In his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush made a series of demands on the Taliban government in Kabul, Afghanistan.  He insisted that: al Qaeda leaders be turned over to the U.S.; all imprisoned foreign...

A large number of options are now available to the United States in developing a 21st century security strategy.  No single strategy will suffice so long as global conditions continue to evolve rapidly and conditions are subject to virtual overnight change. ...

The United States needs a new statutory basis for its national security strategy in this new century.  The Cold War national security state was established by the National Security Act of 1947.  It unified the Army and Navy, and the Marine...

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...