The tensions between the United States and Iran reached a new level over the past week. Following a series of announcements regarding its nuclear program and tests of new weapons systems, Tehran announced on Tuesday that it was purchasing the sophisticated Tor M1 anti-aircraft missile system from Russia. On Friday, the IAEA released its highly […]

As surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, James Baker III reliably appears whenever George W. Bush finds himself in trouble. As the New York Times reports, the growing Iraq quagmire is no exception. Baker, the Secretary of State under the President's father, will lead a congressionally mandated team […]

Visiting England this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered a new twis on that staple of Bush administration communications, the faux apology. Speaking to an audience of British foreign policy wonks, Rice offered a seeming mea culpa for the situation in Iraq, "I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure." Any […]

With the July G8 summit approaching in St. Petersburg, President Bush is facing some uncomfortable questions about his close friend and budding Russian autocrat, Vladimir Putin. Speaking to Freedom House this week, Bush brushed aside suggestions that he boycott the summit, saying the two have a "personal relationship such that there is the possibility for […]

Neo-conservative founding father Irving Kristol once famously said, a neoconservative is "a liberal who's been mugged by reality." Now the once-preening adherents of the Bush Doctrine are being beaten and battered by events on the ground. First came the Sharia-influenced constitution and sectarian violence in Iraq and the Hamas government in Palestine. With the possible […]

I tend to agree with Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly that the Dubai port deal is not necessarily the grave and gathering security risk its opponents decry. (The shocking political tone-deafness is another matter altogether.) But it certainly smells bad, in no small part because of the cronyism and close ties the Bush […]

Faced with negative polls and a pessimistic American nation, President Bush's just completed 2006 State of the Union Address naturally focused on the theme of "the Hopeful Society." But like the stillborn "Ownership Society" vision before it, Bush's 2006 SOTU will be remembered not for its policy program, but for its partisan political purposes. The […]

Signs of China's rapid growth into an economic superpower are everywhere. The latest indicator comes in a report from the China National Bureau of Statistics announcing a staggering 9.9% rise in Chinese GDP in 2005. With its $2.26 trillion economy, China has leap-frogged the UK, France and Italy to become the fourth largest in the […]

Karl Rove is widely credited with being "Bush's brain." But when it comes to the administration's dangerous and unprecedented expansion of presidential war powers, John Yoo is the President's mouthpiece. Only 34, Yoo, formerly of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel and now a professor at the University of California Boalt Hall School of Law, […]

Marx once remarked that historical events occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. In the wake of the devastating earthquake that killed at least 35,000 in Pakistan and India, the United States is once again being penny wise and pound foolish. Repeating the administration's initial "stingy" response to the […]