Do red lines matter? There has been mounting criticism of the Obama administration for setting a line in the sand on Syria -- the movement or use of chemical weapons -- and then apparently failing to act out on its promise. The criticism has come in two varieties: First, those...

The debate over whether or not to intervene in Syria draws on two logics that portend inaction. First, political scientists claim that external meddling in internal conflicts only leads to protracted wars -- interventions lengthen, not reduce, conflicts. Second, to actually arm Syria's rebels would require armaments such...

News that the White House nixed a plan last summer to arm the Syrian rebels was attributed to election-year politics. But maybe the administration's decision not to intervene was motivated by other impulses. On one hand, there is concern that the conflict in Syria could spill across its borders and...

Experts on North and West Africa are hard to find. When guys with names like Gbagbo and Ouattara squared off in 2011, the coverage -- or lack thereof -- was appalling. Previously, in 2005, there was a coup in Mauritania and I remember being at my old gig...

Imagine the United States at an auction with some Gulf regimes. Up for bid is the future leadership of Syria, one of the most important states in the Middle East. The Gulf sugar daddies are raising the ante, yet at the same time clamoring for their soon-to-be-prizes to sound and...

The chorus out of Washington is singing a familiar hymn: Don't get involved in Syria. Civil war is upon us. "Syria is Iraq," proclaims Thomas Friedman, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning portrayal of the horrific 1982 massacre in Hama is what inspired my generation of journalists to travel to places...

After a year and a half of escalating violence and thousands killed, the International Red Cross has finally gotten around to labeling Syria a "civil war." The reaction from most experts is: Well, duh. This is the foreign policy equivalent of Anderson Cooper coming out of the closet:...

In the summer of 2008, when Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, Americans took a timeout from watching the Olympics to express their collective outrage. John McCain boldly declared, "We are all Georgians," even dispatching his wife to Tbilisi to investigate. Yet when Syria's regime brutally slaughters thousands of its own...

Is it worse to be uninformed or misinformed? That is the question regarding Invisible Children's Kony 2012 video that went viral and ended up making Joseph Kony a household name in Hollywood and Middle America. It's been watched by over 70 million viewers. Not bad for a tiny NGO in...

The fall of 1991 I came down from the Urals, exhausted but also exhilarated from the alpine hike. I walked into a Russian village at the foothills. The villagers right away could see something was wrong. Upon seeing my visage, I was declared extremely ill. One bear of a villager,...

It's unbelievable, really. The US military is holding up Iraq as a model for Afghanistan. They'll tell you it took a few years to get right but by golly, Iraq is at peace with itself, with a large armed forces, a democratically elected government, and commerce flourishing. Let's replicate that...

To those who thought Obama would end all war, wipe out global poverty, save the environment, and eradicate terrorism in one fell swoop, they will be sadly disappointed by this earthling-like leader of the free world's slacker performance.

But Obama's foreign policy has not been half bad. He has...

Moammar Gadhafi droned on for 90 minutes yesterday in rambling prose barely befitting a head of state. Later up to the lectern was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also gave long-winded remarks that wandered from topic to topic, desperately searching for a point. Mikhail Gorbachev was infamous for his preachiness. And Cuba's...

At least when George W. Bush goofed off, he was seen busily clearing brush or running on a treadmill. His successor takes in a fancy West Village meal followed by a Broadway show. There is nothing wrong with a night on the town now and then but Obama seems to...

Maureen Dowd plagiarized. Goodness gracious, let's take her out back to the woodshed and make her repent.

Wait, let's not. We all plagiarize. I've read now a half dozen articles about Dowd's plagiarism. Every one of them mentioned the irony of how Dowd exposed Biden's plagiarism way back when,...

Obama has had a remarkably productive first 100 days on the foreign policy front. He has sought to rebuild fractured alliances, toss out bad acronyms (GWOT, among others), and restore America's tattered image abroad, even if it means having grip-and-grin sessions with adversaries. It's hard not to like what I...

Hmm, Obama says he'll shake hands with autocrats if they unclench their fists. Trouble is the new president's hands, like those of his predecessor, are already stained with blood. A series of American unmanned predator drones has reportedly killed a few dozen Pakistanis.

When pressed on the issue, his normally...

There is rejoicing that William Kristol was given a pink slip from the Grey Lady. After all, his columns read like they were written by a Weekly Standard copy boy, not a distinguished opinion-maker. But there are more and more murmurs percolating online that Thomas Friedman's column should get the...

Hand it to Hillary Clinton. She's managed to sum up the bold new direction of US foreign policy into a bumper-friendly catchphrase: smart power. Sufficiently vague, the phrase is remarkable for its meaninglessness. Ostensibly it combines "hard" with "soft" power, a win-win policy that will wow the pants off the...

When asked by Martin Scorsese to tone down his mobster character in The Departed, Jack Nicholson is said to have told the director, "I don't do subtle." The same could be said for Israel and Russia, which both find themselves in the familiar position of being accused of bullying their...