In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama threatened to veto any bill imposing new sanctions on Iran. “For the sake of our national security,” he said, “we must give diplomacy a chance to succeed.” But there is no way to know if diplomacy is succeeding if the terms of the deal with Iran are kept secret, and the mystery shrouding the agreement only encourages those seeking definitive action through sanctions.
An authentic revolution is now occurring in Ukraine, with uprisings in the capital city of Kyiv (Kiev) and throughout both Western and Eastern Ukraine. This groundswell of popular unrest underscores not only the loss of legitimacy suffered by Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, but also the danger of the country’s potential disintegration if a resolution is not reached soon.
The loss of the region to enemy forces caused resentment and despair. The central question asked was: "Why did we fight and die"? Veterans groups and soldiers were outraged, the public was in an uproar and the political leaders were tone-deaf.
That state of affairs refers not to Iraq in 2014, but to another American foreign intervention long ago: the 1745 battle of Louisbourg in what is today Nova Scotia, Canada. The American side lost 561 men — mostly from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and New Hampshire — in that battle and its aftermath, only to have the British trade the city back to France three years later.
That President Obama attempted to put a positive spin on his Administration's beleaguered foreign policy in his fifth State of the Union Address should have come as a surprise to no one. From the Middle East to Asia, recent months have witnessed a United States in strategic retreat and a growing list of adversaries emboldened by America's perceived weakness. So it was to be expected that the president's speech on Tuesday evening entailed a significant burnishing of his meager accomplishments abroad.
If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too? The answer clearly depends on how high the bridge is, but what the question really asks is if carelessly following others is in fact sensible.
The question comes to mind when debating whether to protect critical national infrastructure against large scale electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, events. Although EMP is a well-documented security issue, and one of the very few things that experts believe can dramatically alter our modern way of life, the U.S. government has sadly followed the lead of too many others and done little. This inaction could well prove fatal.