Trying to discern in Obama's address at Oslo the contours of a coherent foreign policy is likely to prove futile. For the elucidation of a strategic design was not the purpose. The aim was political -- in two senses. The first, primary consideration was to create favorable impressions among the...

Following in the rhetorical wake of Barack Obama is like being the clean-up crew after the Imperial cavalry have passed. A disagreeable but necessary duty in the interests of public health. Here goes.

• B.O.: 'Just War' preconditions: "If it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if...

Lost progressive causes don't die -- they just fade away with barely a sigh marking their expiration. Health care reform has been terminally ill ever since Barack Obama exhausted his shallow pool of conviction about a serious recasting of America's patchwork of arrangements that we generously call a 'system.' Discriminatory,...

Dishonesty in Washington at high levels has become like poverty in India. Just when you think you've seen the very bottom, you discover yet a lower level of degradation. After the Bush years of outright lies and systematic deception, we now have Obama plumbing new depths as he tortures the...

The sham Afghanistan strategic review is now revealed for the empty exercise it always was. Escalation was inescapable, for Obama's staunch promotion of a 'necessary war' precluded a serious reappraisal of stakes and risks. Reversing himself would have demanded the kind of courage that is wholly foreign to him. So...

What else is there to do? That is the question flung at critics of our military commitment in Afghanistan by its promoters. Total victory or total humiliation, the Petraeuses and McChrystals tell us, are the only options. There are other answers and other outcomes. The key is to reappraise American...

Obama's decision to go along with the Petraeus/McChrystal campaign for a massive escalation in Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands contradicts every precept of sound strategy and statesmanship. Rarely, if ever, has a great power so willfully set itself down the path of self-destruction with so little reason. This is pathological...

Obama will do the predictable next week and sign on to plans for an expanded American commitment in Afghanistan. It will be a somewhat modified version of the McChrystal strategy. The White House will dexterously perform its patented sleight of hand to cast the decision as the only reasonable course...

Weathering a blizzard of statistics is the fate of the public minded. Numbers come at us from all points of the compass. Some are raw data, some massaged, some naked and some fitted out for the occasion by their sponsors. In this wintry economic season, they all come with a...

There is something rotten in the current state of Washington's Afghan policy making. The White House, we are told, is in the midst of an intense review of our strategy with nothing having been decided. Yet the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels on Thursday gave their seal of approval...

HEIDELBERG -- The different national responses to the Nobel award shed some light on what may be the reaction when it dawns on people that Obama is not the long awaited American messiah. The French reaction was the classic Gallic shrug -- that expressive gesture that conveys indifference, bemusement, resignation...

Obama's peace initiative on Palestine suffered a stunning, perhaps fatal, blow last week. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu rejected out of hand any freeze on the West Bank settlements which the White House had pressed as a necessary first step toward serious negotiations. The Obama plan is now stillborn, never...

The Mother of All Economic Summits held this week in Pittsburgh evokes faded images of similar conclaves in the 1930s. The grainy footage from those times showed somberly dressed men with severe expressions carved on their faces. They walked stiffly from vintage limousines to the imposing façade of some temple...

In this season of our discontents we long for signs that astute, reliable people are taking charge of at least one problem that is bedeviling us. The G-20 summit this week has raised hope in some quarters that the worlds' leaders are finally coming to grips with the root causes...

This essay first appeared in the National Journal Security Expert Blog.

This is the most painful of anniversaries. Fear, anger, anxiety -- a cocktail of emotions. The images are still vivid. This year's commemoration is especially full of angst. Perhaps because torture, Afghanistan and failed wars are creeping back...

Wednesday night Cinderella's gilded slipper comes off -- perhaps never to find its rightful bearer in our lifetime. By midnight it will be made painfully obvious that we have been gulled. Hopes for a renewed America given their coup de grace. It will grieve us far more than him. We...

The White House is upset by the Afghan election. Celebrated at first by Obama on the White House lawn as a signal success marking the country's progress on the road to democracy, it now looks like a monkey wrench thrown into the already stuttering engine of our mission there. The...

Torture is back in the news (good) -- along with renditions (bad) and assorted assassination units (worse). Let's concentrate on what looks positive. The Inspector General of the Justice Department has issued a report recommending that cases involving gross abuses, perhaps including murder, committed by American personnel in Iraq will...

In a season of bizarre political happenings, none is stranger than the exaltation of Ben Bernanke as the natural successor to himself as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Obama seems primed to reappoint the establishment favorite in yet another declaration of his attachment to the status quo. Bernanke is...

Let's face the harsh reality -- Obama has blown health care reform, big time. The opportunity of a lifetime has been squandered. The most recent revelations about backroom deals with Pharma and the other vendors of medical services drops the curtain on any hope of serious change in our...