Category Archives: Global Issues

My Most Recent OMG National Security Moment. Does it Give You the Shivers, Too? | Ricochet.com | 5.10.13

OK now, Team Ricochet, here’s a riddle: You are the U.S. government. You know, the same government whose Secretary of State and her superior could not get it together to send rescuers to the aid of our ambassador to Libya. That aside, your top concern is, as your mission statement puts it, “to provide for [...]
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Question re. Benghazi: Does this Administration Have Any Idea How to Handle a Crisis? What is the Protocol? | HughHewitt.com | 5.08.13

Today the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing on Benghazi. In case you’ve missed all the scuttlebutt, Wes Pruden, editor emeritus of the Washington Times, has an excellent curtain raiser in his paper this morning (http://tinyurl.com/ccrzea2). The committee will hear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut out her department’s counterterrorism experts [...]
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Beyond Boston | USNews.com | 4.29.30

Missed in all the talk about the Boston attacks is that key details suggest that something new is going on. Consider this about what we used to call the “Global War on Terror.” In its early stages, it was clearly a product of global forces that were almost a century old. World War I blew [...]
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Two Examples: Obama On How NOT To Lead. Thatcher On How TO Lead. | HughHewitt.com | 4.08.13

If you want a measure of what it means to have an administration in Washington that puts failed ideology first, take a look at last week’s jobs report.  If you want an example of how a president should be acting in a time like this, look at how Margaret Thatcher, who passed away this morning, [...]
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The Next Big Wars Will Be Fought Over Water | USNews.com | 2.19.13

Recently here at the Thomas Jefferson Street blog, I looked at surprises that the next four years could spring on the nation. I focused on separatist movements around the world, in Asia and Africa, of course, but also in Europe. The gist was that the world map could change quickly, dramatically, and soon if even a [...]
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The Surprises No One Sees Coming | 1.28.13 | USNews.com

Whenever a new presidential term begins, everyone asks what surprises might the next four years bring. Think of the Bush 41 presidency. On inauguration day 1989, how many American experts expected the Soviet Union to collapse before the next election? How many anticipated Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and our troops going to war in the [...]
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Is America Retreating from the World? Global Worries on 9/11 Weekend | HughHewitt.com | 09.14.11

On the tenth anniversary weekend of the 9/11 attacks, a remark to a global security conference held in Geneva underlined the urgency of the coming U.S. election. Speaking of the Arab Spring uprisings throughout the Middle East, an expert panelist from the region uttered a lament that would have been inconceivable anytime from 1945 to [...]
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The 4th of July and the Willingness of the American Heart | HughHewitt.com | 07.04.11

There has been a lot of talk of “American exceptionalism” of late.   In response to a question from a Financial Times reporter, the president said the nation is exceptional in the way that Britain and Greece are exceptional, and he wasn’t talking about levels of government debt.  Immediately his critics jumped all over him — [...]
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Honoring George H.W. Bush | HughHewitt.com | 06.07.11

Among the most unlikely and most fortunate events in American history was the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush, who will celebrate his 87th birthday on Sunday. You may consider each of those points – unlikely, very lucky – an overstatement, so let me explain. First, was Mr. Bush’s election really all that unlikely? In [...]
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New Reality in the Ancient Middle East? | HughHewitt.com | 05.0911

In the Middle East, an old and confounding puzzle may soon be solved, for the better and in an entirely unexpected way – if the United States acts wisely. About six years ago, I met with one of the senior most players in the making of our foreign policy during the prior two decades.  Our [...]
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Killing bin Laden | HughHewitt.com | 05.02.11

In 2001, speaking to Congress not long after the September 11th attacks, President George W. Bush said that the United States would bring the terrorists to justice or bring justice to the terrorists but that one way or the other justice would be done.  As President Obama reported last night, yesterday it was. The Obama [...]
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Ronald Reagan at 100 | Claremont Review of Books | Spring 2011

Early in his presidency, Ronald Reagan caused a stir in the media when he hung in the White House Cabinet Room a portrait of Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge had been persona non grata in the executive mansion since the Great Depression.  Franklin Roosevelt’s followers blamed his policies for the economic catastrophe.  By the early 1960s, with [...]
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Charlie Wilson’s War and Big Time Politicians | HughHewitt.com | 03.21.11

Here is a story about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill.  It applies to the upcoming contest for the Republican presidential nomination.  I heard it at a dinner party around the new year. A few other guests and I were gathered in a side room.  A former senior U.S. national security official was telling Cold War [...]
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Egypt: What Would Ronald Reagan Do? | HughHewitt.com | 02.07.11

Sunday marked the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth.  With the news for the past several weeks focused on popular upheavals in the Middle East, let’s ask, what would Ronald Reagan have done in a situation like the one we are now facing in Egypt and elsewhere? In fact we have a good idea how [...]
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Notes on the Upheaval in Egypt and throughout the Middle East | HughHewitt.com | 01.31.11

As street riots continue in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, Americans should keep in mind both the threat and promise in the regional upheaval.  Here are three sources of both: The Muslim Brotherhood: Some have suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved into primarily a social service organization without much political influence, a minor [...]
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Rise to power echoes back 100 years | Financial Times | 01.18.11

From Mr Clark S. Judge. Sir, Philip Stephens (“The perils of mutual miscalculation”, January 14) notes the rising power of China’s military and its recent challenges to the US. Modern China bears an unsettling resemblance to Germany before the first world war. Like China in our time, Germany enjoyed rapid industrialisation in the late 19th [...]
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Observations from Israel | HughHewitt.com | 01.03.11

For the past week, I have been visiting Jerusalem. My only prior visit was in the mid-80s when I served on the staff of then-Vice President George Bush as a speechwriter.  That time I saw much that tourists could not — a gathering of Knesset members and a trip to the demilitarized zone (both occasions [...]
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Report on Global Security Review Conference in Geneva | HughHewitt.com | 09.13.10

Every September since 2002, the International Institute for Strategic Studies has held, in Geneva, Switzerland, what it calls a Global Strategic Review.  This year’s meeting finished on Sunday. The IISS is a London-based equivalent to the U.S.’s Council on Foreign Relations – an establishment-oriented think tank on global security.  The weekend conference typically draws current [...]
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Distant Threats Closing Fast | HughHewitt.com | 07.19.10

With late Thursday’s detonation of what Drudge on Sunday called a “’Hezbollah-like’ car bomb” in Ciudad Juarez, just across our southern border from El Paso, it is worth asking, are we preparing for the national security challenges ahead? (See Drudge-linked story here: http://tiny.cc/kiqgg ) The border with Mexico is an obvious prize for anyone hoping [...]
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JFK, Abe, RR and the Firing of General Stanley McChrystal | HughHewitt.com | 06.28.10

In Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Elliot decries “the right deed for the wrong reason,” a view I have never shared.  In politics, lots of right deeds are done for lots of wrong reasons, and we are all better for it.  The president’s firing of General Stanley McChrystal is an example.  To see why, [...]
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More Storm Clouds Over US-UK Relationship | HughHewitt.com | 06.14.10

More storm clouds appeared over the US-UK relationship this weekend and as late as this morning, London time.  Today’s London Telegraph headlined “BP oil spill: Barack Obama tells David Cameron ‘I’m not out to wreck BP’”.   The White House didn’t get the memo. It seems that the president and the newly elected prime minister talked [...]
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Potential Casualty of Gulf Oil Rig Crisis: Our Most Critical Global Relationship | 06.07.10 | HughHewitt.com

The biggest long-term casualty of the administration’s mishandling of the Gulf oil rig crisis may turn out to be our most critical global security relationship. As Hugh has been on top of from the first hour, the administration has fumbled every aspect of the environmental disaster.  The president took days to even seem to notice [...]
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Diminishing Margins for Global Error | HughHewitt.com | 06.01.10

Yesterday’s Israeli-Turkish convoy incident was a warning of what the world will look like if the United States recedes as a global power. We have all read the headlines by now.  Sometime on Sunday, Israeli commandos boarded a flotilla of vessels that had sailed from Turkey on a supposedly humanitarian mission to the Gaza Strip. [...]
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The Foreign Policy Equivalent of the Health Care Overhaul | HughHewitt.com | 04.19.10

Newt Gingrich made the rounds in Washington last week.  At an American-Spectator-sponsored breakfast he talked –- among other topics –- about what he called the Obama Administration’s “fantasy foreign policy,” a major instance of which was Iran. It was, in some respects, Iran week in town. It had started out as nuke week. Monday and [...]
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Strategic Obfuscation | HughHewitt.com | 04.12.10

From all health care reform all the time, the Obama Administration has turned to all nukes all the time. Over the past six business days the White House has debuted a three-act nuclear extravaganza, from release of the Nuclear Posture Review last Tuesday to signing of the new US-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on Thursday, [...]
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Spies, Terrorists, Brits, and Us in 2010 | HughHewitt.com | 1.04.10

With the White House claiming it was on top of the global terror threat, the oversized-type front-page headline in the weekend Financial Times suggested a different story. It read: “Yemen terror summit called.” The lead paragraph reported: “Western governments have convened a top-level meeting for this month to discuss strategies to counter Yemen’s growing role [...]
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Report From London | HughHewitt.com | 11.17.09

A week ago Monday Henry Kissinger addressed a dinner in London sponsored by The Atlantic Bridge, an organization dedicated to the U.S.-U.K. special relationship in global affairs. He delivered an unmistakable warning about the direction of American foreign policy. Introducing Kissinger were Dr. Liam Fox (all but certainly the UK’s secretary of defense following the [...]
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Report From Geneva and Stockholm | HughHewitt.com | 9.21.09

As luck would have it, for the last ten days, just as the Obama Administration was upending America’s global relationships, I was in Europe and attended two conferences on international politics.  Together these conferences gave a good cross section of opinion about Mr. Obama and the U.S. in policy centers around the world. It proved [...]
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Surge Scoring: Listening to the president’s new Iraq plan | National Review Online | 01.08.07

Early on Thursday, January 11, 2007, National Review Online (NRO) posted a symposium of reactions to President Bush’s January 10th, 2007 address to the nation detailing changes of strategy in Iraq.  Clark S. Judge, managing director of the White House Writers Group, was one of eight experts NRO invited to participate and whose responses it [...]
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Urgency on the Battlefield: Further Thoughts On Our Hundred Years War | Hoover Digest | 12.12.06

Last summer, the president and his senior advisers tried to define the adversary in the wider war on terror when they spoke, for a brief time, of “Islamo-fascists.” After the predictable catcalls from the predictable circles, the administration backed off. But it may have been onto something. For if there is not necessarily a tight [...]
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Our Own Hundred Years’ War: U.S. Strategic Context, World War I to the War on Terror | Hoover Digest | 10.01.03

From the fall of the Berlin Wall until the September 11 attacks, Americans believed they were living in a largely post-conflict world—the “end of history” as Francis Fukuyama titled his famous 1992 book. Humanity was embracing an enduring state of liberal democratic happiness, a world entirely broken from the bloody past. Since the September 11 [...]
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Hegemony of the Heart: American Cultural Power in the Post-9/11 World | Policy Review | 12.08.01

The power of the United States looks very different in the aftermath of September 11. Since the attacks, the earth’s major nations — ranging from the NATO countries to Russia to China to Japan — and so many others have put aside their differences with the United States. The U.S. and Russia may even emerge, [...]
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