For roughly a decade now, I’ve been advocating that America needs to be unsentimental in choosing its military allies for the 21st century. Europe and Japan are aging and seem increasingly less willing to protect their interests abroad, while India and China are becoming budding superpowers with global interests that, to a stunning degree, overlap with America’s. Most pointedly, we live in an age of “frontier integration” triggered by globalization’s rapid advance, a process in which China and India, and not the “old” West, are the two rising pillars. So it makes sense for America to focus future alliance-building efforts [...]
After a bruising confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Armed Service Committee, former Sen. Chuck Hagel, the nominee for the position of secretary of defense in the second-term Obama administration, may be reconsidering whether he truly wants the position. But the stress he endured on the hot seat before his former colleagues may pale in comparison to the challenges that he — or anyone else nominated for the position should he fail to be confirmed — will have to cope with in the coming years. America’s ongoing fiscal crisis and the seeming inability of its executive and legislative branches [...]
Prior to the December inauguration of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, the United States intervened to halt the rise of Gen. Moises Garcia Ochoa, who was expected to become Mexico’s next minister of defense, according to reporting by the New York Times. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Anthony Wayne met with Pena Nieto’s senior aides to express American concerns over the possible promotion of the general, including suspicions that he had ties to drug traffickers. “This is not unprecedented, and it doesn’t just apply to Mexico. The United States, over the decades, has done this with a number of Latin American [...]
