John B. Judis

For anyone critical of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, there seemed much to cheer about in German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s re-election last month. Schröder, after all, had made opposition to U.S. war plans in Iraq the centerpiece of his party’s campaign. To a liberal or a progressive, there also appeared to be grounds for optimism […]

Republican candidates are beating the war drums just as support for invading Iraq is dissipating. Whereas a Gallup Poll last November revealed 74 percent in favor of a ground invasion of Iraq and 20 percent opposed, this August the percentage of those in favor plummeted to 53, with 41 percent opposed — roughly the same […]

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) can take credit for many of the Democratic Party’s successes in the 1990s. It was instrumental in deflecting Republican charges that Democrats condoned crime, favored welfare over work, and backed higher deficits and taxes. But since the November 2000 election, the DLC and its leaders in Congress have waged a […]

Among democratic politicians and political consultants, the accepted wisdom is that George W. Bush has been successful in foreign policy but a flop in domestic policy. This assessment is based more on polling than personal conviction, although some would-be presidential candidates, such as Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. John Kerry, have actually endorsed key parts […]

In the last two years of his administration, Bill Clinton hosted three conferences on the “Third Way” that included British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok, Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Three years later, only Blair and Schröder are still in office, […]

Take a good dose of free-market ideology, mix in political debts to your business backers and an overriding concern with re-election, and voila: You have the recipe for George W. Bush’s domestic policies. The imperative of re-election has taken precedence over Bush’s conservative convictions on some occasions, leading him to adopt policies like the tariffs […]

The Bush administration is on the verge of making momentous decisions in foreign policy that will shape the country’s role in the world for the next quarter-century. Nonetheless, there is an astonishing lack of public discussion of these decisions, particularly among Democrats. Most Democratic senators and House members, intimidated by Bush’s popularity, are afraid to […]

There are three good reasons why the United States should worry about Iraq: oil, weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein. Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the Mideast, and what its government does with them vitally affects the world economy. As for weapons, Iraq already possesses chemical and biological weapons and could soon […]

The United States scored a great military and diplomatic victory in Afghanistan. It drove out a hostile regime. It dealt a serious, though not fatal, blow to the al-Qaeda terrorist network and assembled a coalition against radical Islam that stretched from North Africa to East Asia. But the Bush administration now appears poised to snatch […]

The Bush administration is getting an A for its prosecution of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but it is flunking international economics. While energetically lobbying Congress for “fast track” authority (which is not a trade agreement, but merely a means of winning approval of one), it has botched every actual economic-policy challenge that […]