Publications

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… 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… 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… Read More ›

Donald Trump Is Helping the Terrorists Win By Steven Simon and NSN Advisory Board Member Daniel Benjamin December 15, 2015 | POLITICO American politics are undermining American national security. In their jockeying for the Republican presidential nomination, GOP contenders—Donald Trump above all—have managed to exacerbate dramatically the two U.S. weaknesses most likely to erode our country’s safety: fear and Islamophobia. The United States has made tremendous progress in the fight against terrorism since September 11. Yet it has also become all too clear that we are short of the kind of societal resilience that is essential for our success in fighting terrorism. Beyond that, we lack a shared recognition of the importance of the American Muslim community in preventing the spread of extremism. In recent weeks,… Read More ›

The paranoid style in Islamophobic politics J. Dana Stuster, NSN Policy Analyst December 14, 2015 | THE HILL When Donald Trump issued a statement recently calling on the U.S. government to bar Muslims, including U.S. citizens, from entering the United States, the condemnation came swift, as though there was still some line of good taste or ethics Trump had only just crossed. The critics are right, of course: Trump is a narcissist, a fascist, a demagogue with a third-grade vocabulary and a three-year-old’s understanding of the constitution. Which makes him an easy scapegoat for the Islamophobia that’s migrated from the far-right fringe of the political discourse to the mainstream. But Trump is a symptom, not a cause. It’s not enough to condemn Trump when his hateful… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Disqualified – It’s Not Just Trump December 11, 2015 While the media has churned over Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States, they’ve neglected the extent to which his rivals have advocated similarly unconstitutional, irresponsible policies. If Donald Trump’s remarks disqualify him from the presidency, his rivals are similarly disqualified. Donald Trump’s latest Islamophobic salvo—calling for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the United States—was so awful that the White House said it “disqualifies him from being president.” But despite their frantic attempts to distance themselves from Trump after his comments, his fellow candidates espouse the same ideas using only slightly less appalling rhetoric. So if Trump is disqualified for saying “no Muslims allowed,” why doesn’t Jeb’s “Christians… Read More ›

THE SPEECH OBAMA SHOULD HAVE GIVEN Tara Sonenshine, NSN Advisory Board December 8, 2015 | THE HILL President Obama was right to lay out the strategy for defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and to explain his policy. Full stop. But we confront a bigger problem than just ISIS, which the president understated: The temptation to turn fear into paralysis and forget the lessons of history. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and an increasing number of supporters like the logic of keeping out people whose backgrounds, ideas, values, religions and other defining characteristics we don’t like and whom we are afraid of. It’s a tempting theory. Just cordon off people and ideas behind big walls and tight borders and all will be well.… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Return to the Dark Side December 4, 2015 In recent days, conservative candidates for president have revived the rhetoric of the immediate post 9-11 period and have seemed almost eager to play into the hands of ISIS, campaigning on policies that reinforce ISIS’s claims that the West is engaged in religiously-motivated warfare against all Muslims. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Donald Trump all want to bring back waterboarding. While these candidates agree that the United States should start torturing people again, none of them have provided any reason to believe that torture gathers information that could not be gathered by lawful methods. There are, however, strong reasons not to bring back waterboarding: not only is it torture, and therefore a war crime,… Read More ›

Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics Policy Brief by J. Dana Stuster and Samuel Davidoff-Gore December 2015 To read the full report, click here. The National Security Network (NSN) is pleased to release a new policy brief, Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics. Since the November 13 terrorist attack in Paris, politicians have seized on reports of participation in the attacks by alleged Syrian refugees to impugn U.S. efforts to resettle 10,000 refugees displaced by the Islamic State and the violence of the Syrian civil war – a relatively small number of refugees in relation to the overall number of people displaced from Syria and the burden on other nations accepting Syrian refugees. These political… Read More ›

NSN 2016 Update: Clash of Civilizations November 13, 2015 Over the last few days, Republicans have engaged in a spirited competition over who can say the most horrible things about Syrian refugees, and a few went further, calling for unconstitutional religious tests that threaten the core freedoms this country was founded to protect. Marco Rubio is reading straight from the ISIS playbook when he calls the conflict in the Middle East a “clash of civilizations.” “ISIS wants to make this a clash of civilizations,” says Rand Beers, former Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and founder of NSN. “Why should we be helping them make their case? Why should we be turning on our own values?” By feeding the ISIS narrative and comparing… Read More ›