November 2 marks the centennial of Britain’s Balfour Declaration, the first international recognition of a Jewish homeland. The Declaration was enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1922, and effectively reaffirmed by a United Nations vote in 1947. The Declaration was impelled…
So the November 24 deadline for reaching a comprehensive agreement with Iran over its nuclear program—itself an extension of an earlier deadline—has come and gone with a whimper, and with another extension. The frenetic, feverish, and foolish pursuit of a deal by the Obama administration, marked by…
July 14 marks a year since President Barack Obama announced an unsigned agreement with Iran on its nuclear program, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), perhaps the most important diplomatic event in recent memory. A majority of Congress and Americans opposed it; Obama considers it his…
Sunday's New York Times Magazine story by David Samuels on President Obama's deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes has created quite a stir. It's not every day that a senior White House official brags about how the administration has successfully manipulated what he portrays as an ignorant…
Iran and Russia are right. Or, at least, they are better interpreters of international law than the Harvard Law Review editor currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. After Iran test-fired multiple ballistic missiles last week, the Obama administration has been at pains to find a legal basis…
The Islamic State executed a series of devastating attacks in Paris last Friday night. President Obama responded angrily by delivering some effective precision-guided strikes. At the Islamic terrorist organization that murdered 129 and wounded hundreds of others in Paris? Of course not; he calmly…
Sunday, October 18, isn’t just a day of baseball playoffs and pro football games. It’s “Adoption Day,” when all parties to the Iran nuclear deal must begin preparing to implement its terms. And while the Obama administration takes another opportunity to pat itself on the back for its achievement,…
It's been two weeks since a majority of Congress sought to register its disapproval of the Iran deal but fell short of the votes necessary to break a filibuster or override a presidential veto, and most politicians and commentators have moved on.
In May, President Barack Obama donned a yarmulke and spoke in a Washington, D.C., synagogue. He reminded his audience that Jeffrey Goldberg, a member of the congregation, once called him the “first Jewish president.” He claimed to be flattered by the characterization. And perhaps he was—most Jews,…
In his first Inaugural Address, President Obama offered an open hand to the Iranian regime. On July 14, announcing the nuclear deal that is the culmination of that overture, he shook a closed fist at the American people. The president came out swinging—not at the regime in Tehran but at his…
President Obama has promoted the recently agreed Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as “a comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” There are many fallacies and ambiguities in this statement.
Let’s begin by doing something we don’t often do, and that is quoting the New York Times at some length. We do this because David Sanger’s report of Thursday, May 14, makes clear how mistaken are the premises underlying President Obama’s forthcoming Iran deal:
Friday marks the seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe, or V-E, Day, when the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender after six long years of war. No one should have savored that day in 1945 more than Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister. Yet he was to a…
Is President Barack Obama right that the so-called framework nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) announced on April 2, will “cut off every pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon”? Some will assess the truth of his statement by crunching the…
Is Barack Obama another Neville Chamberlain? I’ve been reluctant to make the comparison, but as talks with Iran have unfolded, it’s become impossible not to think of the 1938 Munich conference, where Britain and France agreed that strategically and economically vital Czech territory be ceded to…
The passing of Sir Martin Gilbert at the age of 78 marked a sad milestone. He achieved popular acclaim as the official biographer of Winston Churchill, the man whose in-depth eight-volume biography served as the gold standard reference work about the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He…
President Obama couldn’t resist confiding to a recent interviewer, “I am comfortable with complexity.” In fact, he is comfortable with a kind of pseudo-complexity that lends itself to pseudo-thoughtful formulations.
The interim agreement that the United States and its partners cut with Iran last week stands as a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The Obama administration has walked away from a core objective of U.S. policy for two decades—preventing a nuclear Iran—thereby threatening…
Israelis have always lamented that Moses led the ancient Israelites to the one patch of land in the Middle East bereft of energy resources. It turns out the sea offered more promise. At the end of December, a huge natural gas discovery was confirmed in the Eastern Mediterranean inside Israel’s…
With little fanfare, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the Carter Doctrine, when President Jimmy Carter warned against “outside” control of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The U.S. effectively enforced an implicit corollary to that doctrine—to prevent control by a regional power—in the Iraq wars…
It is now widely accepted that the surge in American troops helped dramatically improve security in Iraq in the last year. But there has been less notice of, or comment on, how the surge has improved the Iraqi oil sector, which contributes more than two-thirds of the country's gross national…
IT HAS BEEN WIDELY reported since Super Tuesday that John McCain has effectively sewn up the Republican nomination for president but must still convince enough American conservatives that he stands as heir to Ronald Reagan. This poses an obstacle to his election in November. McCain might be more…
On March 27, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, predicted that Iraq's oil revenue would "finance" its reconstruction and do so "relatively soon." With wise investment and management, Wolfowitz might have been right. Even though its oil sector accounts for 95 percent of the…