Michael Anton

Mick Mulvaney says he'd take the chief of staff job if offered, and Michael Anton defends the upcoming North Korea summit.

If Tom Bossert had any sense beforehand he would be out of a job on Tuesday, he didn’t show it over the weekend. President Trump’s homeland security adviser spoke on behalf of the White House about Syria and national security on ABC News’s This Week Sunday. And in an appearance later that day at…

Michael Anton, the spokesman for the National Security Council and an important intellectual force in the Trump administration, is leaving the White House. Eliana Johnson of Politico first reported Anton’s departure on Sunday, on the eve of John Bolton’s first day as national security adviser.…

It beggars belief to accept uncritically Pyongyang's claim that the recent North Korean nuclear test was a 2-stage H-bomb.

Anniversaries come thick and fast. But 500-year marks are still rare, reminders of a simpler time, a different world.  We look back to Columbus and forward to the Reformation without understanding the epochal revolution in between that made our time, our world.

The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Air Force general Michael Hayden is by all accounts a good man and a good officer. He has certainly done yeoman’s work since leaving government in defending controversial Bush administration interrogation and detainee policies. He didn’t…

Bob Woodward’s recent piece in the Washington Post argues that the debacle of the Iraq-WMD case should have made the Bush administration more circumspect about intelligence—and that everyone understood this lesson except the vice president. He offers the Syrian nuclear reactor destroyed by the…

I worked with Bob Woodward when serving as a press officer at the National Security Council during President George W. Bush’s first term, and I believe him to be one of the fairest and the most thorough journalists in Washington. Nonetheless, his recent piece in the Outlook section of the…

How the End Begins

Speculation about a possible attack on Iranian nuclear sites has reached a fever pitch over the summer.  The talk is so wild that even level-headed commentators on the right like Michael Barone opine aloud that perhaps Israel won’t be the instigator; rather the Obama administration might order a…

The AP is reporting that:

Sixty-nine-years ago today, 3.5 million German troops, plus another million from Nazi allies, invaded the USSR. (Geographically, the land now makes up Lithuania, Belarus, eastern Poland, Ukraine, and Moldavia).  It was the largest army ever assembled, the most ambitious invasion ever attempted, and…

I’ve never been a huge fan of Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence—nor of the institution of DNI, for that matter. A fine naval officer, Blair seemed out of his milieu as DNI, often unaware of basic facts that someone in his position should know. Part the problem is inherent in…

Just when you thought the Iran problem couldn’t get worse, it’s worse. 

The Telegraph (UK) published an astonishing bit of news over the weekend.  Actually, it’s not quite “news,” as the story has been bouncing around for some years.  But the Telegraph cites an article sanctioned by the highest authorities in Beijing, which gives the story a fresh imprimatur of…

Watching foreign diplomats run circles around America’s striped pants set is always a depressing spectacle. In recent days we’ve been treated to some doozies—for instance, Iran being elected to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women when our own (female) U.N. ambassador didn’t show up for the…

In 1988, disgruntled former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan revealed that since the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life, Nancy Reagan had consulted a San Francisco astrologer for advice on scheduling the president.  This went well beyond merely affecting the start times of…

Officially, at least, Washington has not given up on trying to stop the development of the Iranian bomb.  But, you’d hardly know that from what our officials actually do, no matter what they may say.

Remember the two missiles defense sites—one in Poland, the other in the Czech Republic—that the Obama administration cancelled last fall as a goodwill gesture to Russia?  The stated rationale at the time was: Since the sites were intended to defend America and our allies from Iranian missiles, and…

WINPAC—the CIA’s clearinghouse for data on various weapons and delivery systems—sent a new report to Congress this week that amounts to one of the intelligence community’s few sustained public statements on Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons since the widely noticed (and discredited) November…

Everything is going according to plan.  Well, almost everything.

Laura Rozen of Politico has written an assessment of Vice President Biden’s nuclear policy speech from last week that the White House is sure to love.  But that’s because she appears to have bought their line of argument a little too uncritically and has mistaken symbolism for substance.  No doubt…

Last week was a big one for nuclear news.  First, the Obama administration submitted its proposed budget for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (that’s the agency that, among other things, maintains our warheads).  Second, an unnamed administration official…

 The vice president published an op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal.  At first glance, it appears to be a more or less typical example of SOTU follow-up, in which administration officials blanket every available inch of print space and second of airtime pushing this or that component of the…

When two former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, and one of the leading Senate experts on defense issues during the latter half of the 20th century join their voices to speak as one on an issue, one’s instinct is to pay attention.  When two of them happen to be Democrats and two…

Today at 10:00 a.m., the so-called "doomsday clock"—a masterful PR effort run by the anti-nuclear Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—will be reset for only the 19th time in its 62-year history.

When I saw Monday’s LA Times story about the debate on the Nuclear Posture Review, I didn’t make much of it because it didn’t reveal anything that someone who has been following the issue wouldn’t already know.

According to former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, when 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apprehended in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003, his first response to his captors was to sneer "I'll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer." No doubt he…

Nearly all of the voluminous commentary on the death of Robert McNamara has focused on his conduct of the Vietnam war. This is as inevitable as it is natural. Vietnam was not merely McNamara's Egyptian campaign, Austerlitz, Moscow retreat, and Waterloo all rolled into one. It was also the defining…

Gary Hart is not a politician; he just played one in the United States Senate. He is, he wants us to know, a patriot -- an enlightened leader of his people who loves the common good (or, as he likes to put it, the "national interest") more than his own interest and who wishes, above all, to effect…

Look! There's Pat Sajak! And there, there's Ron Silver, fresh from his triumph as Henry Kissinger on TNT, having a cup of coffee. That's Linda Obst, the producer of Sleepless in Seattle. And over there, reclining in his chestnut leather sportsjacket, is John McTiernan, director of Die Hards 1 & 3…

Even the most enthusiastic proponent of the conservative political realignment must acknowledge that legislation alone will not be enough to ensure its ultimate success. Most successful political movments this century have been blessed with a great asset that conservatism -- in all its guises --…