Editors’ note: What follows is the seventh 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 […]

Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage by Michael R. Veach University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 224 pp., $24.95 I began reading Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage, by Michael R. Veach, with a hangover manifesting itself as a throbbing headache, courtesy of the titular drink. I hoped that by the time I finished the book, […]

It wasn’t long after reports revealed the prime suspects of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Watertown shootout as two ethnic Chechens, Tamerlan and Jokhar Tsarnaev, that tales of heroism in the press were displaced by the familiar frenzy of terrorism hysteria. From absurd notions that immigration reform should be scotched because the Tsarnaev brothers […]

In the 1990s, Western supported and funded democracy assistance programs, including support for civil society and rule of law, technical assistance to political parties and legislatures, and election monitoring to ensure free, fair and democratic elections, played an important role in the expansion of democracy throughout much the former Communist block, Africa, Asia and elsewhere. […]

Editors’ note: What follows is the sixth 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 […]

In the March 23 issue of The National Interest Amitai Etzioni castigated Japan and the United States for jointly pursuing a policy of containing China. The United States, he said, would be drinking from a “poisoned chalice ” if it supported the nationalist ambitions of Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an LDP leader who […]

Some Australian strategists have taken a shine to Beijing. If Australia’s loyalty to America can be shaken, none of America’s Asian alliances is safe.

Political inequality drives economic inequality, not the other way around.

Large cities in poorly and misgoverned lands have problems dis- tinct from those in more affluent, better-institutionalized democracies. The denizens of the latter fail to appreciate what ails those of the former even as they produce “wasteful waste” of their own.

Russia’s tumultuous and mostly regrettable post-Cold War history is paralleled in some ways by an earlier time, one that provided the setting for the incomparable émigré journalist Alexander Herzen.