From WAR ROOM —Online Journal of the U.S. Army War College “Observers figure that if the US, Mexico, or Brazil are unwilling to intervene in [Venezuela], they are presumably even less likely to care about dictatorships in countries with fewer resources.” The extraconstitutional power grab may have domino effects for other caudillos who want to retain power on the continent, despite unhappy populaces. The international community’s […]
Top411
Essay: Geography as the Cornerstone to Foreign Policy
From Claremont Review of Books The Dutch-American writer Nicholas Spykman observed in 1944 that “geography is the most fundamental factor in foreign policy because it is the most permanent.” Many thinkers treated geography and geopolitics as passé fields of study after America’s victories in the Cold War and against Iraq in the early 1990s. Instead, many U.S. policymakers […]
Analysis: India-U.S. Military Cooperation Complicated
From WAR ROOM —Online Journal of the U.S. Army War College The American national security bureaucracy is in love with India. Designating India as a “major defense partner” in 2016, then-defense secretary Ashton Carter noted this would allow “the United States and India to cooperate…in a way that we do only with our closest and most long-standing allies.” India’s prominence in the latest National Security Strategy, the […]
Perspective: The Meaning Behind Border Agreement
From In Homeland Security After two weeks of heated negotiations and multiple stalls, negotiators in Congress appear to have reached a potential deal that would avoid another partial federal government shutdown on Feb. 15. According to CNN, the details of this tentative agreement include $1.375 billion for border fencing and about 40,520 beds for housing border detainees. […]
Afghanistan Exit Must Be Gradual, Measured
The best strategy for the United States withdrawing troops and resources from Afghanistan is one that is cautious, measured, and phased according to a Feb. 6 report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “Absent a successful peace negotiation, a U.S. force draw-down should be tied to Afghanistan meeting performance and governance benchmarks and […]