Autor: Gary Schmitt

The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army, both active and reserve, will continue to be a critical determinant of America's ability to win future wars and, above all, the peaces that follow them. The current force is far too small.

When General David Petraeus reports to Washington next week, the most important question he'll have to answer is, What happens in Iraq after the surge?

An invaluable primer on the nature of that imperative, outlining in a comprehensive but accessible fashion the continuing need for American global leadership.

Since the suburban riots last August, the perception that France is in decline has become de rigueur in French, European, and American circles. Economically, culturally, educationally, militarily, diplomatically, and even gastronomically, France seems to have significantly diminished. But French foreign policy--which has become noticeably less anti-American since the Iraq war and tougher toward Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons--suggests that France may already be recovering from its déclinisme.

The Conventional Wisdom is that the ascension of Japan's Shinzo Abe to the prime minister's post is bad news for Japan and, by extension, the United States. Abe is an ardent nationalist who, the thinking goes, will unleash the country's lurking militarism, thus isolating Japan and, indirectly, Washington from the rest of Asia.

The core argument itself is not new: The United States and the West face a new threat and, whether we like it or not, no power other than the United States has the capacity, or can provide the decisive leadership, required to handle this and other critical global security issues.

A U.S. president has just received word that American counterterrorist operatives have captured a senior al Qaeda operative in Pakistan. Among his possessions are a couple of cell phones -phones that contain several American phone numbers. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, what’s a president to do?

Despite efforts by Shiites, Kurds and U.S. officials to find a way for Iraq's Sunni Muslims to support the draft constitution, it seems less and less likely that a deal will be struck, which raises the question: Is there any road forward that leads to a stable, democratic Iraq?

Months overdue, the Pentagon's annual report to Congress on China's military power is a mix of happy talk, flabby strategic musings, and sobering facts. No doubt this analytic confusion explains the quite divergent news accounts of the report when it was released on July 19.

The intelligence community estimate is just as likely to be wrong as right when it comes to predicting Iran's program. Remember, US intelligence on Iraq first missed how close Saddam was to having a bomb prior to the first Gulf War before overestimating Iraq's WMD program in the run up to the second war.