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Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate for the American presidency confirms that this campaign is going to be mainly about domestic issues -- barring a not-impossible Israeli attack on Iran between here and there. It is likely to...
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Syria’s civil war has been going on for more than two years. Seventy thousand people have been killed, most of them civilians. More than 3 million Syrians have been driven from their homes, nearly a million taking refuge in Turkey, Jordan, and...
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"What if the government starts enforcing the espionage statute whenever there's a leak?" Steve Roberts, a former New York Times journalist who teaches at George Washington University, observed to the Baltimore Sun.
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During the Middle Ages—the historical context for the rise of what would come to be known as the “just war” tradition—violence under any circumstance was deemed a great evil by the church. In official Catholic teaching, combat was accepted as...
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Benjamin Wittes, Ritika Singh
Political parties in the United States, like a spatting couple in a bad marriage, have been fighting over the law of counterterrorism for more than a decade. And like the spatting couple, they have developed an almost rote script for their fight....
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More than any other recent U.S. president, Barack Obama has succeeded in puzzling the pundits.
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The political response to the Boston Marathon bombings suggests that we live in an age of shrink-wrapped, prepackaged opinions.
When something new comes along, we hasten to squeeze it into whatever frameworks we were carrying around with us a day, a...
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For campaign operatives and cable-news anchors, it is a job requirement to insist earnestly, if overconfidently, that each upcoming election is historic, realigning, and game-changing. Most, thank God, are not.
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The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the credulity and carelessness of experts...
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It was not supposed to end this way. Although President Barack Obama deserves credit for bringing an end to the war in Iraq that he inherited, if he had had his wishes, thousands of U.S.
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If a president finds himself in the role of a political scientist, he has a problem -- even when his political science lesson is 100 percent accurate.
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The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at the moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.
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What a difference a week makes. In the first presidential debate, President Obama let Mitt Romney's attacks on him stand, and seemed disengaged. Vice President Joe Biden stayed in Rep. Paul Ryan's face for the entirety of Thursday's vice...
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The interview given the New York Times by the new president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, on the eve of his trip to New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting, was notable for its moderation, but more than th
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"Lead from behind" may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate's wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him...
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The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year's best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to...
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It is no secret that President Barack Obama has conducted a very aggressive—and by many measures effective—campaign of targeted killings against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. It is less well known that the...
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On the evening of April 15—the day two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred eighty—President Barack Obama vowed that those responsible “will feel the full weight of justi
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans do not want armed drones circling their own neighborhoods. Who could blame us for not wanting to be taken out by a killing machine operated by someone hunkered down thousands of miles away? Then again,...
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It is a profound but nearly universal mistake among Americans (and others) to think that the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2013 or 2014 will end the American war with the Muslim world that began on September 11 in 2001.
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On January 20, the day before the South Carolina primary, the Washington Post published a long story about how political polarization in that state was reflected in—and sharpened by—South Carolinians’ choices of news providers.
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The increasingly dangerous Afghanistan situation is worth analysis at two levels: that of the war itself—the ultimately doomed attempt by the United States to conquer the Taliban insurrection and impose a pro-American government—and that of the...
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During his first term, President Barack Obama steered a middle course that displeased people on both extremes of the political spectrum. His health-care law eschewed the public option in favor of a private mandate. His stimulus package proved his...
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Barack Obama is not the man many Americans thought he was. This sudden realization has transformed American politics. The sheer audacity of the successful operation against Osama bin Laden has forced Obama's friends and foes alike to reassess...
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We expect some hypocrisy in politics, but it was still jaw-dropping to behold Republicans accusing President Barack Obama of politicizing the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
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Let us contemplate the joys of being in the political opposition when unemployment in your state tops 10 percent. Kevin DeWine, the affable chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio, has a transparent board behind his desk at state headquarters...
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The third American presidential debate was of negligible interest as a test of the qualities of the candidates, whatever it did or did not do to the presidential horserace odds -- probably not much.
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It might seem odd to apply the term “understated” to a documentary that features gritty combat footage: gunfire- and explosion-wracked images from conflicts that include the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and America’s intervent
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Should the president of the United States be able to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world without telling the public why—or even acknowledging that he has done so?
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In late December, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, despite having “serious reservations” about provisions allowing those suspected of terrorist connections to be detained indefinitely without trial—...
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The generation of the Founding Fathers was much attached to religion. They doubtless knew the biblical commandment, “Justice, Justice, shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:20). The Preamble to the new Constitution consequently expressed a purpose to “...
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A Gallup poll issued this month says that 99 percent of the American public now has become convinced that Iran's civilian nuclear program will threaten "the vital interests of the United States in the next ten years." Eighty-three percent say this...
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War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen.
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In what is sadly a rare show of national solidarity, former President George W. Bush will join President Barack Obama at “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan on September 11 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United...
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Just when our politics seemed destined to freeze into a brain-dead brand of partisanship, party lines started cracking up.
It is common in politics to assume that whatever has been happening will keep happening. But a series of events last week...
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It was after 1 p.m. when we finally made it to the crowded McDonald’s on Times Square. My parents, two younger brothers, and I were caked with stinging white powder. It had worked its way into our clothing and our pores, and it burned so badly that...
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Almost all the shibboleths of Washington conventional wisdom took a hit in Tuesday's elections. Yet advocates of a single national political narrative clung to the difficulties of two incumbent Democratic senators to keep spinning the same old tale...
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“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama told the world in announcing that U.S.
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Last New Year’s Eve, President Obama signed into law the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.” Intended to reinforce the 2001 law that empowered the president to respond to the crimes of 9/11, the new statute grants him powers...
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The Afghan government's order a week ago to the United States to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington, although President Hamid Karzai has before invited the United...
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Across the globe, from Tunisia to Burma, people are struggling to cast off tyrannical regimes. It is humbling to witness what thousands are willing to risk for a chance at democracy in the countries of the Middle East.
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A celebrated declaration is engraved above the portal of Langdell Hall, the central building of Harvard Law School: non sub homine sed sub deo et lege (“not under man but under God and law”). That was the brave admonition of Lord Edward Coke (1552–...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
The United States cannot win the war in Afghanistan. Are we willing to lose it? Evidently not quite yet.
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The October online posting by WikiLeaks of nearly a thousand classified Pentagon documents (the “Iraq War Logs”) shed new light on the vexed issue of Iraqi deaths during and after the 2003 invasion.
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Ten years after the terrible devastation of September 11, we live in sacred time.
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Politics tends to wring all seriousness out of speech. Sometimes this is a demonstration of unforgivable ignorance. Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan thinks that "now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach" in...
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Since the beginning of December, military gas (sarin, a nerve agent) has claimed a major place in discussion of the civil war in Syria. The Syrian government has admitted to holding major stocks of (unidentified military) gas in or near the areas of...
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Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history.
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To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don't look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan -- and that is just what Obama told us before he was first elected.
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PARIS -- I watched some of the Washington Sunday political talk shows this week on international television. The participants' main foreign preoccupation seemed to be the potential threat to America of al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb and the other...
