Outside the Beltway

If the President is going to increase American involvement in the Middle East, he needs to address some fundamental questions first.

Congress seems ready to avoid having to vote on expanded attacks against the Islamic State

Dan Froomkin says Obama is as bad as Bush, if not worse.

Massive US intervention has for now liberated Amerli, averting humanitarian disaster. Another crisis looms.

Is the West next in ISIS’s crosshairs?

As talk begins of expanding the war against ISIS into Syria, it is becoming long past time for Congress to exercise its Constitutional function.

Some have argued that there is an historical bias against political parties holding on to the White House for more than two terms. As with most commonly held ideas, that simply isn’t true.

American journalist James Foley has been beheaded by the terrorist network calling itself the Islamic State.

Some on the left are saying that Hillary Clinton isn’t doing enough to help Democrats in 2014.

The chattering class is chattering about the President’s vacation again. It really is quite tiresome.

The shooting of Michael Brown is just another example of an ongoing problem.

Dispelling a rising myth,

The United States is, in fact, doing the exact opposite.

Does Hillary Clinton remember that she was Secretary of State for four years?

Iraq’s problems cannot be fixed by the United States.

It’s hard for a party to win four straight presidential elections. The Democrats may pull it off.

President Obama doesn’t seem to have any idea what he wants to do in Iraq.

End game? Or the potential spark of a wider war?

Institutional reform does take place in other democracies.

Americans have become deeply cynical about government. To some extent that is a good thing, but it’s reaching unhealthy levels.

For the second time in just over ten years, the United States is involved in military action in Iraq.

Fairly or not, the President has created the impression that he is not a good leader, and there’s not much he can do about it at this point.

Add Libya to the list of the world’s trouble spots.

My latest for War on the Rocks: “Don’t Believe Everything You Read in the Papers.”

Relying on the policies of a man who was President in a very different time is not a substitute for a rational foreign policy.

George Will has come under criticism for pointing out what seems to be an undeniable fact.

Crisis seems to be brewing all over the world, but the American people aren’t persuaded that it’s necessary for the United States to act.

Basically, the answer is that nobody really thought there was much of a risk that a plane could be shot down.

A lot of Republicans dislike the President enough to think that he should be removed from office, but will that make impeachment more likely to happen?

Rick Perry and Rand Paul are highlighting what looks to be a coming battle inside the GOP over foreign policy.

In a new survey, Americans cite politics and the news as the biggest sources of stress in their lives.

Iraq continues to fall apart.

A new poll shows that Americans don’t buy into the idea of “American exceptionalism” as much as they used to. That’s a positive development rather than a negative one.

More than any other language, English words are being adopted, and transformed, by other languages.

Americans disapprove of how the President is handling Iraq, but they don’t like what his critics are proposing either.

The First World War played an intriguing role in the birth of the radical Islam we are dealing with today.

Public faith in government institutions is at all all time low.

Is ISIS’s reach about to exceed its grasp?

For some reason, President Obama wants to arm so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels.