Autor: Tom Donnelly

It is also clear from the president's speech that the quality of Iraqi army training has been vastly improved since the early days.

If India, like early America, is essentially still an inward-looking democracy with regional strategic priorities, the United States today is the inverse: a confident democracy striving to manage a global order that is fundamentally strong but coming under increasing strain.

Two recent books by experienced war correspondents tell important stories that call parts of the defense transformation program into question.

Afghanistan has been treated as little more than a mark on a checklist, validating theories about the future American way of war and the universal appeal of democracy.

A U.S.-India strategic partnership, if fully developed, would be the single most important step toward an alliance capable of meeting the 21st century's principal challenges: radical Islam and rising China.

With China’s declaration of an anti-secession law, Washington has received a timely if unwelcome reminder of the depth of Beijing’s determination to retake Taiwan and the reality of geopolitical rivalry in East Asia.

The brand-new National Defense Strategy of the United States is pretty good stuff. It's vintage Rumsfeld, preaching the gospel of 'continuous transformation,' which, when you think about it, is a uniquely American idea.

They're happy to let us worry about North Korea while they assemble long-term plans to counter American hegemony.

The September 11 attacks, the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the counterinsurgency campaigns that have increasingly defined the day-to-day reality of the global war on terror have all recast these assumptions about U.S. national security.

To begin with, Japan appears to be undergoing a true strategic renaissance, even to the point now of pushing the Bush administration to take its responsibilities in East Asia seriously and not sublimate the problem of China entirely to concerns in the Middle East.