The United Nations Security Council acted just in time to forestall a bloodbath in Libya, if it indeed enforces its own resolution. Troops loyal to Muammar Qaddafi have seized almost irreversible momentum in their battle against anti-government rebels, and absent Western action the fall of the rebel capital Benghazi is imminent. After a period of […]

St. Patrick’s Day is usually a time for sentimentally celebrating Irish heritage and, in the United States, for highlighting the contributions that Irish Americans make to our common life. But this year we need something more.  This is a day to do more than toast Ireland; it is a day to offer Ireland moral support […]

Bad Boll is a village in Wuerttemberg, in the southwest of Germany. It is located in the so-called Swabian Alps, a landscape of gentle hills and modest forests, as averse to drama as the proverbially sober regional culture. Yet this village has played an anything but undramatic role in the history of German Protestantism. Johann […]

Is America turning into Dixie?  And, if it is, is that a bad thing? The controversy over the blue social model keeps heating up.  With the controversy over Wisconsin’s restrictions on public employee unions metastasizing from the Madison protests to what increasingly looks like a national political battle, the blue state and red state models […]

On February 18, 2011, The Christian Century carried a short piece (Century Marks section, no permanent link available), possibly for the purpose of light entertainment.  During the apartheid period in South Africa an Anglican convent was visited by a prominent theologian. One of the resident nuns informed him: “You church leaders have a big job […]

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day; Paul Krugman was almost this lucky in his recent New York Times column: Degrees and Dollars.  It’s an important column and should be required reading even for people who stopped reading him a long time ago.  Krugman’s take on what’s wrong with the American economy and […]

The last two weeks in our grand strategy seminar have dealt with the war between Hannibal and Rome. The Second Punic War was one of history’s great confrontations, and the struggle has echoed and re-echoed down the millennia. Hannibal’s audacity, his tactical brilliance and his sheer military genius have challenged and inspired generations of strategists. […]

[As part of The American Interest’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I will be playing Civil War pundit from time to time: that is, I will post pieces about Civil War events as if they were happening now.  The goal of these posts is to illuminate the issues and problems of […]

When Muammar Gaddafi, the ‘Commander of Islam’, Africa’s King of Kings and the Great Loon of Libya addressed the United Nations General Assembly at unusual length in 2009, he asked about the hanging of Saddam Hussein.  “How is the member of a government and president of a country sentenced to hang? Who were these people […]

The icon of Our Lady of Kazan (also known as the Black Virgin of Kazan) is one of the most famous in Russian Orthodoxy.  One of the Virgin’s two feast days coincides with the Day of National Unity. This is appropriate. Kazan occupies an important place in Russian history. Its conquest and destruction in 1552 […]