Copenhagen sets the stage for the president to reveal his surprising new gamesmanship for tough times: kill the world with kindness, then save the world by asking for help. Find out why America doesn't have to fix everything by itself anymore
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
He can't really fix a country with 30,000 troops because he can't really afford any more. So why is the rest of the world gaining from our taxpayer dollars and spilled blood?
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
David Hughes
Economic meltdown? Social anarchy? World War III? Go humbug yourself. Our foreign-policy analyst looks back on the 2009 fears that weren't, so we can all count our global blessings this holiday season.
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Chuck Kennedy/White House
Think he lost some pull in the health-care debate? Try heading East with a sinking dollar in your pocket. Inside Washington's tip-toe game with an equally nervous Beijing.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
Pete Souza/White House
One year ago, he rode to victory largely on the promise of healing America's standing in the eyes of Bush-torn foreigners. But has he? The fourth in a week-long series on Obama's election anniversary.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
2009 Black Star/Newscom (Obama)
Underneath all this week's he-said/she-said over the war's future lies a self-inflicted wound: Our young president has lost sight of what matters in the military conflict that will define him, and lost sight of it to another Boomer-era vice president's guilty conscience.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
SIPA via Newscom
Team Ahmadinejad may walk out of Thursday's diplomatic showdown in Geneva with a slap on the wrist, but Tehran will almost certainly keep the upper hand. A few important reminders for Obama and Co. on the impotent politics of ganging up on a nuclear rebel right now.
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Already a must read at Real Clear Politics
After a tepid U.N. Week, the White House takes to Pittsburgh with a humble plan: convince China and the rest of the world that we'll stop consuming enough to take them down with us one more time.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
Graph by Pat Carr/MCT; Source: International Monetary Fund
With U.N. Week offering him more awkward handshakes, the Right backing him into World War III scenarios, and a brand-new missile system offering him even fewer defenses, can the president play the bad diplomatic hand dealt by his predecessor? A game plan for hard-line regime talks.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
Jason Reed/Sipa Press via Newscom
Sure, the president confronted the heckling right side of the aisle on Wednesday night, but more so than the American people, it's his own Democrats that needed convincing. A blow-by-blow analysis of the fight left unfinished.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
Because Karzai's probably going to win, and Obama's still going to trust another puppet. Because so-called democracy may take the vote, but the Taliban's still going to rule many hearts and minds. Because more U.S. troops may fight harder, but Pakistan's got the last word. To America, at least, Thursday is just another day in another long, unpopular war. And that's why Obama should be worried.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
There's perhaps no one better than our resident global-threat expert to smack down what the Times calls our "new" global-warming threat. So breathe easy and learn something, because it's really just another spooky headline.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
Because the Middle East is catching up to -- and connecting with -- the rest of the world. And no matter how much peace Osama bin Laden's No. 2 tries to offer Barack Obama, there is no stopping globalization's power over extremism.
Continue reading this week's World War Room post at Esquire.com.
The violence and the videos from the world's most frightening border got you down? Here's how Obama can build a nation -- and a re-election campaign -- as the war in Afghanistan begins again.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column for Esquire.com.
By harping on the very "tragedy" and "charity" he claimed to move beyond, not only did our first African-American president fail to move his African approach much beyond that of George W. Bush -- he ceded more ground on the future of globalization to China and India. But one radical solution remains.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column for Esquire.com.
A successful and appropriate military coup, if you can call it that. Because a crisis is not a coup, and Honduras is not Iran. Here's why the uprising wasn't so bad, and how Obama can avoid opening Hugo Chavez's Latin American box of scary.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com.
The cold, post-Cold War truth about Putin's -- er, Medvedev's Moscow? It doesn't matter as much it used to. But if Obama's got his wits about him next week, he'll pretend like it does.
Continuing reading this week's World War Room column for Esquire.com.
As the beat-down goes on and the rhetoric ratchets up, President Obama's poker hand may be getting better. Dealing with an isolationist leader in the middle of a progressive uprising, after all, means you get thrown the aces.
Continue reading this week's World War Room column for Esquire.com.
As a million more protestors march on Tehran today, the days of Ayatollah "Falwell" Khamenei and President "Gingrich" Ahmadinejad are numbered. And that means Obama should keep talking to Twitter more than trying to manipulate the Middle East's dynamics, argues a leading foreign-policy expert. These guys could still go nuclear, after all.
Click here to read Tom's Esquire.com column for today.
I think this time around we want readers to both Digg and Tweet it.
Forget airplane crashes, argues a top Washington policy expert. If America doesn't want its technological progress outpaced by the rest of the world, time has come for Congress to stop blocking space funding -- and for the Obama administration to start trusting the new Wright Brothers of aerospace.
Despite the president's soaring speech on partnering with the world, one foreign-policy expert sees globalization splintering the Arab Islamic world -- to the tune of an Israeli air strike, Saudi-Iranian proxy wars, more nuclear weapons, and Obama's tough re-election battle in 2012.
This week's tests were a local propaganda success gone globally awry, and a foreign-policy expert has bad news for us: The totalitarian, war-crime-worthy Pyongyang government and its cult of personality aren't going away anytime soon -- unless, of course, Obama calls Kim Jong-Il's bluff.
It seems like the former vice-president is the one piggybacking on the new president's detainee policy spotlight, but a top foreign-policy analyst argues that, when it comes to tribunals, it's the other way around: the Obama administration is maintaining the practice of inventing justice as America sees fit.
Digg it (baby!) Despite Rhetoric, Obama Still Following Cheney's Lead in Dictatorial Justice, this week's Esquire column. Go, read, vote.
My man Matt Sullivan did a masterful edit, squeezing in a lot of great quotes from today's twin speeches by Obama and Cheney (I helped some on that, but Matt inserted the bulk). The result is an amazingly timely piece, so a good call on Matt's part to assign the topic.
The president wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Sounds like he's fighting the good fight, but Esquire.com's global-strategy expert argues that it's absolutely the wrong one -- a fight that might open globalization's door to World War III.
My weekly online column at Esquire.com. Find it Seven Reasons Why Obama's Nuke-Free Utopia Won't Work.
It's no big stretch of the imagination for a foreign-policy expert to connect the operations of small-time Somali pirates with big-time terror groups. And, as leading naval defense commanders from around the world tell him, our ports aren't yet prepared for a maritime mob's next big attack. We're not talking ransom notes here.
The Chinese may be helping the States, but can they help themselves? The view from Beijing is a tea party hell-bent on global leadership, but if the government can't give up its moribund socialist movement, America might be riding solo well after Obama.
Find it here.
It's one of those pieces where you're tempted to lump in all sorts of additional arguments, but I wanted to get the one simple point across.
Go and DiggIt! right now. I'd love to run up that total number and impress Esquire.com's staff.
This is me subbing for fellow Esquire contributing editor John Richardson, a very seriously talented journalist and writer, in his weekly "Richardson Report" (political column) at Esquire.com. Richardson is otherwise occupied and Esquire's online editor, Matt Sullivan, asked me to help out this week and next, so this is the first of a planned two columns.
Not my title (Inside the War Against Robert Gates), but then they never are. As always, the title jacks up the drama a bit but accurately captures the intent and main content of the piece--namely, Gates is going to come under a lot of attack for trying to make this momentous shift happen.
I wrote it yesterday. I wanted people to understand just how serious Gates' effort truly is.
Now here's a funny bit: military officer inside the Pentagon (in the Office of the Secretary of Defense) emails me and asks me to send him a copy of the piece. Turns out he can't access Esquire.com from a government computer there--blocked! So I archive a print version of the piece and send it to him as an attachment to pass around OSD.
God I don't miss working for the government.
My favorite memory: trying to access hate sites on my Naval War College PC and finding the sites blocked. I complained to the SysAdmin: "This is the Naval War College, not the Peace College. I need to be able to access hate sites for my work!" (at the time, I was researching millennial terrorist groups).
Alas, I was told that was against government web policy . . ..
Apparently, Esquire is too racy for the Pentagon.
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