I am here in London where I'm participating in an interesting forum sponsored by the Princeton Project on National Security and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Transatlantic Program, I've received not just one email -- but three -- from prominent insider journalists and policy hands that...

When I first saw how the Obama campaign team was taking the Joe Trippi-fashioned IT architecture of political outreach a few notches higher, I was really pleased. I saw that Obama was building a much larger political...

Second Lieutenant Sandy Tsao is being discharged from the military for informing her chain of command that she is gay. She wrote in a letter to President Obama that she could not live according to...

Barack Obama has appointed a hyperactive director of faith-based initiatives, Josh DuBois, and sees little problem continuing the blurring of church and state that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton initiated in their terms. I remain very uncomfortable with evangelicals and other preachers -- many of whom have narrow...

Quite a number of serious and informed observers predict a spike in mass casualty violence hitting this week in Pakistan. President Obama is about to have both collective and separate meetings with Afghanistan President Hamid...

I have had a couple of overwhelming weeks and haven't been able to post until now what I would have preferred on this debate about George W. Bush administration torture policy accountability.

I have told quite...

The Washington Note's actual image has made it on to Rachel Maddow's terrific MSNBC show, been highlighted on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, and has popped up on Wolf Blitzer's...

New America Foundation foreign policy programs director Steve Clemons and Ambassador of Syria to the United States Imad Moustapha (photo credit: Zain Ali Shah)

Yesterday evening, I wanted to pay my respects...

Latin America policy uber diva Julia Sweig chaired a news-making gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington yesterday morning. It was excellent, and the CFR has audio of the entire...

The pin-pricks, as Brent Scowcroft calls them, have started. North Korea is testing Obama's resolve and strategic skills.

North Korea's ballistic missile test masked as a satellite launch violates agreements that the United States, Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan negotiated with North Korea in order to bring it...

I will be arriving in Berlin on Monday, the 11th of May -- and I am appealing to German border authorities to detain me for an hour or so -- to make amends for the treatment that a German political leader (and probably many other unnamed victims of passport screening)...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, much less visible than any other personalities on the Obama national security team roster, is playing the role of "steady hand" on the president's team.

Gates has demonstrated this by keeping his own profile down while his national security colleagues, Secretary of State Hillary...

Romer refused to get...

The Hamilton Project's early objectives were to...

One of the interesting things to observe after George Bush issued his dictate to the world -- "You are with us or against us" -- was how some of those nations "with us" began to assume that their importance to and relationship with the United States was "unconditional" and that...

About a year and a half ago, I attended a very nice reception in New York in honor of German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Lots of Germans there and many top tier German, European, and American media from Washington, New York, and Berlin. A number of Ambassadors stopped by...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar, a long time realist and serious strategic thinker about America's national security challenges, has just popped the bubble...

Acting Chief of Staff to Senator Roland Burris, Darrel Thompson, has resigned his position, according to senior staffers in the US Senate.

Darrel Thompson, a former Senior Adviser to Senator Harry Reid,...