This is a guest note by Daniel R. DePetris, an MA Candidate at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where he studies security issues and Middle Eastern affairs. He is an associate editor of the Journal on Terrorism and Security Analysis and blogs at the Atlantic Sentinel.

I recently had breakfast with FrumForum proprietor and smart issues strategist David Frum who said that if the GOP was really an oligarchy, then Mitt Romney would come out on top.

(click image for larger version) A semi-occasional feature of The Washington Note, which is in process of moving to this new spot at The Atlantic is a snapshot now and then of three awesome pups. Meet Annie (on left) and her two brothers, Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner, and Buddy. More soon.

(photo credit: Gary Burke) “Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be,” General Douglas MacArthur said in August 1962. I’ve often thought about these words and whom we owe for our nationhood.

I enjoyed this ten minute discussion with ThomsonReuters Global Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, organized each year by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute.

(photo credit: Steve Clemons, The Washington Note) (This article is appearing simultaneously at TheAtlantic.com) News is breaking that the prosecutor’s case in the rape allegations against former IMF Director and French political kingpin Dominique Strauss-Kahn is collapsing.

Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies just released an ambitious study that attempts to quantify many of the complex costs of America’s last decade of wars.

(President Obama with Afghanistan President Karzai, Pakistan President Zardari and Vice President Biden during a statement in the Grand Foyer of the White House May 6, 2009.

Tom Donilon, President Obama’s National Security Adviser, once told me that the thing he most needed but rarely had was “time to think.”   Donilon has almost single-handedly recrafted the national security decision making process from one in the George W.

When foreign policy makers analyze a situation they must consider not only what has happened, but also what could happen.