Foreign policy

A month after the election shock of 2016, CBS’s John Dickerson sat down with the ninety-three-year-old Henry Kissinger to get his assessment of the incoming president. “Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen,” Kissinger pronounced, noting that many nations would have to weigh “their perception that [Barack Obama] basically withdrew America from international politics, so that they had to make their own assessment of their necessities,” along with “a new president who is asking a lot of unfamiliar questions.” Given “the combination of the partial vacuum and the new questions, one could imagine that something remarkable and new emerges out of it,” Kissinger added. “I’m not saying it will. I’m saying it’s an extraordinary opportunity.

As the world enters a new era of great power competition, countries are arming themselves at a rate unseen since the end of the Cold War. The war in Ukraine, China’s increasing belligerence and angst over rogue states like Iran and North Korea are driving defense spending and weapons purchases the world over. Amid all this, the United States does not have the luxury of being too picky as to who among its friends gets the weapons they need to defend themselves. Nor can Washington continue to avoid drastic reforms to its arms export controls to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. Standards are necessary — they are what should set America apart — but they must not become so onerous that the security of the US and its partners suffer.

Woodrow Wilson can’t seem to catch a break. Since Princeton University’s 2020 decision to remove the name of the former president (both of the United States and the university) from its school of Public and International Affairs for his “racist thinking and policies,” other academic institutions have followed suit. An elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, decided in May to drop his name because of Wilson’s “racist values.” Another school in San Leandro, California, made the same decision, as has a high school in our nation’s capital. There’s more than a little irony here. Wilson, racist though he was, was also a leading champion of the progressive, globalist worldview shared by our technocratic elites.

I’ve been thinking about where I was on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and my memories of the event are quite depressing. What have we learned? As a research fellow at the Cato Institute at that time, I was working with other analysts preparing research, authoring commentaries, publishing op-ed articles and giving interviews to the broadcast media, warning about the consequences of the coming American military conquest in the Middle East. It's not polite to toot one’s own horn, but we were right.

The first workday of 2022 and already Washington, DC has been paralyzed by snow. That isn't saying much, given that half an inch is enough to shut things down around these parts. As a kid growing up in Connecticut, I remember countless snowy mornings when I'd wake up early, pad downstairs, turn on the listings, only to be devastated to learn that school was only delayed by half an hour. Cut to DC, where they'll close the schools because it's cold outside. So it goes in our thin-blooded nation's capital. And in fairness, the fact that many federal employees are still working from home has mitigated the paralysis somewhat. Still, a city needs to move in order to work, and it's there that the literal gets at something figurative.