Novelist Salman Rushdie, famously, is something of an expert witness on the menace of blasphemy laws. On February 14, 1989, recall, Iran’s fanatical ruler Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa suborning the murder of Rushdie, a foreign citizen, for the crime of writing a work of fiction, The Satanic Verses. Agents of militant Islam from London to Lahore […]

A year ago, the world was abuzz with talk of the euro crisis and the feared disintegration of the European Union. By the end of 2012, the discussion has shifted to the crisis of the liberal democracy model itself. The debate is no longer “Keynes vs. Hayek” or expansionary vs. austerity fiscal measures. At the […]

In the grim opening moments of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated and controversial follow-up to The Hurt Locker, recordings of distress calls and screams amid the harrowing attacks of September 11 echo over a black, blank screen. A ten-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden plays out over the next two hours. It’s an […]

“Pakistan’s continuing support of Operation Enduring Freedom has been critical to our success so far in toppling the Taliban and routing out the Al Qaeda network. Yet President Musharraf has made an even broader commitment. He has declared that Pakistan will be an enemy of terrorism and extremism wherever it exists, including inside his own […]

Good Italy, Bad Italy: Why Italy Must Conquer Its Demons to Face the Future by Bill Emmott Yale University Press, 2012, 304 pp., $30 Italy is a large and prosperous country but one that has never sat comfortably among the great powers. During the 1950s, it was home to Europe’s strongest communist party—a party that, […]

Republicans are poised to take the semi-deserved brunt of public anger after the maddening fiscal cliff “showdown”, a further hit to a brand already tarnished by the 2012 election results. To all the political theorists, intellectuals, and social scientists cooking up strategies to revive the party, I say: Watch more TV. I don’t mean, of […]

“Your first time in a political campaign?” the Senator said. “You poor bastard.” He had his sympathy, however, firmly under control. And properly so, since professors of politics – Woodrow Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan aside – rarely take the knocks associated with the subject they study. The Senator probably considered, and rightly, some bruises, […]

There is an unremarked paradox in the tumult of the contemporary Middle East. Syria is an economically impoverished country of a little more than 20 million people that has been politically stagnant until 23 months ago. Egypt, by contrast, never socially at rest and with its ancient energies newly bestirred, is at 80.5 million people […]

Editor’s Note: The following is Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann’s testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on “Benghazi and Beyond”, from November 15, 2012. Ambassador Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain, […]

Sergei Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who was beaten, deprived of vital medical attention, and left to die in a Russian prison nearly a year after uncovering a massive fraud allegedly committed by Russian officials to the tune of $230 million. The very people whom Magnitsky implicated in the fraud arrested him in 2008; a […]