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Jonathan Tobin declares that Santorum has the “best grasp of foreign policy” of any of the current candidates. Rod anticipates objections from commenters: I know, I know, foreign policy. I know. Please, enough about the neocons. It makes me unhappy, but your average Republican voter is more likely to agree with Rick Santorum on foreign [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Jonah Goldberg wants to revive the lousy “league of democracies” idea: What would be so terrible about giving those good nations someplace else to meet? And by good, I mean democratic. A league, or concert, of democracies wouldn’t replace the U.N., but it would offer some much-needed competition. We’ve had to go around the U.N. [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
David Blair makes an excellent point on the Syrian crisis: The essential problem is that Britain and her allies have two incompatible objectives [bold mine-DL]: they want to hasten the downfall of President Assad, while also bringing the country’s bloodshed to an end. You can’t do both at the same time [bold mine-DL]. Accelerating the [...]
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Matt Steinglass gets a bit carried away: Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together “coalitions of the willing” packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling. Right, because [...]
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David Bosco challenges Walt on his recent Libya/Syria remarks: But there is something profoundly disorienting about a self-proclaimed realist making this kind of argument. Is Walt saying that the West should have not pursued its strategic goal of ousting Gaddafi out of deference to the fine points of a Security Council resolution? (From a narrow [...]
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Shadi Hamid floats the possibility of arming the contras Free Syrian Army: If the opposition itself has chosen the military option — and this seems increasingly the case — then the question is this: Can a ragtag army of perhaps 10,000 Syrian rebels defeat an army that while, far from invincible, enjoys an overwhelming advantage [...]
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Nicholas Noe has a plan for a negotiated settlement to conflict in Syria. Several of his proposals sound politically risky for any Western government to support, but the last one is the least relevant to the current crisis and the hardest to imagine happening: Finally, so that it is not tarred as a Western plot, [...]
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My new column on Syria for The Week is now online. I wrote this over the weekend after the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the U.N. resolution. Here is an excerpt: During the debate over intervention in Libya, it was widely recognized that other abusive states, such as Syria, had patrons that Libya lacked, which [...]
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Noah Millman answers one of Ferguson’s questions and poses a question of his own: Let’s turn thequestion around: can you name any country that suffered military humiliation that didn’t, in consequence, turn to parties, forces or individuals who promised to redeem the national honor through new action? Germany, Japan and Italy weren’t “humiliated” by Wold [...]
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Noah Millman doesn’t think the danger of Iranian retaliation would dissuade Israel from attacking: From an Israeli perspective, a strike on Iran would be a defensive act – perhaps wise, perhaps unwise, but in either case a response to an Iranian provocation, and not an act of aggression. Needless to say, Iran would perceive it [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics