The decline of democracy and popular disenchantment with democratic institutions have recently become hot topics in academic and think tank circles. Freedom House, in its annual Freedom in the World report released in January, cites a seventh consecutive year of decline in freedom around the world but cautions that the decline is not a precipitous […]

In the spring of 2012, a State Department consultant sat at a bar on Capitol Hill watching a baseball game. Across the bar, a young, boisterous American woman solicited funds, so she claimed, for the rebels in Syria. The consultant had served in USAID under the Bush Administration and had been to Syria just before […]

Weakened by ethnic conflict and poor governance, the South Caucasus countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) are losing international significance. Moreover, the West is preoccupied elsewhere with economic challenges and crises in the Middle and Far East. To sustain the Western support the three countries expect and need, they must implement reforms and lessen regional tensions.Two decades ago, war between […]

Sequestration unfairly gouges the Defense budget, and unless it’s offset by an improbable Herculean reform effort in the Defense Department, it will probably wreak havoc in international security. ???

Ron Radosh, writing for PJMedia, dug back into New Left history and political theory in coming up with an explanation for the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. Radosh provided a telling quote from Herbert Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance” article of 1965. I doubt whether it really applies to the IRS scandal, but it’s timely […]

Update: June 3, 2013 (see below). We might have thought that it would be hard to top the Obama Administration’s recent fiascos with respect to the administration of justice. So far the hit parade includes the IRS’s “unintentional” persecution of small-fry Tea Party groups, the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s)  warrantless spying on a score […]

More than 70,000 Syrians have been killed by their own government, and there is now overwhelming evidence that the regime has used chemical weapons. The “international community”, in a display that is cynical even by its own usual jaded standards, has remained impassive and impotent. Even the Obama Administration, which declared Syria’s use of chemical […]

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 […]

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 […]

The attack on the Boston marathon vividly highlighted, with anguish unparalleled in the post-9/11 period, the security challenge posed to the United States by terrorism. Unlike the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, however, these attacks were perpetrated not by terrorists from the Middle East or Southeast Asia but from the Russian North […]