The war on terror will be won not by force of arms, but by a new strategic approach that speaks to the experience of the world’s Muslims, says Charles Peña

The United States’s “war-gaming” of Iran suggests that – despite the Iraqi quagmire – the ambition of the second Bush administration to spread freedom and democracy is undiminished, says Charles V Peña.

Should bunker-busting nuclear weapons be part of United States national security strategy? Charles V Peña on a hidden faultline in the presidential race.

Three years after 9/11, what progress has the United States made in the war on terror? Charles Peña assesses the evidence and finds American policy and action wanting.

The damning findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report in Washington on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction highlight larger political failures, says Charles Peña.

America gave “the terrorists” their victory in Iraq by invading. It must now leave, on its own terms, says the Cato Institute’s Charles Peña, as he judges the occupation against one overriding concern: the security of Americans in their own homeland.

A year after 9/11, the Bush administration articulated a new security doctrine that committed the country to worldwide military intervention in pursuit of democracy. This strange fruit of Wilsonian idealism and neo-conservative ambition is triply misconceived: it will guarantee damaging over-extension of resources, fuel bitter resentment of the United States, and abandon homeland security to the chimera of global control. It is not empire that the US needs, but modesty.

The current US President’s father won the first Gulf war but lost the subsequent election because of a failing economy. On the brink of a second war in the region, a senior defence analyst with Washington’s Cato Institute situates George W. Bush’s military logic in the context of his domestic economic policy – and finds both deficient.