That the United States is facing a new Cold War with China seems more a matter of “when” than “if.” For many U.S. politicians and pundits, this framing is evocative. U.S. collective memory of the Cold War skews triumphal. Many Americans remember then-President Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, exhorting his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall!” And the Berlin Wall did fall, demolished by those it had been constructed to contain. Shortly thereafter, the Iron Curtain collapsed, with students swarming the statue of St. Wenceslas in Prague and the Pan-European Picnic at the Austrian-Hungarian border. Gradually,…

In the spring of 2004, Alexander Cockburn and I met Gore Vidal for lunch in Los Angeles.  He seemed a little down to me. It had only been a few months since Howard Austen had died and he was clearly still missing his longtime partner and the life they shared at Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. But it didn’t take long for Alex to get the great man jump-started. “So, Gore, are you having second thoughts about your Dauphin?” Cockburn was referring to Christopher Hitchens, naturally, who a few years earlier Vidal had anointed as his successor in the ranks…

While the U.S. military is congressionally required to each year assess where it needs to position its assets to address U.S. defense priorities, the U.S. Department of State lacks a process to assess and communicate how it will execute the president’s national security goals. While there have been efforts made in the past to undertake such a process, Congress has never required compliance and no regular practice has been established. To remedy this situation, Congress should consider mandating a Diplomatic Posture Review. INTRODUCTION The historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote of military strategy that the “[e]nds and means have to connect…

Beijing’s drive to modernise its military weaponry compels Washington to ‘maintain deterrence’ alongside allies and partners, says Ely Ratner ‘It’s my firm belief right now that the forces of stability are outpacing the forces of aggression and coercion,’ adds Indo-Pacific specialist   As China and North Korea dramatically increase their nuclear weapons capabilities, the US has come under pressure to respond by modernising its own atomic arsenal and mapping out an expanded nuclear umbrella and contingency planning, a senior Pentagon official said on Thursday. China, which has declined to join non-proliferation talks, could have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, up from some 400 managed by the People’s…

   This is a part of John F. Kennedy inaugural Address   " To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom--and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.