Sovereignty is a word that is used often but it has really no specific meaning. Sovereignty today is nominal. Any number of countries that are sovereign are sovereign only nominally and relatively.
Saddam Hussein was an odious dictator, but he was also a very effective opponent of Iran. He was also a very effective opponent of al-Qaida.
Americans don't learn about the world; they don't study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don't study geography.
All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia.
It is in the U.S. interest to engage Iran in serious negotiations - on both regional security and the nuclear challenge it poses.
Because America is a democracy, public support for presidential foreign-policy decisions is essential.
If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world.
To his credit, Obama has undertaken a truly ambitious effort to redefine the United States' view of the world and to reconnect the United States with the emerging historical context of the twenty-first century. He has done this remarkably well.
Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating.
I'm all in favour of grand important speeches, but the president then has to link his sermons to a strategy.
Palestinian terrorism has to be rejected and condemned, yes. But it should not be translated defacto into a policy of support for a really increasingly brutal repression, colonial settlements and a new wall.
Both World War II and the subsequent Cold War gave America's involvement in world affairs a clear focus. The objectives of foreign policy were relatively easy to define, and they could be imbued with high moral content.
There's something troubling about a condition in which one country alone, which has roughly 5 percent of the world's population, spends more than 50 percent of the world's defense budgets. There's something weird about it.
America's decline would set in motion tectonic shifts undermining the political stability of the entire Middle East.
Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East.
We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.
Given the accelerating velocity of history, we should begin charting deliberately the next phase in its trajectory.
I think it is important to ask ourselves as citizens, not as Democrats attacking the administration, but as citizens, whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety?
It is important to ask ourselves, as citizens, whether a world power can provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety.
American power worldwide is at its historic zenith.