Last month, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikhit, announced it is “necessary to destroy all the churches in the region. There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.”This fatwa was met with dismay in the Western and Christian worlds. Via Meadia and others picked up the story. Now […]

When President Barack Obama announced the ‘surge and exit’ strategy for Afghanistan in December 2009, Delhi, like so many others, was surprised. The significant expansion of Indian influence in Afghanistan since the U.S. ousted the Taliban regime at the end of 2001 was rooted in the stability and security provided by the American and international […]

For three decades the rising cost of attending American colleges has far outpaced inflation. As this higher education bubble continues to inflate, a university degree, which used to be a ticket into the middle class, is increasingly coming to resemble a ticket to decades of debt. And what are students, whose loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion, […]

Would He wear a pinky ring, would He drive a fancy car Would His wife wear furs and diamonds, would His dressing room have a star? If He came back tomorrow, there’s something I’d like to know Would Jesus wear a Rolex on his television show?These questions were asked in a song by Chet Atkins […]

As the U.S. and Iran continue their geopolitical chess match in Syria, the Wall Street Journal has written an absorbing and detailed profile of one of the region’s most important players: Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani commands the elite Qods Force, a network of soldiers and spies operating overseas to advance Tehran’s agenda.Soleimani is believed […]

All those who think the U.S. is declining for the next however-many-years should give Tyler Cowen’s latest TAI essay a close read. Writes Cowen: American manufacturing employment has been badly hurt by the mobility of capital seeking lower production costs abroad, but the growing wealth of foreign populations in rising economies is creating new demand […]

In the old days of Iraq’s Ba’athist dictatorship, Saddam Hussein’s government terrorized religious minorities under the banner of secularism. For years, Kurds and Shiites were brutally subjugated in the name of Iraqi secular nationalism.Today, the banner of repression is a different color, but its message is quite the same. In the name of Islam, divergent […]

For his first hundred days at the helm, Italian technocratic Prime Minister Mario Monti has enjoyed a respite from the political chaos that usually bedevils Italian politics. Approval ratings were high (as high as 70 percent in the beginning), and his support in parliament stemmed from a broad coalition combining the major parties of the […]

On March 9, Guy Taylor of the Washington Times reported that the Treasury Department earlier in the week began investigating former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell for trafficking with terrorists. Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy picked up the story a day earlier.  Apart from a New York Times article on March 13, attention to the matter […]

The U.S. exit from Afghanistan will have far-reaching strategic implications for all of Asia. The American preoccupation with a narrow conception of these implications ill serves the U.S. national interest.