Bolton, Iran, and Hegemonic Hubris

by Shahed Ghoreishi On Sunday, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced that the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and Air Force bombers were rerouted to the Persian Gulf because of “new threats” emanating from Iran and its Shiite militias in Iraq… Continue Reading

Review: Walt’s Hell of Good Intentions

by Miriam Pemberton Stephen Walt knew he had a problem. A single grand strategy had dominated U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, and he was its leading scourge. He planned in his new book, The Hell… Continue Reading

The Forgotten Benefits of Offshore Balancing

by Paul R. Pillar Discussions of grand strategy often are too abstract and general to be of significant practical use in formulating sound decisions about specific foreign policy problems, but sometimes a concept drawn from such discussion points to an… Continue Reading

Henry of Arabia

by Greg Grandin The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key… Continue Reading

The Islamic State and the Terrible Twos

by John Feffer The Islamic State celebrated its one-year anniversary in customary fashion. Other organizations might sponsor parades and make speeches. ISIS spilled blood. A beheading in France, the murder of 38 tourists at a resort in Tunisia, and a… Continue Reading