John B. Judis

Our Iraqi occupation not only rejects American foreign policy since Wilson, it’s a throwback to the great power imperialism that led to World War I.

There were certainly reasons to despair after the 2004 election — chiefly, the awful thought that George W. Bush and a Republican Congress could find the means to exceed the egregious irresponsibility, the xenophobia, the sheer partisan pettiness, and the callous disregard for life and law of Bush’s first term. But the election itself, and […]

Before the Iraq War, administration neoconservatives were fond of saying, “The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad.” In the wake of the war and of George W. Bush’s June 4 summit meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, many people in Washington think they were right. Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in The Washington Post on […]

In justifying their war against Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters based their case primarily on the threat to the United States posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda. But to date, American and British troops have found no signs of a chemical-, biological- or, more importantly, a nuclear-weapons program […]

During the Iran-Contra scandal, it became clear that private citizens had been playing a critical role in the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Some of them, such as Richard Secord, had previously been government officials; others, such as Michael Ledeen, had briefly been advisers or consultants. They were not known to the public or to Congress, […]

Much of the furious debate at the United Nations has been over whether inspectors are capable of disarming Iraq, but what really divides the United States from its chief critics on the Security Council are two diametrically opposed scenarios of a post-war Iraq. The American scenario, dubbed “new dawn,” sees a transformed Iraq leading a […]

When a country goes to war, one question that already should have been answered is “why?” But many people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are genuinely perplexed about why the Bush administration is so determined, even at the cost of war,to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In their public statements, administration officials have, […]

As George Kennan observed 50 years ago in American Diplomacy, American foreign policy has been periodically affected by bouts of evangelical idealism, which date from the country’s Puritan founding and which have led Americans to seek to transform the world in our image — and to demonize any country or regime that stands in the […]

Since taking office, George W. Bush has aggressively rolled back environmental regulations and initiatives. What he hasn’t achieved by changing the rules he has done by reducing the staff devoted to enforcing them. According to a study by AIR Daily, the number of air-quality inspectors fell by 12 percent this year, and the number of […]