This piece is fourth in a series on the challenges facing the U.S. Armed Forces. Previous entries discussed the Army, the Air Force and the Marine Corps. The past eight months have been troubling for American security and for how the world regards American power. The September 11, 2012 attack on our consulate in Benghazi […]

Editors’ note: What follows is the eighth part of an exchange on Russian-Western relations following from David Kramer and Lilia Shevtsova’s monthly column at The American Interest Online (see especially their February 21 essay, “Here We Go Again: Falling for the Russia Trap”). The exchange, a complete listing of which may be found below, has also provoked […]

Have the Bush-era neocons and Obama liberals made all the same mistakes in the Middle East? David P. Goldman argues convincingly in Tablet that the past five years of Middle East policy have been marked not by a Democratic departure from the previous administration’s policies but by a complete failure by consensus: with regard to […]

Colorado and Washington made headlines last year when majorities in both states voted to legalize the sale and use of mairjuana within their states. Six months later, both states are trying to figure out what a legal pot regime actually looks like, and it’s a tricky business.Naturally, the core issues stem from the regulation of […]

In a recent poll of Indian citizens by the Lowy Institute in Australia, 83 percent of respondents said they view China as a major national security threat. Just slightly more (87 percent) said the same of Pakistan. Despite China being India’s number one trading partner, fewer than a third of poll respondents said China’s rise has been […]

Two Amtrak trains collided this weekend after a derailment in western Connecticut, injuring 72 people and destroying almost half a mile of track. Now the focus is on commuters on the affected Metro North line—all 30,000 of them—who won’t be able to take the train into work this week. The AP reports on the delays riders […]

When we highlighted the disturbing uptick in male suicides in a post last week, we noted that a weaker economic outlook for adult men may play a significant role in driving this trend. As the thinking goes, men are finding it more difficult to find work, which makes it harder to find partners and build a family in […]

Teachers’ unions have been fighting a (mostly losing) battle against charter schools for nearly two decades, but the chief victims of the charter and voucher revolutions might not be public schools after all. Smaller private schools, including Catholic schools, face a crisis as they’re increasingly supplanted by charters.In an excellent piece in The Atlantic, Chester E. […]

They’re baaaaaack!The infamous Chinese hacking group Unit 61398 is once again on the offensive after a few quiet weeks. The PLA-guided hackers were fingered by Washington for dozens of sophisticated hack attacks against targets in the West earlier this year. Now Mandiant, the computer security firm that first exposed Unit 61398, says the hackers are […]

The climate story is turning out to be more complicated than green zealots have claimed. A new report published yesterday in the journal Natural Geoscience is challenging the scientific consensus on how fast the Earth is warming.In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that the climate would warm by between 1°C and 3°C […]