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331. Misunderestimating Bush and Cheney

Author:
Christian Caryl
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
A SPECTER is haunting Washington-the specter of George W. Bush. President Obama may have spent almost five years in the White House by now, but it's still possible to detect the furtive presence of a certain restless shade lurking in the dimmer corners of the federal mansion. Needless to say, this is something of a first: usually U.S. presidents have to die before they can join the illustrious corps of Washington ghosts, and 43 is, of course, still very much alive in his tony Dallas neighborhood, by all accounts enthusiastically pursuing his new avocation as an amateur painter. Yet his spirit is proving remarkably hard to exorcise.
Topic:
Government and War
Political Geography:
United States, Washington, and Middle East

332. Breach of Logic

Author:
James Joyner
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country [5] (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 256 pp., $26.00. FOLLOWING HIS graduation from West Point, Andrew J. Bacevich had a distinguished career as an army officer, retiring as a colonel and serving in both Vietnam and the Gulf War. He has since carved out a second career as an iconoclastic scholar preaching the evils of perpetual war. In numerous essays and books, Bacevich, who teaches international relations at Boston University, has ventilated his contempt and despair for America's penchant for intervention abroad, directing his ire at both the liberal hawks and neoconservatives. Throughout, his stands have been rooted in a cultural conservatism that sees America as having strayed badly from its republican origins to succumb to the imperial temptation.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
United States, America, Vietnam, and England

333. Woodrow Wilson: A Frenzied Pedagogue

Author:
Amity Shlaes
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
A. Scott Berg, Wilson [5] (New York: Putnam, 2013), 832 pp., $40.00. WHICH PREVIOUS president does President Barack Obama resemble most? Historians have likened the forty-fourth president to the thirty-second, Franklin Roosevelt. Obama, after all, chose to open his first term with a progressive campaign that explicitly evoked FDR's progressive Hundred Days. But Roosevelt functioned in a more political and opportunistic fashion than does Obama.
Topic:
Government and War
Political Geography:
America

334. The Myth of the New Isolationism

Author:
Jacob Heilbrunn
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the United States has damaged its reputation and national security by lurching from one war to the next. Afghanistan, which began triumphantly for the Bush administration, has devolved into a protracted and inconclusive war in which the Taliban is making fresh inroads as American and allied forces hand over security to the Afghan army. Then there is Iraq. It was purveyed by the Bush administration to the American public as a mission that could be accomplished swiftly and smoothly. Neither occurred. Since then, President Obama's self-styled humanitarian intervention in Libya has led to instability, allowing local militias, among other things, to pretty much bring the oil industry to a standstill by disrupting major export terminals. Most recently, it looked as though Syria might be Libya all over again-an American president embarks on an uncertain crusade, and Britain and France join to provide the necessary diplomatic persiflage for justifying a bombing campaign.
Topic:
Security and War
Political Geography:
Britain, Afghanistan, France, Libya, and Syria

335. Redcoat Leaders Weren't All Dolts

Author:
William Anthony Hay
Publication Date:
08-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The National Interest
Institution:
Center for the National Interest
Abstract:
Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 480 pp., $37.50. THE VICTORS in wars may write the history of those wars, as the cliché says, but history usually manages to delve into the perspectives, interests and exploits of the defeated as it pieces together, over time, a complete picture. A vast literature on the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War and both world wars includes such explorations of the defeated to explain how events unfolded and what factors drove them. But no similar body of literature has emerged to survey the British side of the American Revolution. British historians neglected a defeat that complicated the story of their country's rise to imperial greatness, while Americans operated within the prejudices and assumptions of nineteenth-century patriotic writers. Later attempts to debunk their accounts rarely challenged the overarching-and overly deterministic-narrative of how the United States gained its independence.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
United States and America

336. Afghanistan After the Drawdown

Author:
Seth G. Jones and Keith Crane
Publication Date:
11-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Afghanistan will undergo three major transitions in 2014: from a Hamid Karzai–led government to one presumably headed by another president following the 2014 election; from a U.S.-led to an Afghan-led counterinsurgency; and from an economy driven by foreign expenditures on military support and assistance to one more reliant on domestic sources of growth, as the United States and other countries reduce their presence. The United States and its allies will need to shape each of these transitions in ways that safeguard their interests.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, Islam, Terrorism, War, and Counterinsurgency
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and United States

337. Defense on a Diet

Author:
Melvyn P. Leffler
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The United States is now in a period of austerity, and after years of huge increases, the defense budget is set to be scaled back. Even those supporting the cuts stress the need to avoid the supposedly awful consequences of past retrenchments. “We have to remember the lessons of history,” President Barack Obama said in January 2012. “We can't afford to repeat the mistakes that have been made in the past -- after World War II, after Vietnam -- when our military policy was left ill prepared for the future. As commander in chief, I will not let that happen again.” Similarly, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Congress in October 2011, “After every major conflict -- World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union -- what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force. Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake.”
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
United States, Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Korea

338. Cyberwar and Peace

Author:
Thomas Rid
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Cyberwar Is Coming!” declared the title of a seminal 1993 article by the RAND Corporation analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, who argued that the nascent Internet would fundamentally transform warfare. The idea seemed fanciful at the time, and it took more than a decade for members of the U.S. national security establishment to catch on. But once they did, a chorus of voices resounded in the mass media, proclaiming the dawn of the era of cyberwar and warning of its terrifying potential. In February 2011, then CIA Director Leon Panetta warned Congress that “the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyberattack.” And in late 2012, Mike McConnell, who had served as director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush, warned darkly that the United States could not “wait for the cyber equivalent of the collapse of the World Trade Centers.”
Topic:
Security and War
Political Geography:
United States

339. Bridge to Somewhere

Author:
Jose W. Fernandez
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
International development has moved beyond charity. Gone are the days when the United States would just spend its seemingly bottomless largess to help less fortunate or vanquished countries, as it did after World War II. International development has reached a new, globally competitive stage, bringing with it enormous strategic and economic implications for the United States in the years ahead.
Topic:
Development and War
Political Geography:
United States

340. The Spoils of War

Author:
Max Hastings
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
For decades, World War II suffused the hearts and minds of the American generation that experienced it as “the good war,” in which Allied virtue eventually triumphed over fascist evil. Today, Western societies are mature enough to adopt a more nuanced perspective. There remains no doubt that “our side” deserved to win; terrible consequences would have befallen the world following an Axis victory. But the Allied cause was morally compromised by the need to enlist the services of Joseph Stalin's tyranny in order to defeat the forces of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
America