Conn Hallinan

Behind the political crisis that saw the recent fall of powerful Communist Party leader Bo Xiali is an internal battle over how to handle China's slowing economy and growing income disparity, while shifting from an export-driven model powered by cheap labor to one built around internal consumption. Since China is...

During his confirmation hearings this past June, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned the Senate, "The next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyber attack that cripples our grid, our security systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems." The use of Pearl Harbor provided powerful...

On the surface, the recent turmoil in Teheran looks like a case of the clerical elite, led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, slapping down an independent-minded President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though the battle is couched in vocabulary that does more to obscure than to reveal. Accusations of "sorcery" and...

The assassination of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. public enemy number one. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, "an astounding...

Coming to terms with NATO's intervention in the Libyan civil war is a little like wresting a grizzly bear: big, hairy, and likely to make one pretty uncomfortable no matter where you grab a hold of it. Is it a humanitarian endeavor? A grab for oil resources? Or an election...

Wars are rarely lost in a single encounter; defeat is almost always more complex than that. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have lost the war in Afghanistan, but not just because they failed in the battle for Marjah or decided that discretion was the...

When U.S. forces found themselves beset by a growing insurgency in Iraq following their lighting overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the most obvious parallel that came to mind was Vietnam: an occupying army, far from home, besieged by a shadowy foe. But Patrick Cockburn, the Independent's (UK) ace Middle East reporter,...

All frauds have a purpose, mostly to relieve the unwary of their wealth, though occasionally to launch some foreign adventure. The 1965 Tonkin Gulf hoax that escalated the Vietnam War comes to mind.

So, what was the design behind "Operation Moshtarak," or the "Battle of Marjah," in Afghanistan's Helmand...

Dananeh is a textbook example of why...

One of the oddest — indeed, surreal — encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. On the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the...

While the Obama administration was careful to distance itself from the recent coup in Honduras — condemning the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica, revoking Honduran officials' visas, and shutting off aid — that doesn't mean influential Americans aren't involved, and that both sides of the aisle...

In the past month, two seemingly unrelated events have turned Central Asia into a potential flashpoint: an aggressively expanding North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a nascent strategic alliance between Russia and China.

At stake is nothing less than who holds the future high ground in the competition for...

Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers

Behind the recent Pentagon decision to deny Purple Heart medals to soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a cold-blooded calculation: It saves money.

The official rationale for refusing to honor what is widely considered the "signature wound" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that...

Over the next several months there will be a battle for hearts and minds, but not in Iraq or Afghanistan. The war will be here at home, waged mostly in the halls of Congress, where grim lobbyists for one of the top 15 economies in the world are digging in...

Reposted from Foreign Policy In Focus

If most Americans think Iran and Georgia are the two most volatile flashpoints in the world, one can hardly blame them. The possibility that the Bush administration might strike at Tehran's nuclear facilities has been hinted about for the past two years, and...

Reposted from Foreign Policy In Focus

Iraq was sold as a war to halt weapons of mass destruction; then to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then...

Originally appeared in Foreign Policy In Focus

Why are Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn writing opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons? Keep in mind, these four people are not just major defense hawks. People...

Foreign Policy In Focus, June 18, 2008

Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite.

Thus, Germany formed the Triple Alliance with Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to counter the enmity of France following the Franco-Prussian War....