Christopher Holshek

A couple of weeks back, I had the pleasure and privilege of taking my Wide Glide on the "Law Ride" as the kick-off event of National Police Week. The parade of more than 1,200 bikes started at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., roared past the Capitol, down Pennsylvania...

Not long ago, I finished reading Rachel Maddow's Drift - The Unmooring of American Military Power, a poignant treatise on the creeping militarization not only of American foreign policy but with implications for our whole system of governance. Maddow succeeds in explaining, in a charmingly non-wonkish way, how we got...

In the waning days of the Cold War, the head of the Soviet Institute turned to U.S. journalist Daniel Schorr and relayed a warning from Mikhail Gorbachev: "We will deprive you of an enemy and then what will you do?" Although the United States had won the Cold...

For all practical purposes, it's game on between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Get ready for an unprecedented deluge of TV ads and other media storms persisting right up to the first Tuesday of the 11th month, brought to you by your friendly neighborhood Super-PAC. Thanks to a Supreme Court...

When I was in command of the first U.S. Army Civil Affairs battalion to deploy for Operation Iraqi Freedom, spending the first six months in the southern city of An Nasiriyah, it soon became clear to me that, in order to begin facilitating what one of my soldiers called "

As I was departing Liberia in mid-2009, after a year and a half of service there as an American officer serving with the United Nations Mission, I caused a bit of a stir in a remark I made to the Liberians: "Now that your main international benefactor has elected a...

It's fashionable these days to refute the decline of America, whether in real or relative terms. Conversely, it's practically heresy to proffer anything that suggests American decline. In this election year, the debate is predictably polarizing -- but in an "either you're with us or against us" kind of way.

Instead of malingering in the mall, I decided to spend President's Day actually thinking about this holiday, especially this election year. In particular, I thought about what the relationship between citizen and chief executive should be this day and age.

As I did when visiting some of the presidential libraries...

Mitt Romney, the likely challenger to President Obama this fall, has had a few public-speaking gaffes. There is one theme, however, that Romney has hit on -- and will likely many more times -- that should be taken much more seriously. It is the conservative contention about American decline. Beyond...

Media coverage and op-eds on last week's incident involving the desecration of Taliban corpses by U.S. Marines has been subdued in the United States, but it gathered the attention of many in that part of the world where we have had the most trouble. Still, it appears so far to...

The war in Iraq is now finally over -- at least for Americans. The beginning of that end was actually on the 31st of August 2010, when President Obama declared the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, with much less fanfare than as his predecessor declared "mission accomplished" --...

We Americans have a lot to be thankful for. As a land of inordinate opportunities, our success has not been because we're really any better than anyone else -- but we have been luckier. It seems, however, that our opportunities may be running out. To twist the sports adage, sometimes...

For particularly the last 10 years of my military career, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I admit one of the things I enjoyed was the unsolicited recognition received from people all over the country, whenever I was in uniform. What struck me was, almost every time, they would...

In the more than three decades I've been involved in nation-building, civil-military coordination, and just trying to help make peace in broken places, I've learned that there are two things that tell you a country is still in trouble. One is when people still blame everyone else but themselves for...

A lot of the commemorations on 9/11 were just that -- thinking about the past. We Americans, as a somewhat older population now, tend to wax nostalgic more than we normally have, rather than as a nation that has been known for thinking more about the future. It's healthy to...

The riots on the streets of London and other British cities this past week were no doubt a showcase of opportunism by hooligans and bored teenagers. But the antisocial and criminal behavior of these mostly young and usually unemployed people was too widespread and massive to be dismissed as merely...

Last week's debt deal debacle portended a number of things, among them the stark, unavoidable reality of government dysfunction that it is the embodiment of Pogo's twist of phrase that "we have met the enemy and he is us." This is particularly true considering that, unlike the debt crisis in...

Last Sunday's Women's World Cup final was a triumph, regardless of the outcome. It showed that women's football (yes, that's what everyone else in the world calls soccer) has, in only 20 years, reached a level of play that rivals men's sports. It was by far the most watched international...

It's no secret that success is greatest in synergy. Most of us can recall how Sesame Street taught us the importance of neighborhood cooperation. The Wisdom of Crowds took this to a much higher collective level, explaining more scientifically what we understand intuitively. We Americans like to think we are...

In the wake of the celebrations and commemorations over the death of the personification of what America has perceived to be the most palpable threat to its national security since September 11, 2001, we are likewise taking an appropriate moment to think about what this all means now and where...