Free Republic

An American withdrawal from the defense of Europe is undesirable for any involved nation – unless, of course, their capital city is Moscow – but it is obvious that the current incarnation of the US-Nato relationship cannot continue. The debate over military spending in Europe and in the US shows no sign of resolution, in spite of very recent spending increases from a few European countries. A wide gap persists between the 3.5 per cent of GDP commitment of the US and the below 2 per cent average in Europe. While this disparity has long been an irritant, now there...

Noted military historian Edward N Luttwak, who has penned numerous volumes on the grand strategies of empires, including that of the former Soviet Union, says that the Ukraine war will result in the political demise of Russian president and strongman Vladimir Putin due to a raft of reasons, including the prospects of an unwieldy occupation and the rising tide of discontent back home. Luttwak, a cold warrior now in his late 70s, had negotiated with Soviet generals and officials in his prime as an American interlocutor in the height of tensions between the United States and the USSR. He avers...

Nothing was more predictable about this most predictable of wars than the certain failure of Putin’s Coup de Main invasion to seize Kyiv and conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop. And yet its success was confidently predicted by Russia’s FSB domestic security service, which, instead of the SVR foreign intelligence, was given the task of sustaining the fiction that Ukraine is Russian. Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French...

The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth.

-- snip --As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant. Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him. His conversion, however, was a...

Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1973 October War, there was much joy in the Arab world because the myth of Israeli invincibility had been shattered by the surprise Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal, and the Syrian offensive that swept across the Golan Heights. Even unbiased commentators noted the failure of the Israeli air force to repeat its feats of 1967 while losing fully one-quarter of its combat aircraft to ground fire, just as hundreds of Israeli tanks were damaged or destroyed by brave Egyptian infantrymen with their hand-carried missiles and rockets. In Israel, there was harsh criticism of...

In the immediate aftermath of the 1973 October War, there was much joy in the Arab world because the myth of Israeli invincibility had been shattered by the surprise Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal, and the Syrian offensive that swept across the Golan Heights. ........ In Israel, there was harsh criticism of political and military chiefs alike, who were blamed for the loss of 3,000 soldiers in a war that ended without a clear victory. Prime Minister Golda Meir, defense minister Moshe Dayan, the chief of staff, David Elazar and the chief of military intelligence were all discredited and...

I know of no reputable expert in the United States or in Europe who trusts the constantly repeated promise of Iran’s rulers that their nuclear program will be entirely peaceful and is meant only to produce electricity. The question is what to do about this. Faced with the alarming prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons, some policy experts favor immediate preventive action, while others, of equal standing, invite us to accept what they consider to be inevitable in any case. The former call for the bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations before they can produce actual weapons. The latter,...

GUEST OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR With the prudent Colin Powell to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and with the more warlike Donald Rumsfeld remaining as secretary of defense, many feel that President Bush is set to follow an even more forceful foreign policy in his second term. As a re-elected president who will never again have to face the voters, and with loyal Republican majorities in Congress aiming to remove legislative impediments, Mr. Bush could, it seems, have a second term that would make the first seem tame. But a closer look at the history of second terms...

One of the more amusing spectacles of these less-than- amusing times is the emergence of a Kerry fan club among European anti-war enthusiasts. The letter-writing campaign of The Guardian to the voters of Clark County, Ohio, is especially silly, but is only one of many examples. Of course many people support John Kerry for the next president of the United States for a variety of reasons - he is credible when he promises to cut the Federal deficit, for example. But to support him in the hope that he would make American military policy more doveish is absurd. All the...