Arthur Herman is working on his sixth book. His most recent work, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed An Empire and Forged Our Age, was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and chosen for The Washington Post's list of the Best Books of 2008. The paperback edition release date is May 2009. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001) and To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (2005), which was nominated for the UK's prestigious Mountbatten Prize.
He comments frequently on military matters and foreign policy for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, and Wall Street Journal Asia in addition to the New York Post, and on the air for Fox News Channel and CNN's Lou Dobbs.
Dr Herman's books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, French, and Portuguese.A former professor of history at Georgetown and George Mason Universities, he received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University.
'Four. . . three . . . two . . . one. We have ignition . . . and lift-off." For more than half a century, that countdown sequence has signaled the start of another daring plunge into the unknown -- what we've come...
July 21, 2011 12:00 AMJust a year after the BP oil spill, America is on the verge of a new golden era of oil exploration and production -- unless President Obama and his environmentalist friends get their way. This surge in domestic...
July 14, 2011 12:00 AMPresident Obama's speech on Afghanistan last Wednesday has left supporters and opponents alike wondering if he has a strategy there at all -- or is just trying to split the difference between fighting and abandoning an...
June 28, 2011 12:00 AMThirty-six years after chasing the United States out of Vietnam, the com munist rulers in Hanoi now want us back. The ironies of this bizarre turn of events are many, but the reason is simple: China. Beijing has...
June 20, 2011 12:00 AMBarack Obama surely wants to be remembered as the president who got Osama bin Laden and passed the nation's first universal-health-care plan. Instead, history may well mark him down as the leader who let Iran get the...
June 09, 2011 12:00 AMRobert Gates is stepping down as de fense secretary after 4½ years of hon orable service -- notching up remarkable successes even as he's presided over a perilous decline in America's military capabilities. With...
May 27, 2011 12:00 AMOn April 18, 1943, a flight of US Army Air Force P-38s intercepted a plane carrying Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto, Japan's naval commander in chief and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, and blew it out of the sky. Like the...
May 11, 2011 12:00 AMOn April 16, 1961, the Bay of Pigs was a lonely stretch of water and beach on the southern coast of Cuba. A day later, it was where American sea and air forces landed some 1,400 armed Cuban exiles, as part of President...
April 18, 2011 12:00 AMWhen President Obama made his Cairo speech two years ago, apologiz ing for nearly everything America had done in the Mideast since Jimmy Carter, some of us worried that the goal was nothing less than terminating US...
April 04, 2011 12:00 AMPolls show that President Obama's Libya intervention has the lowest public support of any US military action in three decades. That's not surprising, because Obama seems ambivalent about the enterprise himself....
March 28, 2011 12:00 AMWith the UN-mandated imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya, President Obama has now thrust us into our third Mideast shooting war. The predecessor he used to criticize for recklessly sending Americans into harm's way...
March 21, 2011 12:00 AMTwenty years ago today, ground op erations in Operation Desert Storm came to a halt. American arms had won their most dazzling success in two generations, perhaps ever. After five weeks of round-the-clock air...
February 28, 2011 12:00 AMTo family and friends, the death of four Americans at the hands of Somali pirates on Monday is a tragedy. To the rest of us, it's a wakeup call. After more than a decade of provocation and international dithering,...
February 23, 2011 12:00 AMPublication of Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs, "Known and Unknown," has renewed the fierce debate about the most controversial secretary of defense since Robert McNamara. Most of the debate centers around what many see as...
February 21, 2011 12:00 AMDocuments from Wiki Leaks indicate that the Obama administration, des perate to get the Russians to sign the new START treaty, agreed to pass on secret information about the British nuclear arsenal -- right down to the...
February 10, 2011 12:00 AMYou can bet Chinese Presi dent Hu Jintao was in a good mood last night at his lavish White House dinner: Not since Caesar visited Cleopatra has a head of state enjoyed such an air of superiority and inevitable triumph...
January 20, 2011 12:00 AMCall it President Obama's "conditional-surrender Pentagon budget" -- and bad news for the US economy. The 2012 Defense budget that Secretary Robert Gates unveiled last week calls for cuts of more than $178 billion -...
January 10, 2011 12:00 AMOn the night of Dec. 29, 1940, 70 years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went on the radio to awaken Americans to a looming darkness on the horizon, even as they sat snug and secure digesting their post-Christmas...
December 29, 2010 12:00 AMThe main point of last week's presidential report on America's progress in Afghanistan was no surprise: We're making "fragile" progress in our nine-year war there, but not enough. Yet it's what President Obama and his...
December 20, 2010 12:00 AMWhat strikes this historian about the WikiLeaks dump is how our State Department is hopelessly mired in the past by comparison with our military. Some of the documents date back to 1966 and the Vietnam War. Think...
December 02, 2010 12:00 AMRonald Reagan must be seething in his grave. President Reagan's success in help ing Afghanistan expel the Russians proved a pivot point for victory in the Cold War. Yet now the Russians are going back in -- with...
November 19, 2010 12:00 AMThey stormed the shores of Tripoli in 1804 and the beaches at Tarawa in 1943 and Iwo Jima in '45. They fought America's foes house by house in Hue in 1968 and in Fallujah in 2004. They died at Belleau Wood,...
November 10, 2010 12:00 AMJust when you thought it was safe to leave Iraq, al Qaeda is back -- with a vengeance. According to The New York Times, al Qaeda operatives are undoing the Anbar Awakening, which secured the American surge back in...
October 20, 2010 12:00 AMIf anyone still doubted that America's foreign policy is in crisis, the appointment Friday of Thomas Donilon to be our new national-security adviser should be final proof. Set aside the fact that Donilon served as in...
October 11, 2010 3:06 AMThe photos showing NATO supply trucks being set ablaze by insurgents in Paki stan should send a chill up the spine of every American. So should the State Department's travel-alert warning on yet another Pakistan...
October 04, 2010 12:00 AMPresident Obama likes to say George W. Bush drove the economy into a ditch. What the president could not bring himself to acknowledge last night is that Bush not only drove the Iraq war out of the ditch but hosed it...
September 01, 2010 12:00 AMAmericans are learning there's one minority group President Obama is never afraid to offend: families of victims of Islamist terror. First, Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,...
August 30, 2010 12:00 AMBy failing to deal resolutely and forcefully with Teh ran's nuclear ambitions, we've been sending a clear message to other rogue-nation nuclear wannabes that we don't really care. It brings to mind the "broken...
August 19, 2010 12:00 AMFor the very first time, the US ambas sador to Japan has been ordered to attend the annual ceremony at Hiro shima commemorating those who died when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb there 65 years ago. A State...
August 07, 2010 12:00 AMIn Washington, what people say is happening and what's actually happening tend to be two different things -- especially these days. Tuesday, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) announced that the Senate Foreign Relations...
July 29, 2010 12:00 AM