Stefan Halper is a senior research fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a senior fellow at the Cambridge Centre of International Studies, where he is director of the Donner Atlantic Studies Program. He is author of The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing (Basic Books).
In September 1972 President Richard Nixon played the China card. It was a brilliant gambit; in one stroke he opened U.S. relations with Communist China and chilled Beijing’s relations with Moscow. The succeeding four decades saw the Soviet system collapse and China emerge from the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to become the global […]
Afghanistan is a land mine. If not handled properly, it will blow a hole in the Obama presidency before the midterm elections. Peering down the barrel of the Afghan war, Yogi Berra would have said, “Don’t make the wrong mistake.” With Iraq consuming 4,000 American lives, 33,000 wounded thus far, and costs estimated between $1.5 […]
In his response to our article “Neoconservatism Is Not Reaganism” (posted Tuesday under the headline, “Would Ronald Reagan Have Attacked Iraq?”), Peter Wallison evinces a keen eye for the humorous. We had supposed that the spectrum of arguments for attacking Iraq was filled. We were wrong. He offers us genuinely new reasons, namely that “its […]
Following September 11, 2001, the U.S. has undertaken a remarkably ambitious foreign policy — one radically different from the philosophy on which President Bush campaigned and a notable departure from the classic principles of conservative realism in which ends are ambitious but carefully calculated, and means are sufficient for success but prudently measured. Some heart-warming […]
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