Foreign Policy

Covert drone strikes are one of Obama's key national security policies. He has already authorized 283 strikes in Pakistan, six times more than the number during President George W. Bush's eight years in office.

As a result, the number of estimated deaths from the Obama administration's drone strikes is more than four times what it was during the Bush administration -- somewhere between 1,494 and 2,618.

In August 2003, some colleagues and I were held up by armed bandits on the highway in Fallujah, Iraq. (Don't ask why I was dumb enough to be wandering around Fallujah.) My bandit -- there were quite a few of them, but I like to think of the guy who stuck a gun in my face as my bandit -- was straight out of central casting, complete with a red kerchief around his mouth and nose to disguise his facial features.

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is said to have remarked. For most Americans occupying the now-now-now world of Facebook, this probably feels apt. And until just over a decade ago, Zuckerberg's statement might equally have applied to Pentagon strategists. A 1995 strategy document from the Defense Department was hardly less blunt: "[U]ltimately we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa."

To watch Condoleezza Rice, the face of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, stand before a convention of cheering Republicans and condemn Barack Obama for diminishing America’s standing in the world—one can only gasp at the magnitude of chutzpah in one woman.

Even before the book went on sale, the announcement by the publisher Dutton that the pseudonymous Mark Owen, one of the SEALs on the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, would be publishing an account of his role in the raid quickly propelled “No Easy Day” to the No. 1 slot on Amazon, displacing “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Republicans like to talk about individual responsibility. In case you haven’t heard, it’s what makes America great.

On Wednesday some media outlets obtained copies of the heavily embargoed book "No Easy Day" by Mark Owen, the pseudonym of one of the Navy SEALs who was part of the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

Before dawn on Friday, a man wearing an Afghan uniform shot and killed three U.S. soldiers during a meeting to discuss local security issues in the southern province of Helmand.

It was one of an unprecedented series of five attacks by people in Afghan security forces uniforms in the past week against NATO forces.

Steve Coll explores the Republican presidential hopeful's evolving foreign policy agenda and gaffe-ridden trip abroad. Jennifer Rowland illuminates the American group that poses a greater threat to our national security than al Qaeda. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

On Aug. 2, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution urging the White House to stop an obscure U.N. agency from asserting greater control over the Internet. It is the "consistent and unequivocal policy of the United States," the lawmakers affirmed, "to promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet today."