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President Trump's national security report has been released, and climate change is not on it. That is a departure from not only the Obama administration, but the George W. Bush administration, some media are noting.Since 2003, the Defense Department has indicated that climate change threatens "disruption and conflict," refugee crises, border tensions and other military conflicts. President Obama saw the threat as more dire, putting climate change in the same conversation as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in his 2015 memo. Climate change, that document warned, was contributing to "increased natural disasters, refugee flows and conflicts over...

President Trump declared Monday that the United States faced growing competition from Russia and China, two great-power rivals that he said “seek to challenge American influence, values and wealth.” But Mr. Trump, in presenting a new national security strategy that carried distinct echoes of the Cold War, said nothing about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, even though the official strategy document itself warns briefly of “Russia using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies.” Mr. Trump referred instead to a Sunday telephone call from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who thanked him for...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump will lay out a new U.S. national security strategy on Monday based on his "America First" policy and will, among other items, make clear that China is a competitor, two senior U.S. officials said on Saturday. Please see link, for full article.

The Trump administration will reverse course from previous Obama administration policy, eliminating climate change from a list of national security threats. The National Security Strategy to be released on Monday will emphasize the importance of balancing energy security with economic development and environmental protection, according to a source who has seen the document and shared excerpts of a late draft. “Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system,” a draft of the National Security Strategy slated to be released on Monday said. “U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic...

The Trump administration will reverse course from previous Obama administration policy, eliminating climate change from a list of national security threats. The National Security Strategy to be released on Monday will emphasize the importance of balancing energy security with economic development and environmental protection, according to a source who has seen the document and shared excerpts of a late draft. “Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system,” a draft of the National Security Strategy slated to be released on Monday said. “U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic...

About a year ago, I posted a thread asking for recommendations for good republican memoirs. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2981964/posts Since then I've complied quite a reading list. Going on the recommendations that were given to me(which I'm pretty grateful for), I got a few Richard Nixon books(No more Vietnams, The real war, Leaders) George Bush and Dick Cheney's books and others. I'm still to get through the last two, but I've finished reading through No more Vietnams and currently getting through the other Nixon books. But No more Vietnams really quite impressed me by how well detailed and informative it was and this...

Tarnished Brass: Is the U.S. Military Profession in Decline? Richard H. Kohn Nearly twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the American military, financed by more money than the entire rest of the world spends on its armed forces, failed to defeat insurgencies or fully suppress sectarian civil wars in two crucial countries, each with less than a tenth of the U.S. population, after overthrowing those nations’ governments in a matter of weeks. Evidence of overuse and understrength in the military abounds: the longest individual overseas deployments since World War II and repeated rotations into those deployments; the...

DFL Rep. Keith Ellison appeared on TPT's Almanac tonight to discuss the shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut. During the interview, Ellison argued for greater gun control measures. "The NRA (National Rifle Association) is strong and many of them (members of Congress) take the position that any gun position is going to lead to the position of taking away of all guns," Ellison said. "This is not rational. We need sane, sensible gun regulation and we need it now." Ellison says his top initiatives would be to address high capacity clips that hold multiple rounds of bullets and greater...

A "force structure" review that is about to be completed is likely to recommend that the Navy needs around 300 ships to meet its future demands. The study is not yet finished, but could be presented to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus as early as next week, said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert. A 300-ship Navy is slightly larger than the current fleet of 285, but it is smaller than previous recommendations. Navy leaders since 2006 have said the fleet should grow to 313 ships. During a breakfast with reporters March 16, Greenert said the review is not...

August 17, 2010 Pakistan’s Failed National Strategy Walter Russell Mead The unremitting spate of bad news from Pakistan continues; rains are still drenching the highlands and the devastation continues to spread down the river valleys.  This year’s harvest has been ruined; increasingly, it seems unlikely that farmers will be able to plant fall crops.  While visiting Pakistan earlier this month, I posted on the roots of Pakistan’s rage, doing my best to explain why so many Pakistanis are so angry with the United States.  That is one side of the story; but equally mysterious to many people and especially in...

HH: I begin with Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. You can read all of Mark’s work at www.steynonline.com. I’m going to be seeing you out this way in a couple of weeks, Mark Steyn. I find you in the Big Apple tonight. Do they have any better sense of what the American foreign policy is in Libya in New York than they do in California? MS: No. And indeed, it may be an entirely different foreign policy in New York than it is in California. This war is getting more incoherent by the day, and I think the reason...

SNIP Disrupt, Dismantle, and Defeat Al-Qa’ida and its Violent Extremist Affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Around the World The United States is waging a global campaign against al-Qa’ida and its terrorist affiliates. To disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qa’ida and its affiliates, we are pursuing a strategy that protects our homeland, secures the world’s most dangerous weapons and material, denies al-Qa’ida safe haven, and builds positive partnerships with Muslim communities around the world. Success requires a broad, sustained, and integrated campaign that judiciously applies every tool of American power—both military and civilian—as well as the concerted efforts of like-minded states and...

A so-called spiritual conference at which Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called for the U.S. border to become an "irrelevancy" was led by a slew of extremists, including a Marxist who reportedly compared the tea-party movement to Hitler. Conference speakers include radicals with deep ties to President Obama. Yesterday,*[TheBlaze.com, founded by Fox News host Glenn Beck, posted a video] from a conference led by the Network of Spiritual Progressives, or NSP, in which Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, declared to about 400 attendees that "God willing," the U.S. border will become irrelevant. Ellison continued, "And you know, the fact...

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Obama administration is considering creating a unified national security budget that would combine elements of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development with the Pentagon, according to a draft copy of a long-awaited foreign policy strategy review shared with Congress this week. Citing the joint planning required between U.S. military and civilian agencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the proposal is one of several that would put the U.S. diplomatic corps and its lead global humanitarian agency on a stronger national security footing, according to a draft of the State Department’s first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and...

For many Afghans, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal over intemperate remarks in a magazine profile has served mainly to underscore their own weariness with a conflict that has dragged on for nearly nine years with no end in sight.For some, the general's woes have sharpened fears that the Western campaign against the Taliban movement — which ruled the country for five long, harsh years — is floundering. And many Afghans think that the Americans, like the Soviet Union two decades ago and so many would-be conquerors, ultimately will fail.McChrystal won the respect, even affection, of many Afghans with...

Choices are stark: Stick to the timetable and drawdown, or stick it out until the job is done. And so far, he has signaled intent to do both. The news from Afghanistan has been bad lately. The military campaign to win control of Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, has slowed to a crawl. Taliban insurgents have filtered back into parts of southern Afghanistan that U.S. Marines had cleared in the spring. President Hamid Karzai, the erratic leader of Afghanistan's civilian government, has given only halfhearted support to the U.S.-led military effort — and has done little to clean up the...

Implicitly rejecting the antiterrorism rhetoric of the Bush administration, Brennan said that "our enemy is not terrorism, because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not terror, because terror is a state of mind and, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear." "Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists," Brennan said, because use of these religious terms would "play into the false perception" that al-Qaeda and its affiliates are "religious leaders and defending a holy cause, when in fact, they are nothing more than murderers." "...an action that eliminates a single terrorist but causes civilian...

President Obama's firing of retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair as director of national intelligence highlights a pattern of problems involving senior officials in Obama's administration who once served in the upper ranks of the military. In addition to Blair, national security adviser James L. Jones, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Eikenberry and Sudan special envoy L. Scott Gration have faced questions about their performance inside and outside the government. All four achieved the rank of admiral or general before joining the administration. White House officials say that, other than Blair, the men have largely succeeded after sometimes difficult starts,...

Best Opinion: Riehl World View, Wash. Independent, Power Line President Obama has outlined a new national security strategy rooted in diplomacy and international alliances, which some see as a repudiation of George W. Bush's policy emphasizing America's right to wage pre-emptive war. Obama previewed his new approach in a commencement address at West Point — the same place his predecessor had introduced what became known as "the Bush doctrine" in the aftermath of 9/11. Is Obama's strategy wise, or is he going soft on terrorism? (Watch Obama's comments on "international order") Obama's weak, like past Democratic presidents: "There's nothing new...

WEST POINT -- President Obama on Saturday pledged to shape a new "international order" as part of a national security strategy that emphasizes the president's belief in global institutions and America's role in promoting Democratic values around the world. "The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times,'" he said in prepared remarks. "Countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; preventing conflict and healing its wounds."