On Monday, Lindsey Graham announced his presidential candidacy in a speech devoted mostly to foreign policy. He mentioned variations of the word “Islam” six times. He said “the nuclear ambitions of the radical Islamists who control Iran” constitute the “biggest threat” to the United States. He twice emphasized his devotion to Israel. And once, about halfway through his remarks, he mentioned China. …

Last week, in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, former Clinton and Bush administration counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke pointed out something extraordinary. “Congress has been asked by the President months ago now to make a decision, to vote on the use of force against ISIS. And they’ve refused to do it. It’s incredible.” …

In important ways, America in recent years has become a less bigoted country. In today’s U.S. Senate, there is no equivalent to Jesse Helms, who during his 1984 reelection race filibustered a federal holiday for Martin Luther King and his 1990 reelection race aired an ad showing a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as the narrator declared that “they had to ...

Hillary Clinton has been an official candidate for president for five weeks, and she still hasn’t done the thing most candidates do on day one: given a speech laying out her vision for America. Nor is she planning on doing so anytime soon. Politico reports that Hillary’s “why I’m running for president,” speech, initially scheduled for May, has now been delayed until June, or even ...

The “would you have invaded Iraq” saga continues. Sunday on Fox News, Chris Wallace tried again and again to get Marco Rubio to say whether, in hindsight, the Bush administration was right to invade a WMD-less Iraq. And again and again, Rubio answered a different, and politically safer, question: Was George W. Bush right given the information he had at the time? Rubio’s answer to ...

In a presidential field as crowded as this year’s Republican one, every candidate needs a niche. Marco Rubio is trying to own three: generational change, Hispanic outreach, and foreign-policy gravitas. It was in pursuit of the third that he went to the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday to lay out his foreign-policy “doctrine.” …

The most interesting thing about Jeb Bush’s statement that, even knowing Saddam Hussein had no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, he’d still have supported the Iraq War, isn’t the beating he’s taking from liberals and the punditocracy. It’s the beating he’s taking from conservatives. The Washington Post compiled some of the right-wing outrage. The appalled include The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, who wrote that, “If ...