“Do not even think about bombing Iran,” wrote Michael O’Hanlon and Bruce Reidel in yesterday’s Financial Times.  Pointing out that the US has two unpopular and unfinished wars in the region already, and that the damage from any military strikes on the Islamic Republic would be unlikely to do enough damage to its nuclear program […]

After a rough week of paper grading, family visits and writing capsule reviews for Foreign Affairs, I’m getting back to an ambitious blogging schedule.  I’m working on a post about war with Iran that should be up by morning, planning a look at the state of the climate change movement following Al Gore’s typically unreflective […]

Recently, on a trip to Washington, D.C., I stopped by the offices of The American Interest and sat down to discuss the Tea Party movement in the context of historical American populism, something I wrote about in my recent post, “Do Soldiers Drink Tea?“.Subscribe to The American Interest podcasts through iTunes here.)

Apologies for the light blogging during the last few days.  I’ve been visiting family and trying to cope with a sudden flood of deadlines.  There’s lots to write about, including Al Gore’s poorly conceived op-ed in the Times, and I’ll be back be back in the saddle very soon.

The modern Democratic Party was formed out of four previously antagonistic elements in American society: urban working class and immigrant whites, Southern whites, African-Americans and upper middle class progressive reformers.  It began to take shape when Woodrow Wilson brought progressives into the mainstream of the Democratic Party; Franklin Roosevelt put all the pieces together when […]

The Gallup organization has come out with yet another poll showing that Americans by an overwhelming percentage sympathize with the Israelis rather than the Palestinians.  This time, the pro-Israel sentiment is at a near record level: 63 percent of those asked said their sympathies lie more with Israel, 23 percent said both or neither, and […]

A report from the Pew Research Center out this morning isn’t getting huge play in the press, but it offers a much bigger clue to the shape of our future than anything you will read on the front page of today’s New York Times.The report is on public attitudes toward unions, and it finds that […]

Regular longtime readers of this blog know about E. Benjamin Skinner, a former Team Mead research associate who has gone on to great things.  He wrote a book on slavery in the contemporary world, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, which received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. In the course […]

President Jimmy Carter, and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, have both taken issue with my recent article in Foreign Policy about Obama’s Jeffersonian and Wilsonian foreign policy impulses, entitled “The Carter Syndrome.”As I said in my reply, my  “article was not really about Carter or his administration. It was about the current U.S. president and […]

At the tea parties here in glamorous Queens we make sure we serve genuine Devonshire clotted cream with the scones and we keep our pinkies carefully extended while lifting the delicate porcelain cups to our lips, but a very different kind of Tea Party has my friends in the upscale media and policy worlds gravely […]