Feet of Clay
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century By George Packer • Knopf • 2019 • 608 pages • $30 George Packer’s captivating but not entirely convincing new biography, Our Man: Richard...
View ArticleSmart Power for a Rising Generation
The world is falling apart, yet foreign policy has scarcely registered in the Democratic presidential primary campaign. Stump speeches center on health care, jobs, taxes, infrastructure, and other...
View ArticleDefend Multilateralism—It’s What People Want
Donald Trump is the ultimate unilateralist, and not a particularly talented one. He undermines and demeans close allies. He pulls out of treaties and international accords designed to advance our own...
View ArticleThe Middle East: Finding Opportunities
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. Les Gelb never grew tired of the Middle East. He rejected the narrative that American power is in such decline that it can do little good in the region, as...
View ArticleThe Grand-Theory Skeptic
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. Les Gelb helped usher in the post-doctrinal phase of U.S. foreign policy. Les was instinctively pragmatic and keenly aware of the vicissitudes of our...
View ArticleHow to Use Economic Power
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. Think of economic power as the tide and military power as the storm,” Les Gelb advised in Power Rules. Having spent a lifetime navigating storms, from Vietnam...
View ArticleGrappling with Cyber Threats
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. About 20 years ago, while pondering the fate of an increasingly fragile and fragmenting world order, Les Gelb was confronted with two unwelcome proposals....
View ArticleChina: Heeding Les’s Principles
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. Les Gelb would likely not recognize today’s China as the one he depicted a decade ago in Power Rules. No longer committed to a low-profile foreign policy in...
View ArticleIraq: Admitting a Mistake
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. Les sought to learn from and shape domestic political pressures and even to reconsider where they had shaped him, sometimes for the worse. As it became clear...
View ArticleForeign Policy and the American Dream
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. The great grand strategists of history sometimes discounted the levers of economic power as mere means of raising armies and funding empires. With the end of...
View ArticleStage-Setting Power
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. Les Gelb taught us that “[power] is neither hard nor soft nor smart nor dumb. Only you can be hard, soft, smart, or dumb.” Power is about getting someone to do...
View ArticleThe Common-Sense Visionary
See the other tributes to Les Gelb here. To much of the foreign policy community, Les was like Elvis—instantly identifiable by his first name. Mentor, friend, (constructive) critic, (occasional) pain...
View ArticleWho’ll Stand for Democracy?
As America moves from Independence Day to Election Day, we are on the verge of a new Cold War with Communist China. That conflict is taking place in the shadow of a raging global pandemic and a steep...
View ArticleThe Chinese Military Threat Is Real
Observers who do not spend their days immersed in foreign policy may be experiencing whiplash. To many, it seems like the post-9/11 wars have hardly hit a pause, and already the specter of an...
View ArticleReinventing the State Department
If the United States is to re-engage the world effectively in a post-Trump era, it will need a very different State Department to do it. Over the course of 2019, in what now seems like a different era,...
View ArticleAbandoning Democracy Abroad
The phrase “leader of the free world” is anachronistic yet stubbornly evocative, hearkening back to a Cold War paradigm of Manichean struggle between free and authoritarian nations. It conjures a...
View ArticleCircumventing Congress’s War Powers
It’s strange to remember that just few months ago, in January, the United States and Iran were on the brink of open war as a consequence of the U.S. strike that killed Iranian Quds Force Commander...
View ArticleUndermining the Democratic Idea
We typically mock politicians for “paying lip service” to some ideal. The implicit criticism is that whatever they might say, those seeking support and acclaim from their fellow citizens don’t really...
View ArticleClosing the Nation’s Doors
American immigration law and policy have been transformed over the last four years like no other domain. Through the presidency of Donald Trump, restrictionists have controlled the federal government’s...
View ArticleInviting Interference in Our Elections
What kind of damage was inflicted on American democracy in 2019 when President Trump withheld nearly $400 million in approved U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and dangled a coveted White House...
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