Robert Farley

When priorities come into conflict… Now, the US is reportedly considering a sale of the advanced stealth F-35 Lightning II to Saudi Arabia. In an effort to maintain military superiority, Israel has asked the Bush administration to purchase the the F-22 Raptor, despite the fact that foreign sales of the aircraft are currently banned by […]

Since the US-engineered fall of the Islamic Courts Union, piracy off the coast of Somalia has increased dramatically. Pirates like this area for a couple of reasons. First, because pirates need friendly bases from which to operate, they tend to do well in failed states. No one in Somalia right now is interested in preventing […]

Since I don’t really care for the Summer Olympics, I wouldn’t be terribly broken up if we decided to boycott. Moreover, since China’s purpose in pursuing the Games has always been avowedly political (this is the PRC’s coming out party) there’s nothing wrong with making a political statement on what amounts to a political statement. […]

This is interesting: NATO commanders in Afghanistan have decided to end local police training, fearing that cops in remote areas — most of whom once fought for tribal warlords — might one day turn their weapons against Kabul and the U.S.-led coalition. The change in policy perhaps signals a shift in Western attitudes towards the […]

In about twenty-five years, Europe has moved from having one mildly crazy Albanian countries to having two independent Albanian states, one of which is part of NATO, and having three others (Macedonia, Greece, and Montenegro) with substantial Albanian minorities. The Albanian diaspora, its influence evident in the 1999 Kosovo War and a number of Balkan […]

Via Yglesias, this is pretty intriguing: The last bastion of male dominance in the US Navy is about to be swept into history. While the eyes of the nation are focused on the first woman to have a shot at winning her party’s nomination for President, the Department of the Navy has unveiled a project […]

Ukraine, Georgia, and Macedonia will not be joining NATO in the immediate future, but Croatia and Albania will: National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley put the situation in a positive light. Although Georgia and Ukraine did not get what they sought, they are “clearly on the way to their membership in NATO,” he told reporters. […]

Like Matt, I don’t have any principled opposition to Ukrainian membership in NATO. It will irritate the Russians, yes, but I don’t have a terrible lot of sympathy for Russia on this point; making it more difficult for Russia to intimidate its neighbors seems, on balance, like a good thing. It also seems as if […]

Via Jason Sigger, Der Spiegel has a fantastic series on “Curveball” and German intelligence. The story is fairly simple; Curveball was looking for a way out of a refugee camp, and succeeded in doing so by making up a story that the Germans wanted to hear… Among the numerous Iraqis in the camp, the rumor […]

This is very exciting: The opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai is in talks with advisers to President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe, amid signs that some of those close to Mr. Mugabe may encourage him to resign, a Western diplomatic source and a prominent Zimbabwe political analyst said Tuesday. The negotiations about a possible transfer of […]