Tim Fernholz

The news that Iraq has a $79 billion budget surplus due to the rising cost of oil, and that most of it is in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, is fascinating. At the same time, very little of that money is being spent on reconstruction and development, or even on maintenance for previously […]

Jon Cohn flags a fundraising e-mail from the McCain campaign that portrays Obama as someone who will spend taxpayer dollars … on foreign aid! Check it: It seems the Democrats’ would-be president of the United States of America really believes that the rest of the world’s problems, and approval, trump the interests of Americans when […]

O’Hanlon, Pollack and Biddle unveil their latest on Iraq in The New York Times today. They are wise enough to recognize the difference between the presidential candidates’ Iraq policies, but their own proposal depends on the problematic idea that the U.S. needs to have troops in place to outwait various militant groups who otherwise would […]

Via Spencer, this Post article on the Pentagon’s new program to fund social science research makes academics opposing it look foolish. Look, a huge complaint about the Department of Defense and our foreign policy apparatus in the last few years has been that they’ve ignored expert information, much to the country’s detriment. And now that […]

Separate from the issue of whether the U.S. should send more troops to Afghanistan, Adam raises the question of whether domestic political priorities are the real drivers behind both presidential candidates’ support of doing so. I’ll give you John McCain, whose decision to support Afghanistan troop increases seemed more an attempt to prevent Obama from […]

There’s a growing cottage industry of skepticism about recommitting military and development resources to Afghanistan, as both Presidential contenders plan to do. The Taliban has reconstituted itself relatively effectively from its base in Western Pakistan, and as this article points out, presents a serious problem — the linkages between Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and Pakistan’s […]

Various Dems and observers have been getting nervous of late that Obama hasn’t been fighting back hard enough against the various attacks from the McCain campaign. Presumably, this straightforwardly negative ad, coming as part of Obama’s energy policy roll-out, will be greeted with a sigh of relief: The McCain campaign already has Mitt Romney out […]

The Washington Post summons forth a huge psychopolitical profile of John McCain today, which manages to simultaneously trot out nearly every cliche about the man, from adviser Mark Salter to hero Robert Jordan, while actually challenging him on the issues. One small insight: Salter is quoted saying that “things go on inside McCain’s head that […]

The Great Game was what they used to call geopolitical intrigue in the Hindu Kush, and once again it returns to the news. Reports confirm that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was involved in bombing the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing 54. People in the know saw this coming, […]