review column with an observation that deserves to be placed onto a plaque hung permanently in the Oval Office: “Second terms are the price a man pays for the hubris of thinking he deserves one.” Because Barack Obama’s supply of hubris is in surplus, it should…

What will the State Department’s $250 million in new foreign aid to Egypt buy for American taxpayers?  That’s the question facing Secretary of State John Kerry after he stunned Congress by coming up with a quarter of a billion dollars just days after the March 1 budget sequestration went into effect.  Kerry is framing the spending…

This week the White House let the press know that President Barack Obama is considering Chuck Hagel, the former Republican Senator from Nebraska, to be the next Secretary of Defense.  The trial balloon touched off an interesting debate among conservatives and libertarians about whether to support the choice.  The Cato Institute, a libertarian…

“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance…

Barack Obama – a man whose instincts towards Caesarism don’t quite fit under the rug – has a bad habit of becoming triumphalist in the aftermath of electoral victory. In 2009, only a few days into his presidency, Obama told a group of Republican congressmen who were at the White House to discuss the shape of his stimulus plan that…

It’s an analytical shortcoming of advanced, western societies to assume that progress is the default disposition of humanity. To a certain extent, that’s the intellectual byproduct of living in a democratic, capitalist nation. An American senior citizen alive today was born into a world where polio was still a threat, African-Americans…

Nobody should even for a moment entertain the suggestion that the attacks on American outposts in Libya and Egypt are the fault of Barack Obama – but nobody should avoid saying that this week’s tragedies are symptomatic of the abject failure of Obama’s foreign policies not just in northern Africa but around the globe. Under Obama…

Mitt Romney’s announcement of Paul Ryan as his running mate has electrified conservatives in the run-up to November’s presidential election, and with good reason. As the most intelligent, articulate, charismatic and (this factor is often overlooked) creative advocate for conservative reforms to the entitlement state, Ryan’s selection…

“The White House will apologize for this outrageous mistake.  It’s a shame that such a momentous ceremony has been overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence.” That was Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, objecting to this week’s embarrassing gaffe by President Obama.  So much for “the smartest guy ever…

Last week, a senior Russian general threatened a preemptive military attack against NATO missile defenses:  “Taking into account the missile defense system’s destabilizing nature and, in particular, creating an illusion that a disarming strike can be launched with impunity, a decision about a pre-emptive use of attack weapons available…

In many ways, the three-plus years since Barack Obama has assumed the presidency have been an era of clarity for the Republican Party. The mid-section of the previous decade – dominated by lobbying scandals, rampant deficit spending and an unpopular war, all of Republican authorship – found the party in a state of ideological drift. At…

“Brazil is the country of the future – and it always will be.”  That witticism captures perfectly Brazil’s perennial underachievement.  Consider this pre-Internet lamentation from The New York Times in July 1995:  “Brazil once captured the fancy of outsiders as an impossibly alluring place of unspoiled…

Based on the media’s reaction, you would think that Barack Obama has discovered his inner Theodore Roosevelt in the last week. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed, “As White House U-turns go, President Obama's hawkish rhetorical shift on Iran in the last week has been remarkable.” Fox News, similarly breathless, reported…

President Barack Obama’s inept handling of Israel and the Palestinians has now prompted a United Nations debacle over Palestinian statehood.  With the UN Security Council now considering whether to subject the request to a vote before the entire General Assembly, two presidential candidates are reminding voters why Obama can’t be trusted…

With President Barack Obama continuing to send the political equivalent of a blank check to the United Nations, House Republicans are forging ahead with an ambitious bill to reform the UN by withholding funds from programs filled with waste, fraud and abuse.  Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the longest-serving Republican congresswoman and chair…

Viewers who were unfortunate enough to tune into President Obama's Wednesday night speech at the wrong moment could have been forgiven some measure of confusion. The speech, billed as the president's pronouncement on the future of America's war policy in Afghanistan, spent only about a third of its length actually discussing that conflict.  …

Last week’s bipartisan rebuke of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Libya was dismissed by a White House spokesman as “unnecessary and unhelpful.”  For Americans weighing a change in leadership, it was instructive.  It’s never a good day as president when a congressman representing a fraction of…

Osama Bin Laden is dead. And there isn’t much more to the story than that.   In an era when media outlets proliferate like rabbits and around-the-clock coverage tends to showcase journalist endurance rather than journalistic insight, an important lesson is often lost: The greatest stories are often the simplest. No matter how many hours…

“I don’t oppose all wars … what I am opposed to is a dumb war.” – Barack Obama, 2002   Oh how luxurious the view from the cheap seats must seem to Barack Obama in retrospect. The man who spent the past decade (beginning with the now famous speech quoted above) trying to decide whether he was more preternaturally…

John Bolton is making the rounds at presidential campaign venues like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but he won’t be the 2012 Republican nominee.  With his speeches and media appearances it looks like the former ambassador to the United Nations is angling to star in a different role: Vice President.  Of course…

According to legend, it was the wayward kick of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that began the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Two days later, a third of the Windy City’s property value was destroyed and a third of its people were homeless. One wonders if a similar catastrophe will emerge from another seemingly minor combustion: the self-immolation…

As 2010 recedes into memory and 2011 begins to take center stage, America continues a long and bizarre interregnum in our foreign policy posture. Ever since the war in Iraq began winding down and the economy began cracking up during the 2008 election cycle, we have become a nation whose political focus is concentrated almost exclusively stateside. &…

What to make of Peggy Noonan's recent intellectual fender-bender in The Wall Street Journal?  Ironically entitled “A New Start in Washington,” her piece reverts to the same calcified strategic orthodoxy that her former boss Ronald Reagan so brilliantly challenged.  Noonan’s commentaries often provide an eloquent weekly…

What do you call an axis of authoritarian regimes united by a rejection of the United States and free market capitalism?  A ‘VIRUS’ for 21st century freedom.  The acronym comes from an oft-repeated grouping of Venezuela, Iran and Russia; countries led by three governments that share a statist’s preference for top-down micro…

Given the public’s distemper at the sight of the President, it’s not surprising that the Commander-in-Chief is developing a taste for delivering major addresses to a solitary camera in the Oval Office. Yet even that doesn’t quite explain President Obama’s decision to deliver a nationally televised speech from the White House…

There are no indispensable men in American life.  That is one of the many lessons surrounding the downfall of General Stanley McChrystal, who up until earlier this week was serving as the commander of American forces in Afghanistan. Another lesson?  If you have designs on being an indispensable man, make sure that there’s not someone…

In a desperate bid to inject his boss with some much-needed gravitas, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently revealed to the press corps that President Obama’s nightstand reading included a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, the man who sat in Obama’s chair almost exactly a century prior.  Let’s hope the president is…