A few years ago I was lucky enough to have some time in Athens, while attending one of those endless conferences during which the world’s affairs are handled in such an exemplary fashion.  I think this one may have been about relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.  It went as these things usually do; the […]

Et tu, Britain?This is what a lot of Americans are thinking with the news that a British parliamentary committee has pronounced the special relationship ‘dead’.Actually, one of the wonderful things about a special relationship is that it has more lives than a cat.  Brits and Americans have been pronouncing the special relationship dead since the […]

In my recent “Faith Matters” post, I expanded on a topic I discussed in a recent Council on Foreign Relations conference call on Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country: as a follow-up to a 2006 article I wrote in Foreign Affairs–“God’s Country?”–about the politics of Protestant religion in […]

Yesterday I wrote about a pattern of choices in our foreign policy that may make sense individually but that overall project an image of weakness before our enemies, disloyalty to our friends.Today I want to write about something bigger: a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it […]