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One is that the United States shouldn’t go to war unless it has a plan not only for the initial military action, but also for the day afterward, and the day after that. Another is that the United States shouldn’t go to war without a detailed understanding of the country we’re entering, and the forces we’re likely to empower.

even with the best-laid plans, warfare is always a uniquely high-risk enterprise — which means that the burden of proof should generally rest with hawks rather than with doves, and seven reasonable-sounding reasons for intervening may not add up to a single convincing case for war.

What interventionists ask of us, constantly, is to be so informed, wise, judicious, and discriminating that we can understand the tangled morass of practical politics, in countries that are thousands of miles from our shores, with cultures that are almost entirely alien to ours, with populaces that don't speak our same native tongue. Feel comfortable with that? I assume that I know a lot more about Egypt or Yemen or Libya than the average American-- I would suggest that the average American almost certainly couldn't find these countries on a map, tell you what languages they speak in those countries, perhaps even on which continents they are found-- but the idea that I can have an informed opinion about the internal politics of these countries is absurd. Absurd. I followed the health care debate, an internal political affair with which I have a great personal stake and a keen personal interest, with something resembling obsession. I can hardly comprehend how many hundreds of thousands of words I read on the subject. And yet in some ways I know so little. And yet I am supposed to have knowledge enough about the internal politics of Libya? Enough to wager the future of the lives of every citizen of that country? Enough to commit human lives and millions of dollars to engineer the outcome that I think we want in that foreign country? With the fog of war, the law of unintended consequences, and all of those unknown unknowns, floating around out there, waiting to entrap us? This is folly. It is insanity.

From Libya to Palestine to parts of the Egyptian Sinai, armed—and increasingly hard-line—Islamist groups are making significant inroads. This is the Arab world’s Salafi-Jihadi moment.

In Libya and Syria, even non-Salafi groups like the Brotherhood are adapting to the new world of anti-politics, allying themselves with local armed groups or working to form their own militias.

This is one of the great tragedies of the past few years—that a movement meant to demonstrate that peaceful protest could work ultimately demonstrated the opposite.

“Since World War II, very little that could be called genuinely humanitarian has resulted from American military intervention—not in Korea, certainly not in Vietnam, and not in Panama, Afghanistan, or the two Iraq wars and Libya.”

Since World War II, very little that could be called genuinely humanitarian has resulted from American military intervention—not in Korea, certainly not in Vietnam, and not in Panama, Afghanistan, or the two Iraq wars and Libya. The only wars of rescue that might have been conceived on moral grounds—Grenada and Kosovo—were so badly tainted by U.S. deception that the liberal interventionists don’t even talk about them anymore. The American medical students in Grenada were in no real danger after the communist coup, and the Serbs weren’t committing “genocide” against the Albanians in Kosovo.

’ve been consistent in my criticism of the president since even before he was first elected. But I don’t think that he’s ignorant, or even a fantasist like Reagan. Mr. Obama surely knows that America cannot defeat a religious ideology with missiles or soldiers, any more than we could defeat the Vietcong and Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese troops with massive aerial bombing and more than 500,000 ground troops.

There were accusations by Republicans of a State Department cover-up. There were critiques by Democrats that the other side had spread conspiracy theories about the 2012 attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya, for political gain.

questioned her handling of Libya as secretary of state, her response to the Benghazi attack and her frequent contacts with Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton adviser who had been barred by

the White House from working at the State Department.

The panel's seven Republicans tried to prove Clinton ignored U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens' requests for additional security before the September 11, 2012, attacks during which Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

Clinton -- seeking an October trifecta after delivering a strong performance in the first Democratic presidential debate

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pushed Clinton hard over her use of a private email server -- mocking her as "the most transparent person ever."

The world would be a better place if dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Moamer Kadhafi were still in power, top Republican US presidential hopeful Donald Trump said in comments aired Sunday.

I mean, look what happened. Libya is a catastrophe. Libya is a disaster. Iraq is a disaster. Syria is a disaster. The whole Middle East. It all blew up around Hillary Clinton and around Obama. It blew up."

A hidden assumption underlies the debate over North Korea. The assumption is that preventive war—war against a country that poses no imminent threat but could pose a threat in the future—is morally legitimate. To be sure, many politicians oppose an attack on practical grounds: They say the costs would be too high. But barely anyone in the foreign policy mainstream calls the idea itself abhorrent.

By historical standards, that’s astounding. Over the past two decades, American foreign policy has undergone a conceptual shift so complete that its current practitioners don’t even acknowledge how revolutionary their current views are. During the Cold War, the dominant figures in American foreign policy considered preventive war to be fundamentally un-American. A member of the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Reagan administration, transported to 2017, would wonder how their successors embraced a principle that they associated with the regimes America fought in World War II.

In the second half of the 20th century, when America’s leaders heard “preventive war,” they thought about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And for good reason. Both regimes had used the doctrine to justify their attacks in World War II. In August 1939, on the eve of his invasion of Poland, Hitler told his generals that, “we are faced with the hard alternative of either striking or the certainty of being destroyed sooner or later.” In a 2006 journal article, University of Pittsburgh law professor Jules Lobel quoted the Commander of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, as writing that, “[i]n the event of outbreak of war with the United States, there would be little prospect of our operations succeeding unless, at the very outset, we can deal a crushing blow to the main force of the American fleet in Hawaiian waters.”

On Wednesday in The Washington Post, Vice President Mike Pence contrasted his boss’s response to protests in Iran to President Obama’s response in 2009. Obama, he said, had “stayed silent” and “declined to stand with a proud people who sought to escape from under the heavy weight of a dictatorship.” But “under President Trump,” Pence crowed, “the United States is standing with them.”This is a lie. Obama did not “stay silent.” He declared himself “appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments” of Iranian protesters. His administration also leaned on Twitter to ensure that Iranians could continue using it to organize their demonstrations. Obama did, however, temper his public comments, so as “to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.” Given its history, Obama argued, if the U.S. were “seen as meddling,” it could harm the protesters’ cause.

They should recognize its risks for two reasons. First, because American conservatives have spent the last half-century warning that virtuous rhetoric, and even virtuous intentions, do not necessarily produce virtuous results. Think about the right’s critique of government intervention to alleviate poverty. It’s built on the contention that while liberals may denounce poverty more passionately than do conservatives, their policies, even when well-intentioned, actually hurt the poor. Why? Because human behavior is too complex for government planners to understand, so when they try to make people zig, people often zag instead. Irving Kristol, among the most influential conservative intellectuals of the 20th century, declared in 1972 that, “I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.”

It’s particularly odd because American policy toward Iran is exactly the kind of situation most likely to produce unintended consequences. If translating intentions into results is difficult domestically, it’s even harder overseas, especially in a country like Iran—from which the United States has been largely isolated since 1979—and whose domestic political dynamics American officials only dimly understand.In fact, American policy in the Middle East since September 11 has been a festival of unintended consequences—measured mostly in innocent lives lost. In addition, America’s war in Afghanistan, which was expected to highlight American power, has helped China deepen its economic influence in Central Asia. America’s war in Iraq, which was expected to vanquish terrorism and weaken Iran, helped create ISIS and extend Tehran’s power. The “war on terror,” which was designed to prevent terrorism from the world’s ungoverned spaces, has instead ended up creating more: from Iraq to Libya to Mali.

To his admirers, Marco Minniti, Italy’s powerful interior minister, is the mastermind who solved Europe’s migration problem. To his critics, he’s the unscrupulous architect of a secret deal with North African militias and thus responsible for severe human rights violations of refugees trapped in Libyan detention centers.

Dealing with Libya’s splintered leadership and its porous borders is the cornerstone of his attempt to combat both terrorism and human trafficking. And, he says, the only way to solve Europe’s migration crisis. “What Italy did in Libya is a model to deal with migrant flows without erecting borders or barbed wire barriers,” said Minniti, who oversaw the country’s security services as undersecretary under two prime ministers and served as deputy interior minister under then Prime Minister Romano Prodi. It’s a “way of stemming the flow,” he added, “that Europe could adopt.”

Minniti’s unique approach to the region, which he refers to as “desert diplomacy,” is exemplified by a peace deal he brokered between two of south Libya’s strongest tribes — the Awlad Suleiman and the Tebu. In April 2016, 60 tribal chiefs, religious leaders, mayors, and police and military officials gathered at the Viminale, the interior ministry’s palatial headquarters named after one of the seven hills of ancient Rome.

A military drone that attacked soldiers during a battle in Libya’s civil war last year may have done so without human control, according to a recent report commissioned by the United Nations.

The weapons systems, it said, “were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability.”

Human-operated drones have been used in military strikes for over a decade. President Barack Obama for years embraced drone strikes as a counterterrorism strategy, and President Donald J. Trump expanded the use of drones in Africa.

In mere weeks, Joe Biden will stride into the Oval Office and peer out at a world still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and at growing threats from resurgent US adversaries such as China and Russia. Leaders around the world will have to adapt to a new US administration and its potentially dramatic changes in policy and rhetoric.

We asked Atlantic Council experts to preview what Biden’s election means not just for regional heavyweights, but also for smaller nations who could play an outsized role in US foreign policy over the next four years.

GERMANY: A brighter tone and realistic expectations could rehabilitate relationship

A stressor, she explains, is a “sudden change in circumstances or environment that interacts with a complicated psychological profile in a way that leads a previously quiescent person to become violent.” The stressor is never the only explanation for the crime, but it is inevitably an important factor in a complex set of variables that lead to a disaster

the essays make a strong case that the interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and politics is a hidden stressor that helped to fuel the revolutions and will continue to make consolidating them into stable democracies much more difficult.

from 2006 to 2011, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced the worst drought ever recorded there — at a time when Syria’s population was exploding and its corrupt and inefficient regime was proving incapable of managing the stress.

‘Islamic State’ Turning Into a Guerrilla Army, Top General Warns

The capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq is now under assault. But ISIS isn’t going anywhere. Instead, the terror group is beginning to rebrand itself from a “caliphate” to an insurgency

It could well mean that there will be no “lasting defeat” of ISIS, even if it loses control of Iraq’s second-largest city, despite Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s claim of such a victory just four days ago

The Latest: 7 bodies of migrants found near Spain, off coast

Spain's maritime rescue service says the bodies of seven African migrants have been found dead along the Strait of Gibraltar since Friday.

More than 181,000 people, most so-called "economic migrants" with little chance of being allowed to stay in Europe, attempted to cross the central Mediterranean last year from Libya, Africa's nearest stretch of coast to Italy. About 4,500 died or disappeared.

Hillary Clinton plans to deliver a scorching assessment of Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy prescriptions on Thursday, casting her likely Republican rival as a threat to decades of bipartisan tenets of American diplomacy and declaring him unfit for the presidency.

persistent assault to portray a potential Trump presidency as a dangerous proposition that would weaken American alliances and embolden enemies.

specific criticism of comments Mr. Trump has made about rethinking the United States’s support of NATO

ongressionally mandated analytical and statistical review of global terroris

m. It is important to understand how the U.S. government defines this subjective phenomenon:

overall decrease in global terrorism

Five years on, Tahrir has the quality of a dream. Read Worth’s remarkable new book, “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS,” and weep. The chasm between the civic spirit of the square and the brutal theocracy of the Islamic State reveals the extent of the failure.

Everywhere outside Tunisia, sect, tribe and the Mukhabarat (secret police) prove stronger than the aspiration for institutions capable of mediating differences and bringing the elusive “karama,” or dignity, that, as Worth notes, was the “rallying cry of all the uprisings.”

Who should be blamed for this epic failure

That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade. It was an attack on George W. Bush’s Iraq war and Hillary Clinton’s Libya incursion both, on Nafta and every trade deal negotiated since, on the perpetual Beltway push for increased immigration, on the entire elite vision of an increasingly borderless globe.

it gave full voice to sentiments that are widely held on both sides of the Atlantic — sentiments rooted in the broken promises of both right and left, in 15 years of economic disappointment and military quagmire, in the percolating threat of globalized jihad, in an ever-more-balkanized culture governed by an ever-more-insulated elite.