#foreign-policy-hawks

#foreign-policy-hawks

Mearsheimer argues that the idea that the US and Israel are making a safer, more stable Middle East is ludicrous, emphasizing that the real threat comes from their collaboration.

The White House is seeking a 10 percent cut to nondefense spending, proposing a reduction of $73 billion from federal programs outside the military, targeting environmental initiatives.

The idea for a new canal to move oil from the Middle East had emerged two decades earlier, in the context of another Middle East conflict, the Suez crisis. In 1956, Egypt seized the Suez Canal from British and French control, causing the price of oil to spike for European consumers.

The provocative military activity has led to speculative conversation about what it would take to invade a country twice the population and three times the territory of Iraq.

Judge Richard Leon stated, 'Unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!' He emphasized the need for congressional approval to ensure proper oversight of government spending.

Hegseth's financial broker inquired about a multimillion-dollar investment in BlackRock's Defense Industrials Active ETF, which invests in global defense and security-related companies.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.

Four days into this situation in the skies over Tehran, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, 'We're not at war right now.' This was, rather, a 'very specific, clear mission-an operation.' Operation does seem to be the preferred word in government talking points, even as it encompasses assassinating an ayatollah, torpedoing an Iranian naval ship, blowing up fuel depots and a desalination plant, and losing the lives of (so far) eight American service members along the way.

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, emphasized that vesting war powers in Congress rather than the President represented a crucial safeguard against concentrated executive authority and the potential for individual flaws in judgment affecting national security decisions.

American diplomats are supposed to represent the nation, advocate for the interests and policies of the U.S. government, and stay on generally good terms with the country to which they're assigned. Even when they are sent to places that have an adversarial relationship with the United States, they are expected to maintain decorum while conveying messages these regimes may not want to hear.

There are more signs that the United States is disengaging from the global order established after World War II. President Donald Trump has ordered his administration to pull out of more than 60 agencies, half of them part of the United Nations. Trump argues that being a member of these organisations is contrary to his country's interests. The secretary of state went as far as saying they're useless or wasteful.

Nobody escaped 2020 without hearing of at least a couple of media personalities that became wildly popular amongst conservatives for abandoning the left. They themselves, though, framed things a little differently. "The left left me," they proclaimed. There is something deeply revealing in this statement. These commentators didn't move an inch to the right. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Bari Weiss, former op-ed editor at the New York Times and now editor-in-chief at CBS News.

Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it). The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can't express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU.)

On this week's episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE's warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested.