Over at Matt Yglesias’ new blog Moneybox, Via Meadia‘s research team came across a smart post from earlier in the week that cuts through the complaining and over-analyzing of the story about Mitt Romney’s upgraded beach house, and gets at a real problem most people have missed: to put on an addition at your house, you […]

The FT, citing two confidential analyses which were distributed to EU leaders on Friday, warns that the current lull in the storm that’s been roiling the financial markets is only temporary—a reprieve bought at the steep cost of €1 trillion spent to date. The underlying problems are as far as ever from a solution. Portugal and […]

India is not lacking for suitors these days. At the same time it was announced that Russia is preparing to develop a hypersonic cruise missile with India, China’s courtship of the emerging power was in full view at this week’s BRICS meeting in the Indian capital. Perturbed by the success of Obama’s “pivot” to Asia and […]

The Washington Post is catching on to a trend we’ve been writing about here for a while: As a young labor organizer in Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa worked for the city’s teachers, honing his political skills in the fight for a good contract. The union loved him back, supporting the Democrat’s election to the State Assembly, City […]

Grand strategy as a discipline is the study of power and how to get it. It is not about deconstructing power, attacking power structures or subverting hierarchies – although all of these can be skills a young eagle needs.

As expected, there was much more barking than biting at the BRICS summit in New Delhi this week. A BRICS-backed bank was among the new institutions the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) said they hoped to create, but different interests and priorities among countries with few things in common blocked any […]

Glenn Reynolds, the redoubtable blogger behind Instapundit, interviewed Prof. Mead on Pajamas Media TV this week. Topics of discussion include President Obama’s first term and higher education.Here’s the video. 

According to Iran, there are good revolutions and there are bad revolutions. Tehran supported the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Yemen last year, but on Thursday Iran’s highest authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reiterated his longstanding support for the Assad regime, saying his country is “strongly opposed” to any foreign intervention in Syria.The Ayatollah’s opposition made […]

As Arab leaders sip tea and discuss what to do about Syria in the heavily guarded (yet still vulnerable) compounds of Baghdad, one thing is clear: No one cares about Arab nationalism anymore.The leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman refused to attend the summit. The predominately Sunni Arab countries […]

The noose around the neck of the Iranian economy is getting tighter. Two more countries, Turkey and India, are preparing to cut their imports from Iran. Turkey appears set to cut imports by 10 to 20 percent, while India may cut imports by as much as 25 percent. As the second and fifth biggest importers of […]