Presents an assessment of Obama's foreign-policy challenges and achievements addressing questions from the outcomes of radically different approaches to American national security to the ways in which fiscal constraints have affected American power.

Yasser Arafat's incremental conquest of Israel was learned at the feet of the North Vietnamese in 1970. The Vietnamese told the Arab leadership that they accepted the fact that victory in Vietnam would take many years, during which it would be necessary to temporarily accept the division of the country into two states, while they worked for a shift in the balance of power. In this, the Vietnamese were smart enough to permit the Americans to save face. They had no intention of respecting the agreements they signed with the United States; the point was to provide political cover for the American retreat. Today, Barack Obama is giving the Arabs the same opportunity as Nixon gave the Vietnamese. Obama told a Muslim audience in Cairo in the first months of his administration that America's support for Israel was "unbreakable," even as he moved to compel Jerusalem to cede even more territory to its enemies. In, this new broadside, Michael Ledeen asks why the Obama administration has chosen this course, and examines what this betrayal means for Israel and the world at large.

Liberty's Dilemma is a diagnostic analysis of the falling away in the United States from the founders' vision of individual liberty and freedom of association. The founders never could have envisioned the enormous expansion of industrial and scientific power we have experienced, nor the national and international conflicts. Never could they have predicted the massive growth in power of the federal government - the kind of power they fought against in our initial struggle for independence and liberty. One significant consequence of these events for our future is the massive dependency of large portions of our present population and the consequent debilitating redistribution of the productive wealth of the independent classes. This growth of a seemingly permanent dependent class has gone largely unexplained. Liberty's Dilemma points to the declining intellectual capital in large portions of our society as cause. This is reflected in the disintegration of family life, lowering educational achievement levels, and the flight of our industrial and technological base. Until our leadership awakens to this fundamental issue of our intellectual capital deficits and their cause, the fundamental vision of liberty that was brought into reality by our Constitutional founders will have forever slipped beyond our political reach.