The Libyan rebels have marched triumphantly into Tripoli this week, but they can’t expect much in the way of congratulations from the African Union, which has thus far refused to recognize the National Transitional Council. With the Great Loon little more than a fugitive, and with pro-Loon forces decimated to the point where only the […]

[A Vintage Via Meadia essay originally published one year ago, republished as a new cohort of first year students tries to figure out how to get the most out of college — and a new cohort of parents tries to figure out how to pay for it.]The anxious emails from students are hitting my in-boxes […]

The Japanese are on to their sixth prime minister in five years. The FT calls it the “PM revolving door”, and says the newest leader, Yoshihiko Noda, will be lucky to get a meeting with President Obama at the White House. In public, the White House welcomed Mr Noda’s appointment. “The relationship between the US […]

China’s low cost manufacturing sector is widely seen as the single biggest contributor to the Middle Kingdom’s dramatic and much-ballyhooed economic rise. For many companies, locating manufacturing operations in China just made too much sense to pass up. One by one, companies with plants in the US, Europe, and even Mexico pulled up stakes to join in […]

A former Ambassador critiques a former Special Envoy’s take on Pakistani double-gaming.

How Americans have commemorated the Civil War at fifty, one hundred and 150 years tells us who we are as a nation-in-progress.

As I surveyed the photographs of people in Cairo and elsewhere in the Arab world, mostly young and brimming with enthusiasm, often with fingers raised in a “V” for victory, I was reminded of three similar moments in recent Latin American history, each of which I witnessed firsthand: the Dominican revolution of 1965; the Sandinista […]

With the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of American Special Forces on May 2, 2011, the 9/11 decade may be said to be psychologically over.1 Political decades, after all, do not have to fit neatly into the calendar.  Just as the Sixties began with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 2, […]

Looking back on the life of an extremely difficult woman.

Bad government is making the tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan’s bad luck hard to stomach.