Writing & Thoughts
Reflections on naval history, political science, amateur radio adventures, and music.
The tacticization of strategy: why dismantling Iran's conventional military spine is not the same as knowing how a war ends.
Some uses for which the United States has historically reserved the right to use nuclear weapons may not be a credible threat to some adversaries. Conventional alternatives may create a more flexible and credible response.
My thesis is that the foreign policies of the Obama Administration yielded an international relations environment that China and Russia perceived to be weak.
The prospect of war on the Korean peninsula is sobering. The danger is not just getting into a war, but getting into a war for which we are not prepared, either militarily, economically, or psychologically.
The evolution of U.S. foreign policy from the late 20th century to the present can be viewed as a transition from a proactive, grand-strategy approach to a reactive, case-by-case management style.
Modern American political discourse often feels like a series of unprecedented crises. We argue about the limits of executive orders, the reach of federal agencies, the role of faith in the public square, and the persistent sting of racial inequality. But to look at these as "new" problems is to miss the fundamental nature of the American experiment. The United States was not built on a consensus; it was built on a series of profound, recurring tensions that pre-dated the Revolution. These four debates are the "hereditary conditions" of our democracy. They weren't resolved in 1776, 1787, or 1865—and they remain the fault lines of our national identity today.
There is a popular, persistent myth in American classrooms that the United States was born in a vacuum—a "big bang" of liberty sparked by a few enlightened men in Philadelphia who suddenly realized that kings were a bad idea. We treat the Declaration of Independence as a divorce decree that wiped away the past, allowing us to start the world anew. But this narrative is more than just a simplification; it is a dangerous historical amnesia. By forgetting that the American Founding was the continuation of a 500-year British struggle, we have lost the manual for how our own government is supposed to function. The United States did not invent the limitation of executive power; we inherited it, refined it, and—in the modern era—have begun to squander it.