I'm afraid I haven't been holding up my end of this discussion very well because it turned out that I am traveling to Europe just as things got underway. I'm here in Paris for some meetings that include some very serious intellectual-activist-elites from across Europe. A very distinguished group of people, and I feel a bit of a...
Let me raise the uncomfortable subject of the Clinton Administration's commitment to international law. Chollet and Goldgeier offer three episodes that I think shed light on President Clinton’s commitment to international law and the use of force. First, with the Rwandan genocide, Clinton failed to intervene in Rwanda or even treat the situation seriously. Tony Lake described...
This deeply unsettling experiment starts on a typical Monday morning on Manhattan's leafy Upper West Side, where commuters stroll by Starbucks and Central Park. At 7:10 a.m., I'm off to see how long it takes to buy a child slave.So begins a report by ABC's Nightline. By 5:00 pm the journalist is in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and he has made a...
More than a year ago the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs convened a National War Powers Commission, which today unanimously issued its report on improving future relations between the Executive and Legislature when it comes to involving U.S. forces in conflict. The bipartisan Commission was chaired by Former Secretaries of State James A. Baker III and...
Man, what kind of sweatshop is the University of Chicago?From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered...
Following up on my previous post, and as Peggy pointed out, one of the themes in America Between the Wars is the struggle to “define the era” since the fall of the Berlin Wall and to provide a grand strategy, much in the same way as George Kennan’s “X” article had provided the intellectual underpinnings for the policy of containment...
One theme running throughout America Between the Wars is constant debate and struggle regarding the proper role of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy. A tension over pushing democratic reform has long existed within both American liberalism and conservatism, and pervades each presidential administration discussed in the book. My question is: where will the next president take it? Chollet...
Thanks to Roger Alford, Matt Waxman, Ken Anderson, Chris Borgen, and Peggy McGuiness for their interesting posts today. I wanted to respond to Roger’s very astute observation about 1993. We do write about the disaster on the national security side, but as he notes, Clinton also got NAFTA passed that year, which was a major achievement. It was really...
Before I offer my initial thoughts about the “Between the Wars,” it is only fair that I join Ken in disclosing my own biases. I joined the Foreign Service the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and left the State Department at the beginning of the second Clinton term. My final post, fittingly enough, was in Berlin. ...
Before turning to some of the broader themes that Chollet and Goldgeier have set out, in this post I want to focus our readers on two quotes from one person. The authors describe how, in the days after the 1991 Gulf War, an interested party was asked about why we did not drive all the way to Baghdad and oust...
I greatly enjoyed Chollet and Goldgeier's book on American Between the Wars. I have several thoughts about the book, but I wanted to begin by discussing their thesis that from a foreign policy perspective President Clinton had a disastorous first year in office. They write: "January 1994 brought an end to a very bad first year in...
This superb book is must-reading for students of contemporary foreign policy and for anyone hoping to be part of the incoming foreign policy team of the next president. America Between the Wars is a book about ideas – the foreign policy and national security ideas that presidential administrations bring with them into office, and the competition of ideas within administrations and...
