Niccolo Machiavelli is one of those rare writers so well known that his name has become an adjective; ‘Machiavellian’ means crafty and ruthless.  And over the centuries, Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, has vexed moralists for its seeming defiance of all moral laws. The ruler, Machiavelli tells us, must not just learn to do […]

Though the signs were clear from the start of the Libya operation that people hadn’t clearly thought through the consequences of intervention, it took a tweet from Anne-Marie Slaughter (the recently-departed Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and one-time author for our magazine) to crystallize just what a mess we’re really in. She […]

Andrew Sullivan is shocked and appalled that President Obama now seems committed to stretching coalition involvement in Libya beyond the narrow confines of the UN Security Council resolution:It’s so surreal, so discordant with what the president has told the American people, so fantastically contrary to everything he campaigned on, that I will simply wait for […]

It’s still much too soon to tell how America’s Libya liberation venture will work out.  The international coalition is shaky; the UN mandate is dubious; air power has frequently disappointed those who trusted that it alone can win wars; political support in the US is shaky; the Great Loon of Libya, a statesman in the […]

The Copts have featured repeatedly in media reports about Egypt. Before the recent revolutionary events the reports have been about murderous attacks on Coptic churches and homes by Islamic fanatics, unhappily in line with similar attacks on Christians in Iraq, Pakistan and other Muslim-majority countries. There were some uplifting follow-up stories from Egypt—Muslims (including leading […]

A couple of days ago, I was asked a few questions about what chances liberal forces had in Egypt after the referendum. My response was in the negative. The young activists so often described in the Western media as liberal, democratic or secular stand no chance in the next parliamentary elections scheduled for next September. […]

Two milestones in the long, painful decline of the blue social model were reached this week and reported, of all places, in the pages of the very éminence grise of the monde bleu: the New York Times. The first was a piece of national and historical news: The Census reported that waves of blue state […]

I just spent a week in South Africa, attending a fascinating conference of limited “godder” interest. I have been coming to that country for over twenty-five years, watching with empathy its transformation from an odious racist regime to a vibrant democracy. This was a visit after an interval of about three years, and once again […]

The argument one’s been hearing most of all from critics of the intervention in Libya has been over consistency. If we’re so keen on invading Libya for ostensibly humanitarian reasons, why aren’t we fighting a war in Bahrain, Yemen or Côte d’Ivoire? The implication here is two-fold: that the Obama Administration has embarked on this […]

To all appearances, U.S. foreign policy in the Obama Administration has now definitively gone down the rabbit hole. It is intoxicated with an advanced form of Wilsonian madness, one shorn of all sensitivity to the consequences of the U.S. government’s behavior. Like Alice with her pills, some things are getting or will soon get bigger—risks, […]