It has been an eerie experience rereading Thucydides while watching governments totter across the Arab world.  In some ways, nothing has changed in 2500 years; revolution was an important part of Thucydides’ world and changes in government in Greek city states would cause those cities to shift from a pro-Athens to a pro-Sparta orientation.The revolutionary […]

There were two stories about the military chaplaincy in the February 8, 2011 issue of The Christian Century.  The first dealt with the disproportional representation of Evangelicals among chaplains today—33%, while the number of soldiers belonging to Evangelical churches is 3%. This situation is unlikely to change. 87% of individuals seeking to be chaplains in […]

Is America in a race to the bottom, or are we going through what the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter would call a process of “creative destruction”?As readers over thirty will remember, Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of two boys: a pessimist and an optimist.  A psychologist put the pessimistic boy in a […]

[Published in the IHT under the headline “The Tea Party and US Foreign Policy”]The rise of the Tea Party movement has been the most controversial and dramatic development in U.S. politics in many years. Supporters have hailed it as a return to core American values; opponents have seen it as a racist, reactionary and ultimately […]

OK, now things are finally starting to get interesting in the Middle East. Tunisia was noteworthy, but not critical. Egypt has been very dramatic, though wildly misinterpreted by most observers in the United States. Jordan is still more or less stable, but is in fact more portentous a stake in some ways than Egypt. But […]

The world has been watching the upheavals and protests shaking the Middle East these days, but it’s just possible that the disturbances in Madison, Wisconsin mark what will ultimately prove to be a bigger turning point in world history.In the heart of Blue State America, we are seeing a challenge to some of the fundamental […]

The difference between Egypt and Bahrain is that Egypt has a national army, and Bahrain does not. The Egyptian officer corps is drawn from the nation’s elite while conscripts from ordinary families fill the enlisted ranks. But every Egyptian speaks Egyptian Arabic (little more than regional accents survive from the old dialects) and the population […]

On February 5, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about Eva Golinger, a lawyer from New York, in her thirties, who has become a fervent advocate for Hugo Chavez and his “Bolivarian revolution.” She came to Venezuela in the 1990s and now lives in Caracas, and speaks Spanish with a pronounced American accent. […]

If a specter haunts the chancellories of America, it isn’t communism and it isn’t Karl Marx.  It’s Thucydides, the chronicler of the 30 year Peloponnesian War between ancient Sparta and Athens that led to the comprehensive defeat of the world’s first great democratic power.  The assumptions most Americans bring to the study of foreign policy […]

Pharaoh Hosni is out; the Mubarak dynasty is done.  This had to happen and, whatever comes next, the downfall of an undemocratic leader well past his sell-by date is a good thing in and of itself. The nation of Egypt is not a personal possession to be handed down like an heirloom from generation to […]