A former Army officer and FBI agent, Mike Rogers has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration's fight against terrorism, at one point accusing the president of waging "lawfare" rather than warfare. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers has been a leading voice for cybersecurity safeguards, and he co-authored the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which would allow the government and private companies to share information about cyberattackers and their tactics. The bill passed the House and is awaiting a Senate vote. In April, Rogers told reporters, "America will be a little safer and our economy a little better protected from foreign cyber predators once this measure is enacted."
With his syndicated column running on op-ed pages throughout the country and his frequent appearances on Fox News, Charles Krauthammer has a powerful platform to promote his hybrid neoconservative-realist vision for U.S. foreign policy. While he likely found little to agree on with Obama, Krauthammer has been among a select group of journalists invited to off-the-record discussions with the president. Krauthammer has defended Bush-era interrogation techniques, arguing that torture is justifiable in cases where "the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information [is] likely to save lives." And in recent columns, Krauthammer has slammed Obama's handling of the Syrian situation, calling his attempt to secure a U.N. Security Council resolution "slavish, mindless self-subordination to ‘international legitimacy.'"
Now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Stephen Hadley was a central figure on President George W. Bush's foreign-policy team -- serving as Condoleezza Rice's deputy before taking her position as national security advisor -- and one of the architects of the Iraq war. More recently, he has advocated negotiating with the Taliban to end the conflict in Afghanistan. "Efforts to reach a settlement should include an approach to Taliban elements that are ready to give up the fight and become part of the political process," he wrote with John Podesta in Foreign Policy. Known as an influential, behind-the-scenes operator, Hadley is well-regarded within the GOP and one of its most sought-after advisors. He is whispered to be among those being vetted for the top job at State in a Romney administration. Recently, he has criticized Obama for letting the United States "follow" rather than "lead" events in Syria and called on him to abandon the U.N. diplomatic route in favor of more robust support for the rebels.
Jamie Fly worked under both Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates as the Defense Department's assistant for transnational threats policy, as well as on George W. Bush's National Security Council staff as director for counter-proliferation strategy. Since 2009, Fly -- whose resume also includes stints at the Republican National Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Bank, the American Enterprise Institute, the U.S. Embassy in London, and the U.S. Senate -- has kept busy as executive director of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative, co-founded by Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor. Fly also writes frequently for National Review, the Weekly Standard, and FP's Shadow Government blog, regularly ripping into the president over Iran, Syria, and the defense budget.
The career paratrooper, four-star general, and former acting Army chief of staff retired in 2003 but became one of the chief architects of George W. Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq when a paper he co-wrote for the American Enterprise Institute, calling for an additional 30,000 troops on the ground, prompted the president to bring him on board in an advisory role. Since then, Keane has been a strong critic of Obama's drawdown in Iraq, calling his decision to bring home all combat troops in 2011 an "absolute disaster." "We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country," he told the Washington Times last year. Now chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and a regular on Fox News, Keane was a strong supporter of military intervention in Libya and has said that conflict with Iran is "inevitable."
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