National Security

The tides of war are not receding. The Harvard psychiatrist Steven Pinker, in hisbestselling book The Better Angels of our Nature offers a detailed explanation of mankind’s evolution from a Hobbesian world of brutish, short and violent lives to today’s benign...

When Jimmy Carter came into office, he was determined to reverse the growth in defense spending that had been bequeathed to his administration by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In particular, he tried to make good on his campaign...

Gray, it seems, is the new black. The concept of “gray zone” conflict has generated significant attention and controversy recently, within both the U.S. government and the broader strategic studies community. Some analysts have identified gray zone conflict as...

In a blockbuster investigative report dated January 25, Adam Goldman of the Washington Post has revealed just how General David Petraeus managed to avoid a prison sentence for leaking highly sensitive, classified information to his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell. In the interview...

This is the second in a series of three essays on the challenge of strategic foreign policy planning for the next administration. In Part One, I described problems with the national security decision-making process under the current president, then...

Last September, Russia deployed dozens of jets to Syria to rescue the ailing regime of Bashar al-Assad. Vladimir Putin aimed to protect one of Moscow’s few foreign allies and gain leverage for the coming peace negotiations over the Syrian...

The recurrent affirmation that history is on our side, a phrase frequently used by President Obama and to a lesser degree by his predecessors, is a rhetorical flourish that betrays great naivety. TAI columnists Eliot Cohen and Walter Russell...

Executive Summary It may have been William F. Buckley, Jr., who observed that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is as oft cited as it is infrequently read. Something similar might be observed about Containment, the doctrine articulated by George F....

Derek R. Mallett. Hitler’s Generals in America: Nazi POWs and Allied Military Intelligence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. 264 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-4251-7. Derek Mallett’s Hitler’s Generals in America presents an interesting argument about a small group of prisoners, fifty-five in number, sent...

The flare-up between Saudi Arabia and Iran involves far more than another outburst of Shiite-Sunni rivalry, which dates back to the seventh century Battle of Karbala, though no doubt that ancient feud fuels resentment on both sides of this...