Cruz embraces the dark side of Reagan’s legacy By John Bradshaw, NSN Executive Director The Hill | Feb. 9, 2016 Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) continuing infatuation with dictators reflects a long and dangerous tradition among conservative politicians. Cruz has recently expressed his admiration for Egypt’s leader Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s hardline rule, saying that while al-Sisi “may not be a champion of democracy” he has kept the Muslim Brotherhood in line. He has also defended the legitimacy of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, pined for the days when Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya, and regretted the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Cruz justifies his endorsement of these odious regimes by claiming that they are a bulwark against terrorism. Substitute “communism” for “terrorism” and Cruz’s formulation becomes indistinguishable from Ronald Reagan’s rationale for supporting a long list of authoritarian regimes around the world in the 1980s. Of course, it was Reagan’s eventual U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick who was the godmother of the authoritarian embrace in her famous 1979 piece “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which first brought her to Reagan’s attention. Kirkpatrick argued that the U.S. should work with repressive regimes to combat communism because autocracies could evolve into democracies while totalitarian communist regimes were… Read More ›

A Bureaucratic Failure, Not a Scandal A BUREAUCRATIC FAILURE, NOT A SCANDAL John Bradshaw, NSN Executive Director January 19, 2016 | USA News As a former foreign service officer who served in several small U.S. posts overseas, the 2012 attack at the Benghazi facility had a particular resonance for me. But from the beginning, it was clear to me that this was not a political scandal, but the tragic outcome of two interacting forces: bureaucratic inertia at the State Department that led to chronic inadequate security for U.S. posts, and the propensity of foreign service officers to continually push against the boundaries of the security envelope. The various investigations of the attack, including the Accountability Review Board chaired by former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, all concluded that the security provisions for the State Department facility in Benghazi were inadequate given its location in what was essentially a war zone. U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, who tragically lost his life in the attack, had noted his concerns about security and had on several occasions asked for increased presence of security personnel. The State Department security bureaucracy, unfortunately, did not respond to those requests effectively. Stevens, who was passionate about his mission… Read More ›

Hyperbole is not a Strategy December 18, 2015 While all the candidates on the Republican debate stage in Las Vegas criticized Democrats on national security issues, very few of them presented anything resembling a clear strategy for tackling the threats facing the United States. Instead, they substituted tough talk, threats, and fearmongering for strategy, showing that they know how to scare people, not solve problems. Jeb Bush thinks we need “to destroy ISIS before it destroys us.” By saying that, Jeb Bush showed that he has no idea what kind of threat ISIS is or how to combat it. If every ISIS combatant assembled in one place, their roughly 30,000 fighters would be fewer than the total number of soldiers in a two U.S. Army divisions. ISIS also lacks an air force or a navy. ISIS poses a real threat to the interests of the United States, but it doesn’t threaten our existence as a nation. Nazi Germany and the USSR couldn’t destroy the United States; the idea that a ragtag group of irregular infantry a fraction of the size of one of our three branches of the military could “destroy us” is beyond belief. It’s hard to believe that… Read More ›