Robert Zarate is a foreign policy and defense analyst who contributed to The Weekly Standard from 2007 to 2013. His writing for the magazine focused extensively on national defense spending, military budget cuts, sequestration, and national security threats including Syria's nuclear activities. He served as a policy advisor at the Foreign Policy Initiative, where he worked on issues of U.S. defense policy and international security.
Former senator Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be the next secretary of defense, has drawn sharp criticism for championing even deeper cuts to military spending, making statements hostile or indifferent to Israel, denigrating pro-Israel groups in the United States as “the Jewish lobby,”…
In a letter to the White House, four members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked President Obama whether recent disclosures to the press of classified information on the Benghazi terrorist attacks were authorized by the Obama administration or illegal leaks subject to…
Four senators sent a letter to the White House today, urging President Obama and his advisers to answer the growing list of questions about the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, which lawmakers have posed in writing to his administration over the last month. Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey…
President Barack Obama asserted at Wednesday’s presidential debate that Governor Mitt Romney wants to spend “$2 trillion in additional spending that the military is not asking for.” Obama’s assertion echoes his earlier claim at the Democratic National Convention that Romney wants to “spend more…
Reporting from inside Syria, Time magazine correspondent Rania Abouzeid counters the claim that extremists currently dominate the armed resistance against the Assad regime. Having interviewed a number of Islamist and non-Islamist rebels in Syria’s Idlib province, she writes: “There has been much…
House of Representatives lawmakers are set to debate an annual bill that authorizes military programs later this week, and a handful of Democrats have set their sights on killing provisions that would support efforts to build missile defenses by 2015 to protect America’s East Coast from future…
With the House of Representatives set to vote this month on a bill to reverse the trillion-dollar “sequestration” cuts to the military, Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Virginia) will be launching his “Defending Our Defenders” listening tour in Chesapeake, Virginia, on May 14, 2012 at 6:30 p.m. Forbes,…
Bashar al-Assad’s security forces have brazenly slaughtered more than 10,000 Syrian civilians, and injured or detained tens of thousands more, since the anti-regime protests began in March 2011. Despite these facts, America’s policy towards Syria—a terror-sponsoring government that is Iran’s…
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated President Obama’s August 2011 demand that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad step down. However, neither explained how this…
President Obama didn’t intend the world to hear him tell outgoing Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he’d have “more flexibility” to accommodate the Kremlin’s concerns about missile defense and other issues after the election in November. But as his now infamous meeting with Medvedev in Seoul…
The United Nations reports that over 9,000 have been killed in Syria during the anti-regime uprising that has been going on for the last year. So far, however, President Obama has taken a hands-off approach, relying exclusively on diplomacy and sanctions.
Congressman Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio, sent a letter to President Obama demanding an “urgent explanation of [his] comments to [Russian] President Medvedev in Seoul this morning,” only hours after a hot microphone caught Obama privately telling Medvedev this morning that he’ll have “more…
As Washington wrangles over the size of the federal budget in a time of fiscal austerity, Congress is debating whether to hold President Obama to his promise of adequately funding the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal and infrastructure in exchange for the Senate’s passage of the…
In a Politico op-ed today, Congressman Michael Turner (R, Ohio) criticizes the Obama administration’s lack of transparency on its controversial study of future reductions to America’s nuclear deterrent—including one option that would cut the arsenal by 80 percent, down to as few as 300 deployed…
Thirty-four lawmakers sent a letter to the White House on Thursday in response to news reports that President Obama had ordered his staff to study the option of reducing America’s nuclear deterrent by 80 percent—down to as few as 300 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. The United States currently…
In an op-ed published last week, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton and Congressman Ed Markey (D, Mass.) criticize President Obama for abandoning the effort to prevent a post-Iran nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Known as the new “gold standard” for nuclear nonproliferation, this effort is…
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler debunks the false claim made by supporters of nuclear disarmament that the United States will spend $700 billion on nuclear weapons programs in the next decade.
Recent Republican presidential candidate debates have featured a 30-second ad sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in support of more cuts to defense spending. The commercial, however, is misleading.
At a House Armed Services Committee yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey warned against making further reductions to future defense spending, telling lawmakers that further cuts will “truly devastate our national defense.”
Unless Congress passes a law to reduce the long-term federal deficit by more than $1.2 trillion by January 2012, the debt limit deal, agreed upon last month, will result in two major cuts to the military budget.
“Extraordinarily difficult and very high risk.” That’s how General Martin Dempsey, the Army’s chief of staff and Obama’s pick to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bluntly described proposals by the president and certain lawmakers to cut national security spending by anywhere from $400 billion to $1…
A confidential copy of a draft resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would call for Syria to face consequences for its nuclear transgressions, is now being privately circulated among the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, in the hopes of getting it approved by the…
Does Syria’s recent offer of transparency to the world’s atomic watchdog represent a change of heart, or is it simply a tactic meant to prevent (or delay) punishment for its nuclear transgressions? History tells us that it’s likely the latter.
Contrary to what the Obama administration might hope, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is no reformer. Even with the Syrian government’s murderous crackdown against its unarmed opposition, the White House is not getting the message. Yet Assad’s true colors should have been plainly obvious at least…
One might be tempted to think of Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter as simply the wife of the late nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter. However, it would be just as accurate to think of Albert as Roberta's husband--she did, after all, get him a job in 1951 at a relatively new defense think tank where she…