Cautionary Note: The following text has been rated PG. Parental discretion is advised.Not all issues in the contemporary American culture wars involve sexuality. A good many do (possibly due to the long shadow of Puritanism). Sometimes issues that started elsewhere, such as in disputes over the role of religion in public life, take on bizarre forms […]

Ethiopia today dismissed Egypt’s talk of “war” as psychological intimidation and vowed that construction on what will become Africa’s largest dam will continue regardless of threats. Dina Mufti, a foreign ministry spokesman, said that Ethiopia was “not intimidated by Egypt’s psychological warfare and won’t halt the dam’s construction, even for seconds.” This comes only a couple days […]

President George W. Bush’s reputation among Americans is on the rebound. For the first time in eight years, more Americans regard W positively than negatively, says Gallup. The WSJ reports: 49% of Americans now view Mr. Bush favorably, outpacing the 46% who view him unfavorably. . . . At the end of his second term, […]

The US media and the pundit class, everywhere from the NYT to The Atlantic, are elegantly and beautifully wringing their sensitive hands over the NSA snooping scandal. Woe, alas and alackaday seems to be the reigning sentiment. Freedom is dead. Big Brother rules the roost.Outside the Beltway, however, a new Pew poll finds that a majority […]

Russia already has the world’s largest reserves of conventional natural gas and is the world’s largest gas exporter. So more could hardly be a bad thing for Moscow, right? According to the EIA, Russia has the ninth-largest technically recoverable shale gas reserves in the world. But Russia has serious fracking problems, of which the biggest by […]

Tom Graham’s wide-ranging “Response to the Critics” included a question for me, in his fourth paragraph. He saw an inconsistency between, on the one hand, my view that Putin’s crackdown over the first year of his latest Presidency has been internally generated and was not a response to U.S. pressure, and, on the other hand, […]

Understanding rogue or “outlier” states, and figuring out how to deal with them, remains a major international security challenge. Two books would tutor us, one more successfully than the other.

Calculating the costs of U.S. political campaigns over time is no simple task, but it doesn’t take an expert statistician to know that things have gotten out of hand.

R2P can be a prod for effective humanitarian intervention, but not a recipe suited to particular cases. Implementation can improve, but it will never be easy.

Something very curious is happening in Turkey. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appear to have been rattled by the Istanbul demonstrations that started on May 31. With the world’s attention on Gezi Park in Taksim, they seem to be at a loss as to how […]