This article draws from the annual lecture in ‘U.S. Security in the 21st Century Series,’ sponsored by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy; it was delivered by the author on September 27, 2012, in New York City.  It explores the U.S. military’s role in the making of American foreign policy by examining the degree of influence, identifying reasons why policy formulation may be imbalanced, and speculating on possible long-term consequences of excessive reliance on military power.  Central to the arguments presented is the erosion of appropriate levels of executive, congressional, and media oversight of the American armed forces.

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The protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have diminished America’s appetite for waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands. Military interventions have traditionally been a source of controversy in the United States. But America’s appetite for the dispatch of armed forces has been diminished greatly by factors that have primarily emerged in the twenty-first century. These include, most painfully, the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that have made US political and military leaders more cautious about waging wars to end tyranny or internal disorder in foreign lands. Read more here.

If there is one thing Americans should have learnt from their recent wars, it is that they do not have the wisdom, resources or staying power to dictate political outcomes. Not long ago Washington aspired to build prosperous democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today it would be satisfied if they simply hung together as countries.President Barack Obama says the US should recognise that the world is “messy”. His strategy has been to avoid doing “stupid stuff”. And yet he is again trying to put a more ambitious face on American policy, asserting this month that the US would “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the al-Qaeda offshoot known as Isis. Air strikes quickly followed. Read more here.

In a commentary on the long-term storage of SNF in the March 2015 issue of Nature Materials, Professor Rod Ewing writes that, "to design reliable and safe geological repositories it is critical to understand how the characteristics of spent nuclear fuel evolve with time, and how this affects the storage environment. Globally, about 10,000 metric tonnes of heavy metal (MTHM) are produced each year by nuclear power plants, and a cumulative inventory of approximately 300,000 MTHM is stored either in pools or dry casks at reactor sites around the world1. Most of this inventory is destined for long-term storage and eventual geologic disposal. Thus, the behaviour of UO2 in spent fuel as a waste form must be understood and evaluated under the extraordinary conditions of geologic disposal, which extends to hundreds of thousands of years. The behaviour of nuclear fuel under the conditions of long-term disposal in a geologic repository depend specifically on the chemical changes that have occurred to the fuel during service life in the reactor."

For 25 years now, a weak-state fixation has transfixed U.S. foreign policy, Amy Zegart writes in this Foreign Policy piece. But Washington's paranoia over weak and failing states is distracting it from the real national security threats looming on the horizon.

As the fallout from the November 2014 cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment continues, with Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal stepping down this month, it’s still not clear how the story will end, either for the Hollywood luminaries or U.S. national security. Herb Lin writes in this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece that we can learn from the incident and start to formulate responses for the future attacks that will inevitably occur.