Vance Serchuk is a foreign policy and national security analyst who contributed to The Weekly Standard from 2003 to 2015. His articles covered a wide range of international affairs topics, including U.S.-India relations, African geopolitics, and global security challenges. He has served as an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and as a foreign policy advisor in government.
Just after midnight on August 2, 1990, an invasion force of approximately 100,000 Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait. As mechanized and armored Republican Guard divisions breached the border and sped southward across the desert, Iraqi Special Forces commandos launched airborne and amphibious assaults…
Tokyo
After holding Mogadishu for six months, Somalia's Islamists have been swept from power, ousted in a blitzkrieg attack by the Ethiopian military. The nature of the emerging political order in Somalia remains profoundly uncertain, with the retreating Islamists threatening to wage an Iraq-style…
The Punishment of Virtue
WHEN RIOTING suddenly broke out in Kabul in May, sparked by a fatal traffic accident involving the U.S. military, most in the city were taken by surprise. Less shocking, alas, was the response of the Afghan National Police, or ANP, to the unrest. Rather than dispersing the mobs and restoring order,…
WILL AMERICA'S PARTNERSHIP WITH INDIA fall victim to politics? The Bush administration's proposed agreement on civil nuclear cooperation with New Delhi--once predicted to win approval from Congress as early as June--is under a growing cloud. With the November midterm elections fast approaching, the…
The White Man's Burden
WITH SECTARIAN VIOLENCE flaring up across Iraq, the release late last month of the Pentagon's third, semi-regular report to Congress on the progress of the war could hardly have come at a better time. "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" is--as its title suggests--an attempt to lay down…
AFTER TWO YEARS of patient diplomacy with Iran, representatives of the E.U.-3--Germany, France, and Great Britain--recently acknowledged that their negotiations with the Islamic Republic had reached a "dead end." Spurred by Teheran's decision to restart work at its enrichment facility in Natanz,…
WHILE AMERICAN POLITICIANS SPENT THE last months of 2005 arguing over the U.S. military presence in Iraq, their counterparts in the Netherlands were debating the future of the Dutch contingent in Afghanistan. At issue is The Hague's pledge to deploy slightly over 1,000 Dutch troops to the restive…
FOOL ME ONCE, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. When it comes to detaining prisoners seized in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the other fronts of the terror war, the Pentagon's "just-trust-us" mentality continues to undercut American strategy. Thankfully, Congress is at last on the verge of doing…
"WE ARE ABOUT TO drive a stake into the heart of the Taliban," the U.S. military official in Kabul confidently declared. It was late January, three months after Afghanistan had successfully held its first democratic presidential election, and the mood in the capital--at least among American…
LAST WEEK'S TERRORIST ATTACKS in London cast a pall over the meeting of the G-8 heads of state in Gleneagles. The bombings instantly overshadowed the summit's scheduled talks, an intrusion of history--in all its barbarism and violence--into what would otherwise have been a carefully-managed and…
Ghazni, Afghanistan
Blood From Stones
AT THE HEART of this fall's presidential campaign was a policy debate about the meaning of the "global war on terror." Is it, as George W. Bush came to understand, a struggle for the political future of the greater Middle East--a contest between liberalism and radical Islam to supplant the…
IN REACTION to Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement this week of plans to curtail democratic institutions in Russia and assert increased political control over the country from Moscow, Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry criticized President Bush for having "taken his eye…
WITH HIS JULY 4 OP-ED in the Washington Post, "A Realistic Path in Iraq," presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry lays claim to being the genuinely conservative foreign-policy voice in this fall's election. Arguing that, in Iraq and in the greater Middle East, the United States…
ON CHRISTMAS DAY in Erbil--the semi-official capital of the semi-official entity known as Iraqi Kurdistan--over 100 delegates from across northern Iraq gathered in a meeting hall that resembled nothing so much as an inner city high school auditorium, complete with rows of battered faux-leather…
THE OLD BROMIDE about generals preparing to fight the last war misses the point: What military leaders can't resist is the impulse to plan for the war they'd like to fight. The current leaders of the Pentagon seem particularly susceptible to this impulse. The idea of military "transformation" is…