Abolish the Vice Presidency?
Bruce Ackerman thinks the vice presidency is an anachronism from the political era of the Framers and ought be abolished. For two centuries, presidential nominees have used the office to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president's death ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on October 2, 2008 14:36
War Powers Consultation Act
Former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to call for a new War Powers Act. A bipartisan group that we led, the National War Powers Commission, has unanimously concluded after a year of study that the law purporting to govern the decision to engage in war — the 1973 War Powers ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 8, 2008 07:21
Political Candidates Not Candid on Big Issues
TNI editor Nik Gvosdev observes a "disconnect" between the discussion among the foreign policy elite and the 2008 field: Last night, former Secretary of State James Baker spoke at a small gathering at Citronelle at a National Interest dinner to discuss his recent essay in the magazine. To encourage a free and frank discussion between Baker and his audience, including several ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on September 11, 2007 12:08
Could A Presidential Candidate Write This?
Nik Gvosdev shares some excerpts from a forthcoming piece in The National Interest by former Secretary of State James Baker. The money quote: American might, however, is not limitless. The history of empires and great powers from Rome onwards provides an important lesson. power must be husbanded carefully. It is precious and finite. Spreading it too thinly can lead to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 17, 2007 15:11
Arabs Don’t Care About the Palestinians
Lisa Beyer has a powerful op-ed in Time with the provocative title "The Big Lie About the Middle East -- Tell James Baker: Arab nations don't care about the Palestinians." In lumping the Iraq mess in with the Palestinian problem--and suggesting the first could not be fixed unless the second was too--the Baker-Hamilton commission lent credibility to a corrosive myth: that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on December 12, 2006 09:47
The Sticky Parts of the ISG Report Recommendations
As I re-read the recommendations in the Iraq Study Group (does this conjure up images of James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Sandra Day O'Connor, etc. huddled together in the college library for anybody other than me?) Report published yesterday, several points jumped out at me that made me wonder if the members of the group realized how controversial some of their ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on December 7, 2006 15:38
How About a Commission to End Commissions?
My latest for TCS Daily, "How About a Commission to End Commissions?" is up. Washington is eagerly awaiting the report from the Iraq Study Group, headed by former Bush 41 Secretary of State James Baker and Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, to point the way out of the war in Iraq. Sure, there are tens of thousands of years of professional military ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on December 4, 2006 11:49
Iraq Study Group Wants Diplomacy with Iran and Syria
The Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker, will recommend overtures to Iran and Syria in an effort to solve the crisis. A draft report on strategies for Iraq, which will be debated here by a bipartisan commission beginning Monday, urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but sets no timetables for a military ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on November 27, 2006 08:45
James Baker and the Desert Storm Legacy
Austin Bay has an interesting essay at StrategyPage on "James Baker and the Desert Storm Legacy." In it, he argues that a major obstacle that the U.S. has faced in Gulf War II is the fact that we left Saddam in power and, more importantly, abandoned Iraq's Kurds and Shiites to his depredations. He notes the irony that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on November 16, 2006 08:48
Return of the realists?
The report soon to be released by the Iraq Study Group headed by former George H. W. Bush Secretary of States James Baker and the appointment of Robert Gates as Defense have been hailed by many as signalling a return to realism in international relations by the Bush Administration. I suppose it depends on what you mean by foreign ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on November 12, 2006 19:03
