Political journalists, especially, tend to describe all elected officials as “politicians.”  That is not necessarily incorrect.  They operate in the political sphere, engage in political discourse, and attempt to achieve, or block, certain political objectives.  But the word also is...

An earlier comment questioned my use of the word commonwealth as describing all those things Americans hold together—our public lands and resources, our defenses, our air and water, our government, and the list is long.  A commonwealth is described as...

We do not have to wait for the final resolution of the American military presence in Afghanistan to begin to see what, if anything, we have learned from our checkered experience there.

Very soon President Obama will announce a new...

For many years the United States has been the de facto guarantor of world oil supplies.  We maintain one and more recently two aircraft carrier task groups in the Indian Ocean and...

Politicians almost always dwell near the bottom of polls reflecting public respect. Yet, almost always, Americans who vote do so for one politician or another. That's because they are almost never given a choice.

Let's agree that a politician is an elected official who wants to make...

A good deal of attention is being given recently to the notion of creating networks among sovereign governments.  This basically involves linking government functions of a number of governments to make the performance of each of them more...

A post-Cold War mystery prevails.  Why, almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War, are there still so many members of the U.S. foreign policy community (often called foreign policy elites) who seem instinctively to dislike...

As a nation that has largely valued laissez faire in its markets and independence for individual citizens, the United States has generally resisted strategic approaches to domestic matters or grand strategies for its role in the world.  Strategy suggests planning,...

Posted from Senator Hart's new blog at Matters of Principle.

This little-noticed phrase in the Preamble to our Constitution has profound significance for laws and governing.  If...

Posted from Senator Hart's new blog at Matters of Principle.

Thus, our salute to the flag of the United States identifies us as a republic. Not enough Americans, including...

Posted from Senator Hart's new blog at Matters of Principle.

Not too long ago, issues came in boxes.  There was a health box, an education box, an economy box,...

Posted from Senator Hart's new blog at Matters of Principle.

For about 300 or 350 years most conflicts in the world, or at least the major ones,...

Posted from Senator Hart's new blog at Matters of Principle.

If there has been a dominant phrase in the political vocabulary of my generation it has...

It has been powerfully argued that the national security state, inaugurated in 1947 and greatly expanded...

Starting about 35 years ago, I've argued the political importance of the Western United States, especially in my own Democratic party. After the South shifted from Democratic to Republican in the Nixon years following Democratic leadership on civil rights, East Coast punditry continued to ask how the Democrats could regain...

The short answer to this question is yes and no. Yes, in the sense that terrorism was never a global phenomenon that could be defeated by a "war" as proposed by George W. Bush. No, in the sense that the United States will be attacked again someplace, sometime.

For those...

"[W]e believe that our government is weak, stupid, overbearing, dishonest, and inefficient, and also believe it to be the best in the world and would like to offer it to others." This insight of Professor Michael Kammen came to mind as I drove around the teeming, dusty streets of Kabul...

Last June I urged then-candidate Barack Obama to use his presidency to transform the country for the 21st century world, not simply to repair the damage to our economy, foreign policy, and defenses done by the Bush administration. By that standard, his first three months have been a remarkable success.

After 'Mission Accomplished' and the shift from successful invasion to unsuccessful occupation of Iraq, many people questioned why even less visible opponents were not more outspoken in opposition. In my case speeches and interviews were given, but few received any publicity. There is no guarantee that simply because one "speaks...