Thomas P. Crocker— One of the intriguing developments during the COVID-19 crisis is how absent claims about presidential power to solve national security crises have been. There have been no calls for exercising unilateral and exclusive presidential power to engage in possible extralegal action deemed necessary to save American lives
John J. Mearsheimer— Many in the West, especially among foreign policy elites, consider liberal hegemony a wise policy that states should axiomatically adopt. Spreading liberal democracy around the world is said to make eminently good sense from both a moral and a strategic perspective. For starters, it is thought to
Philippe-Joseph Salazar— Security agencies fail us each time a terror attack takes place –while their collective failure to act on intelligence is balanced by the personal bravery of citizens, first responders, and police. But there is a worse failure, which goes unnoticed in the outpouring of emotions, denunciations and verbal
Rosaleen Duffy— Since 2013 claims have been circulating that ivory is a major source of funding for Al Shabaab in Somalia, and it has even been called the “white gold of jihad.” This is a powerful message—and one that is promoted by some wildlife conservation organisations, representatives in the US
Abram de Swaan— Today’s devil incarnate is the militia known as the Islamic State. So far it has done everything in its power to deserve the title. But it is only the latest in a long sequence of adversaries that were considered by the West as the embodiment of evil,
Listen to the podcast interview for The Terror Courts on iTunesU! Follow @JessBravin On the Yale Press Podcast, in conversation with Yale University Press Director John Donatich, author Jess Bravin revealed: “It was one of the commission’s big advocates, Senator Lindsey Graham, who told me, in effect, that you needed to put
Ahmed Rashid, the internationally acclaimed journalist and author of Taliban, has been in high demand with news media lately. Rashid has a column in today’s New York Daily News, was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday while another column of his ran in the Washington Post, and last weekend,
Saturday, October 14, marks the centennial of the birth of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German-born political philosopher whose analysis of the nature of power, totalitarianism, and the “banality of evil” still resonates powerfully in our own time. “So it is no accident,” says Edward Rothstein in the New York Times,
Matthew Levitt, author of the forthcoming book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of the Jihad, was interviewed last week by the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. Levitt, who wrote his book while serving as senior fellow and director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near
An editorial in today’s New York Times states, “[President] Bush’s decision after 9/11 that he had the power to put prisoners beyond the reach of the law at his choosing was the first attempt to suspend habeas corpus on American territory since the Civil War.” It continues: The retired Justice