Aaron MacLean

Drawing on the wisdom of history, philosophy, and literature to inform foreign policy.

His vast fortune, the equally vast array of women with whom he has slept, the sufficiency of the relevant equipment for such exertions, how other men are afraid of him, or are brought to tears because of him, or will bend to his will in their dealings with him: Donald Trump seems very concerned…

There I was, loitering in the amicable atmosphere of the green room for Fox and Friends early one morning this past December, preparing to join a panel of veterans to discuss the previous night's Republican debate. Of the panelists, two of us weren't backing a candidate, but a third—a strapping…

If there’s one thing Donald Trump wants veterans to know, it's that he loves us, he's going to take care of us, and by the way, he's going to rebuild the military so that it's "so big, so strong, so powerful, nobody is going to mess with us." Going into South Carolina — a state where something like…

Marines are made at a recruit depot located amid the swamps of Parris Island, tethered to the rest of the Carolina coast by a single causeway, and at another such depot in California, jammed onto a scrubby patch of ground between the San Diego International Airport and Interstate 5.

When Ash Carter stood at the podium on December 3 to reveal the most profound social change in military policy in at least a half-century, he stood alone. Absent from the defense secretary's announcement that all ground combat jobs were to be opened to women were the uniformed service chiefs and…

In March 2003, as the 1st Marine Division raced up Mesopotamia toward Baghdad, two Marines-turned-writers—Bing West and retired Major General Ray “E-Tool” Smith—accepted a helicopter ride from the assistant division commander, John F. Kelly. Though zipping over the battlefield at 150 feet was…

The recent outrage over reports of systematic child rape by Afghan security forces may be justified, but sadly there is little novelty to the reports themselves. Even the Sunday New York Times article that brought the matter into public view cited a list of earlier dispatches addressing it:…

Disputes between the political appointees who run the Pentagon and the military officers who serve there are not unheard of, but the nastiness and public nature of the fight over women in combat being waged between Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and the Marines who answer to him is unprecedented…

Harry Butcher, an aide to General Eisenhower throughout his time as supreme commander in Europe, and gossipy diarist par excellence, reports the following remarks made by the mild-mannered Kansan on July 10, 1944:

I recently returned from my first visit to Las Vegas, and naturally I was charmed by the various location-themed resorts: New York, New York; Paris, Las Vegas; The Venetian; and many more, with their outlandish designs and so-tacky-it’s-good approach to décor and entertainment. Yet I couldn’t help…

During the course of the past week the Washington Post has run a series of stories which are the product of a campaign of on-the-record interviews and coordinated on-background leaks from administration officials, the overall aim of which is to diminish General McChrystal's case for a better…

Ralph Peters had an ill-considered piece in yesterday's New York Post which seemed to blame American casualties in Afghanistan on 'politically correct' rules of engagement forced on the military by the Obama administration: In Afghanistan, our leaders are complicit in the death of each soldier,…

Consider these alternative futures for Afghanistan in the year 2014. In one future, the United States and NATO are beginning to draw down troops from the levels they reached in 2010. That was a bloody year, as were the two that followed it, but the level of violence has been dropping steadily since…

An AP story which ran Sunday covering the crash of an American jet in Afghanistan, apparently from mechanical causes, contained a significant detail about the way U.S. military spokesmen are doing business: Col. Greg Julian, a United States military spokesman, said the pilot of a second fighter…

The current issue of Vanity Fair carries a very fine piece by Sebastian Junger chronicling the efforts of the 503rd Infantry Regiment (airborne) to get some sort of control over the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. The story has some finely observed moments of infantry life: Sure enough,…

At Columbia University, political debate involving the Middle East has a predictable loopiness. I can remember visiting its Morningside Heights campus earlier in the decade and, being at that time something of an innocent in West Asian affairs, growing astonished that there were not two, but three…

ABC World News With Charles Gibson ran an ill-considered story last night trumpeting the quality of the health care provided to our nation's veterans. The opening was provocative and the agenda was clear: "Socialized medicine may sound un-American, but in fact, it's exactly what we provide to our…

Are We Rome?

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