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The Syria policy of the Obama administration is the main reason for the growth of the Islamic State (or ISIS) – and with it, for the current crisis in Iraq, and for a greatly increased danger of terrorism in Europe and America. Administration policy has fanned the rebellion in Syria and kept it going for three full years, while doing nothing to bring it to a successful close. Sometimes the administration has explicitly tried to keep the rebels in a stalemate with Assad; Secretary of State Kerry said that it was his policy to do just that, in order to...

President Obama received a tepid response from veterans as he voiced his foreign policy ideals during a speech at the American Legion’s 96th national convention in North Carolina. Staring blankly at his teleprompter, Obama recited his speech, pausing for applause that never came.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is an intriguing figure on many counts. As Americans and as conservatives we owe the Senator heartfelt thanks and applause for bringing vital issues of privacy and governmental overreach to forefront of the national debate. He, better than most Republicans, has been able to reach out beyond the tradition party base, specifically among black, libertarian and younger voters. However, his continued insistence of playing the role of "dove" on foreign policy renders him unqualified to be our Commander-in-Chief and therefore Rand Paul should not be given the 2016 GOP Presidential nomination. In comments made...

On Sunday, August 24, This Week moderator George Stephanopoulos bizarrely worried that the U.S. might take too much action in combating the terrorist group ISIS.

In every cartoon I’ve seen with an ostrich, there comes a scene where it gets scared and buries its head in the sand. Ostriches don’t do this in real life, but it came to symbolize, in cartoons at least, the concept of thinking something bad will go away if you simply ignore it. It’s foolish – some would say stupid – but it appears to be the crux of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. There are times when a president has to be president, even on vacation. This is the part of the job President Obama seems to hold in...

The crowded stadium roars its approval -- “Allah is great!” -- as a man shoots a woman in a public execution. Militants destroy a historic religious shrine. Women and children face public abuse, private violence, and daily fear. Girls, denied access to education, remain trapped in a seventh-century dystopia. A bloodthirsty terrorist organization promises death to Americans. Think this resembles the Middle East today? No, these references date to the turn of the millennium in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Today, these same toxic forces behead children, sell women into sex slavery, drive ethnic and religious minorities from their homeland. Refugees hide in...

WASHINGTON - There can be only one response to the barbaric beheading of American journalist James Foley by Islamic State terrorists. We must hunt them down and kill them. President Obama said as much in his brief remarks in the wake of the terrorists' grisly video that showed Foley's execution by a masked jihadist who spoke with a British accent and is believed to be a British citizen. The United States will "do what we must to protect our people," Obama said Wednesday. "We will be vigilant and we will be relentless" in bringing them to justice. No sooner had...

As time goes by I find reading less pleasurable, mostly due to time constraints and my continuing fading vision. I find myself listening to more stuff on my MP3 player. I also am finding those voices I want to pay attention to. For almost thirty years one of those people I listen to VERY CAREFULLY is Angelo Codevilla, whose insights into the nature of the political world are unerringly well thought through. His previous book, "America's Ruling Class," a bipartisan evisceration of the political establishment, ranks in my opinion with Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Vision," perhaps the most insightful secular...

The GOP is in the midst of a public foreign policy debate. Debate is fine, but as Republican we must agree on some basic premises. The most important premise is that instead of laughing at us, our enemies should be terrified of us. Yes, terrified. The world isn’t some sort of fantasy milieu of earnest, huggy people who want to work together to forge a brighter tomorrow for all the world’s citizens. It’s full of bad people, many of whom want us enslaved if not dead. They aren’t bad because we’re rich, or insufficiently carbon neutral, or any of that...

The White House announced Friday that President Barack Obama will jet out to the small Eastern European country of Estonia in early September, before attending a NATO meeting in Wales. The trip is likely intended to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from grabbing parts of Estonia and its two small neighbors, all of whom contain populations of ethnic Russians. All three countries are member of NATO, and are too small to block a determined Russian invasion. “In light of recent developments in Ukraine, the United States has taken steps to reassure allies in Central and Eastern Europe, and this trip...

I am constantly amazed at the tendency of some to use the perspective of hindsight to condemn decisions of those who did not possess the supernatural gift of predictive prophecy at the time they made their decisions. So when a friend asked whether I believe that those who supported George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq should feel remorse, considering the chaos and genocide occurring there now, I said "no," with some qualifications. I believe that Bush and his team based their decision to invade Iraq on the best available intelligence (as to weapons of mass destruction) and a reasonable...

Diplomacy: Great leadership isn't necessarily about intelligence, expertise or background. It's more about wisdom and judgment. Based on this, Americans should be very concerned about Secretary of State John Kerry. As the world melts into chaos and threats to the U.S. homeland multiply, America's top foreign policy official seems bizarrely, even dangerously, fixated on ... global warming. In remarks at the East-West Center in Honolulu on Wednesday, Kerry repeated his claim that climate change is "the biggest challenge ... we face right now." To which we respond: Can he be serious? In recent days, we've seen the establishment of a...

WASHINGTON - President Obama is on a two-week vacation in Martha's Vineyard, as wars rage across the Middle East and Ukraine, terrorists threaten to topple Iraq, and Republicans are on the brink of capturing the Senate. Around the country, a deepening mood of anger and anxiety permeates America's electorate, with the midterm elections a mere three months away. And in a brewing political civil war among Democrats, Hillary Clinton has unleashed a sharp attack on Obama's timid foreign policy, calling for a more muscular response to the spread of global terrorism. The president's job approval scores remain in the...

It must be exhausting for Barrack Obama. I sometimes feel worn down just reading about all the events going on in the world – I can’t even imagine how tiresome it must be, trying to avoid leadership on all those issues. Lucky for our Vacationer in Chief, he’s found a way… Apparently a healthy mix of golf and swimming is exactly what is needed to distract yourself from the chaos in the Middle East. And, to be fair, this genocidal chaos in Iraq is not completely the fault of a Nobel Laureate who plays the American President on TV. The...

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Sir Walter Scott’s warning on the complications of dishonesty seems to apply to the recent travails of Hillary Clinton, who has spent the past week or so attempting to distance herself from the disaster of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. That’s a neat trick for someone who served as Secretary of State for four of the five-plus years of the Obama administration, and the White House and its supporters have already lashed out about it, if indirectly.How is the project working? So far, conservatives aren’t buying the...

In the wake of the recent surge of violence in northern Iraq as well as the potential coup within the government, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams did his best to push the White House line that President Obama’s summer vacation was full of work.

American bluff and bombast toward Moscow has stoked Russian nationalism, convinced Putin we're weak, and fostered a dangerous realignment. PRESIDENT BARACK Obama likes to say that America and the world have progressed beyond the unpleasantness of the nineteenth century and, for that matter, much of the rest of human history. He could not be more wrong. And as a result, he is well on the way to repeating some of history’s most dangerous mistakes. Few would think to compare Obama to Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II. Nevertheless, Emperor Nicholas II, like President Obama, thought of himself as a man of...

Americans have always grown up believing we are the good guys. We fight the wars of the righteous, help the oppressed and free the world from despots and evil dictators. I am seriously wondering when all that had changed. Do I have to dig up John Wayne to do battle with evil? Isn’t anyone up to the challenge anymore? It is no longer an assumption that America is on the right side of history, because now it seems we are on the wrong one or can’t even find the sides at all. When good men ignore evil and allow it...

In a new interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, former secretary of State and probable candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Hillary Clinton went further than she has to date in openly criticizing the foreign policy of the president that she served under from 2009 to 2013. Specifically, Mrs. Clinton draws a direct line from the president’s failure to act in Syria to the rise of the Islamic State and the problems it now poses for Iraq and the rest of the region, and generally criticized the president for a having a foreign policy that had no clear sense...

Ahead of a possible presidential run, Hillary Clinton appears to be distancing herself from what she called President Barack Obama's foreign policy "failure": the decision not to intervene during the early stages of the Syrian civil war. In an interview with The Atlantic published on Sunday, the former secretary of state says the "failure" of the United States to those protesting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad led to the rise of al-Qaida-inspired groups like ISIS, the militants currently creating havoc in Syria and Iraq. “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who...