Articles

The problem of North Korea has bedeviled policy makers in Washington for years. The notoriously opaque Stalinist state that sits above the 38th Parallel represents one of the world’s most intractable security dilemmas. Starting this spring, however, the challenge posed by Pyongyang has grown more acute. The defiant series of nuclear and ballistic tests carried out by Kim Jong Il in May has brought into sharp focus the growing threat posed by the North’s strategic arsenal—and precipitated a frenzy of international activity in response.

What's in a name? This spring, the Obama administration ignited a political firestorm when it replaced the phrase "war on terror" with the more antiseptic "overseas contingency operations." The turn of phrase led critics of the administration to conclude that, when it came to confronting our terrorist foes, the White House was trading substance for style.

Recent events have done little to dispel that notion. As John Brennan, the president's top adviser on counterterrorism, told an audience at the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies back in August, Team Obama defines the current conflict quite differently from its predecessor - as neither a "war on terrorism" nor a "global" struggle.

In the eight years since Sept. 11, the U.S. has devoted a great deal of funding and thinking to the struggle against radical Islam. There's at least one area where it's fallen short, though: It hasn't mounted a serious economic challenge to the activities and ideologies of terrorist groups on a grassroots level.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Obama administration's decision last Thursday to scrap missile-defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic is that it was so long in coming. Mr. Obama has defended his decision on both technical and financial grounds. The Bush administration's plans to deploy ground-based interceptors in Poland and early warning radars in the Czech Republic were targeted as part of his campaign pledge to eliminate billions of dollars in missile-defense spending. Instead, the White House now has pledged to develop a new theater and sea-based missile-defense architecture for Europe that "will provide stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America's allies." But what about defense of America?

When the Fatah Central Committee convened its sixth party conference last month in Bethlehem -- the first such meeting in twenty years and the first ever held on Palestinian Authority territory -- one might have expected a bit of soul-searching. After all, more than two decades after the Palestine Liberation Organization and its main political faction met America's prerequisites for a dialogue by rhetorically recognizing Israel's right to exist, renouncing terrorism, and accepting United Nations Resolution 242, a casual observer might assume that a re-examination of revolutionary principles was in order. Yet nothing of the sort occurred.