Renewing American Leadership

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Review Essay

Honolulu, Harvard, and Hyde Park

Walter Russell Mead

David Remnick’s The Bridge delivers fresh insights about Barack Obama’s personal and political odyssey -- particularly when it comes to understanding the degree to which Obama is a product of New England’s commitment to social and global reform.

Snapshot

Obama's Turn on Nuclear Weapons

Joseph Cirincione

Shortly after taking office, Obama traveled to Prague to lay out a vision of a world "free of nuclear weapons." Now the Pentagon has prepared a top-secret memo for the White House, and the president has to decide whether to maintain or shrink the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Now he must decide whether he will uphold the principles he once preached.

Essay

Scoring Obama's Foreign Policy

Martin Indyk, Kenneth Lieberthal, and Michael E. O'Hanlon

The Obama administration’s foreign policy has tried to reconcile the president’s lofty vision with his innate realism and political caution. And given the domestic and global situations Obama has faced, pragmatism has dominated. Judged by the standard of protecting U.S. interests, things have worked out quite well; judged by the standard of midwifing a new global order, they remain a work in progress.

Essay

Campaign Tips From Cicero

Quintus Tullius Cicero and James Carville

In 64 BC, the great Roman lawyer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero ran for consul. His younger brother, Quintus, thought Marcus had a chance -- as long as he ran a good campaign. So Quintus wrote a detailed strategy memo laying out just what Marcus needed to do to win. It’s the best guide to electioneering you’ll ever read, presented here with a commentary by the legendary political consultant James Carville.

COMMON SECURITY FOR OUR COMMON HUMANITY

At moments of great peril in the last century, American leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy managed both to protect the American people and to expand opportunity for the next generation. What is more, they ensured that America, by deed and example, led and lifted the world -- that we stood for and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond our borders.

As Roosevelt built the most formidable military the world had ever seen, his Four Freedoms gave purpose to our struggle against fascism. Truman championed a bold new architecture to respond to the Soviet threat -- one that paired military strength with the Marshall Plan and helped secure the peace and well-being of nations around the world. As colonialism crumbled and the Soviet Union achieved effective nuclear parity, Kennedy modernized our military doctrine, strengthened our conventional forces, and created the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress. They used our strengths to show people everywhere America at its best.

Today, we are again called to provide visionary leadership. This century's threats are at least as dangerous as and in some ways more complex than those we have confronted in the past. They come from weapons that can kill on a mass scale and from global terrorists who respond to alienation or perceived injustice with murderous nihilism. They come from rogue states allied to terrorists and from rising powers that could challenge both America and the international foundation of liberal democracy. They come from weak states that cannot control their territory or provide for their people. And they come from a warming planet that will spur new diseases, spawn more devastating natural disasters, and catalyze deadly conflicts...