"Recent reports suggest the US is considering a 'bloody nose' strike — highly visible but materially limited — on North Korea to make a statement, and that President Donald Trump's secretaries of state and defense are the key figures holding him back. Experts have panned the idea of a strike on North Korea with near unanimity, but the Trump administration has consistently touted the use of force as a potential tool."
"American forces went to Syria with the declared objective of pushing the ISIS terror gang out of territory it had seized there. This has been accomplished. It is an ideal moment for the U.S. to declare victory and depart. That, however, would be hauling down our flag. By Roosevelt’s logic — and evidently Tillerson’s — American soldiers should not be withdrawn from any country where they have ever been deployed."
"Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan: This trifecta of semi-permanent US military engagements reflects the extraordinary power of the Pentagon to sway even a president who had made opposition to such policies a central element of his campaign."
"Still fighting the culture wars, Reagan and his advisers decided early on that marijuana was the biggest drug threat facing the country. And so a couple of years into his first term, federal and California officials came up with a battle plan to target cultivation in the northern part of the state. The phrase 'battle plan' isn’t much of an exaggeration here."
"President Trump's new Nuclear Posture Review is expected to call for new 'low-yield' nuclear weapons and an expansion of the scenarios in which the US may use a nuclear 'first strike.' Is this a good idea? We discuss in today's Liberty Report..."
"Trump and his unabashedly Iranophobic generals have allowed the United States to become a patsy for Saudi Arabia, actively abetting or tacitly endorsing MBS’s ambitions. Yet whatever the administration’s purported intent, throwing in with the Crown Prince will only exacerbate the disorder that previous U.S. administrations have done so much to create."
"If '#Resistance' means anything, at a minimum it should entail a refusal to trust a dangerous authoritarian to wield vast power with little checks or oversight."
"Dr. Martin Luther King's stance against the Vietnam War led him to be shunned by much of the liberal establishment that applauded his work on civil rights in the US. Was challenging the US warfare state the third rail that cost MLK his life?"
"In just one extraordinary year, Trump has destabilized the delicate duality that has long been the foundation for U.S. foreign policy: favoring war over diplomacy, the Pentagon over the State Department, and narrow national interest over international leadership. But in a globalizing world interconnected by trade, the Internet, and the rapid proliferation of nuclear-armed missiles, walls won’t work. There can be no Fortress America."
"The [Iran] episode exposes a malady of American foreign policy. It lacks consistency, coherence and moral clarity, treats friends and adversaries by separate standards, and is reflexively interventionist. Thus has America lost much of the near-universal admiration and respect she enjoyed at the close of the Cold War. This hubristic generation has kicked it all away."