Washington and its NATO allies have bungled the Libya crisis. Unless they change course, they face endless entanglement in an interminable civil war in North Africa. The only worse option would be to double down and escalate.

Allied intervention in Libya makes no sense. No security issues of note are...

President Barack Obama's poll ratings for national security are falling. As they should. The war in Libya increasingly looks like America's next geopolitical train wreck.

Hope for a quick rebel victory is now a distant dream. Western officials are talking about a military stalemate with no political solution in sight....

Candidate Barack Obama ran for president on a platform of change. Many policies deserved reform, none more than President George W. Bush's propensity to initiate unnecessary wars of choice. Iraq was a debacle from the start; the shift from counter-terrorism to counter-insurgency in Afghanistan turned that conflict into a second...

Religious liberty is the first freedom. If governments will not protect this most basic liberty of conscience, they are unlikely to protect political or civil freedoms.

Promoting human rights long has been an important U.S. government priority. America obviously has done so only imperfectly -- witness persistent support for authoritarian...

Venezuela's close relationship with Iran and plans to build nuclear facilities with Russian help are raising fears in Washington of another nuclear crisis. The incoming Republican House majority may place increased pressure on the Obama administration to confront Caracas.

Washington need not panic. A 'Chávez bomb" is but a distant...

By the time 2010 came to a close 1370 Americans had died in the Afghan theater. Of those, 1309 were killed in Afghanistan, 15 in Pakistan, and one in Uzbekistan, and 45 others died elsewhere of their wounds. Nearly 500 died last year alone.

For what did they die?

Until...

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is nothing if not an expert in chutzpah. He wants Washington to release Jonathan Pollard, arrested a quarter century ago on the steps of the Israeli embassy after spying for Israel, in exchange for a freeze on West Bank settlements. Even stranger is the fact...

Religion stirs our deepest passions. That helps explain the furor over the planned construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan near Ground Zero. Why else would Americans, who normally glory in their right to practice their chosen faiths, be debating whether people can build a house of worship in the...

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele recently said the unthinkable: Afghanistan is "a war of Obama's choosing." Steele's remarks triggered a verbal slugfest between neocon proponents of endless war, such as William Kristol, and Iraq hawks turned Afghanistan doves, such as Ann Coulter.

Michael Steele was right. President...

The U.S. government long has promoted human rights. However, religious liberty has typically received minimal attention. And Washington's advocacy always has been constrained by other American objectives, such as confronting communism and terrorism.

More than a decade ago Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA). The legislation provided for...

The horrid attacks of 9/11 led to the cry: Why do they hate us? Most Americans seemed to believe that it was because we are such nice people. But the Times Square bomber reminds us that terrorism is mostly a response to U.S. government policies.

After 9/11 President George...

Nobel laureate and Burmese democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi turned 65 today. She has spent 15 of the last 21 years in prison or under house arrest. There is no end to her, or her nation's, agony in sight.

Burma, renamed Myanmar by the junta, won its independence after...

For many, probably most, statesmen war is just another policy option. A government can apply diplomatic pressure. It can impose sanctions. It can launch a military attack.

The U.S. is a democracy and Americans like to think of themselves as setting a moral standard for the world. Yet since the...

It has been weeks since the South Korean ship Cheonan sank in the Yellow Sea near the disputed boundary between South and North Korea. As yet the cause is unknown--some government critics suspect a cover-up--but after raising the wreck South Korean officials said the explosion appeared to be external. Which...

The horrid attacks of 9/11 led to the cry: Why do they hate us? The recent bombings in the Moscow subway remind us that terrorism is most often a political tool used to advance political ends.

Of course, after 9/11 President George W. Bush and his neoconservative supporters reassured Americans:...

The American military has been constantly engaged since the end of the Cold War. Washington has initiated conflict against Serbia, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. U.S. forces have occupied Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. There has been much talk of attacking Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration apparently even considered...

A bloody military battlefield in 1945, Okinawa is the subject of an equally bitter political fight today. A majority of the prefecture's residents want the American military to go elsewhere.

The U.S.-Japan alliance is almost 50 years old. Like most of Washington's military relationships, the security treaty really isn't an...

The U.S. is rarely at peace. It doesn't matter which party or which politician is in power: American military forces will be on the move, invading a Third World nation here and threatening an emerging power there.

In January 2009 Republican George W. Bush yielded to Democrat Barack Obama,...

Some things never change. The Democrats hold the White House and run Congress, but military spending is going up. It's as if George W. Bush never left office.

The Pentagon budget is the definition of wasteful, unnecessary spending. The U.S. spends almost as much as the rest of the world...

The War on Drugs continues, four decades after President Richard Nixon commenced hostilities. President Barack Obama--the third president in a row to have used illicit substances in his youth--is no drug warrior. However, he seems unlikely to challenge the disastrous new prohibition.

The president has, however, ended the...