I wrote fairly recently a fourth update on Libya, thinking it would be the last update for a while. But having read this morning’s New York Times, I can’t resist a short comment. An article by Suliman Ali Alzawy and David D. Kirkpatrick reports that Libyans in the eastern province, centered on Benghazi, have declared […]

I had a friend some years ago, an Israeli (since deceased) of large appetites and an expansive sense of humor, who used to joke that Shakespeare was really an Arab: Sheikh Zubar. I remember one day at a hilltop park near his home in Haifa he acted out a very tall tale of Hamlet with […]

Since I took a look at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for The American Interest late last year, the future of both agencies has remained uncharted by Congress. My piece offered a brief history of the Depression-era birth of Fannie Mae and its younger thrift-inspired sibling, Freddie Mac. For much of that history, these government-sponsored […]

The American Interest notes with deep sorrow and regret the passing of James Q. Wilson (May 27, 1931–March 2, 2012), eminent American public policy scholar and a member of the AI’s editorial board. He was 80.Update:Francis Fukuyama on James Q. Wilson.Wilson in the AI:The Sources of American Conduct, Autumn 2005A Quarter Century of Broken Windows […]

Two weeks after the ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court that convicted Baltasar Garzón and led to his disbarment as a magistrate, the media is close to unanimous in portraying the case as a Francoist assault on the democratic institutions in Spain and the revenge of malicious peers, envious of Garzón’s international standing.   In […]

We received the following letter from the State Secretary for Government Communication, Dr. Zoltán Kovács, on February 10, responding to Francis Fukuyama’s February 6 post, “What’s Wrong with Hungary?“The text of the letter follows: Budapest, 10 February, 2012 Dear Professor Fukuyama, Thank you for your response; your admission of the factual mistakes in your original post […]

During my five years as Hungarian Ambassador in Washington, DC, we used public communications extensively—both traditional tools and “outside the box” ones. Every day my staff and I were on the lookout for new outlets to portray our country in a positive light.In that vein, my two appearances on the Colbert Report were, without doubt, […]

There’s really nothing wrong with existing U.S. drug policy, except that all but one of its underlying ideas is false. The one true idea is that drug use can be a dangerous activity for drug-takers and others, both because people under the spell of intoxication partially lose control of their behavior and because people under […]

When U.S. and coalition forces ejected Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, a new American era of military power projection began. During the Cold War, America’s military became an increasingly static force, forward based around the world to deter warfare, dampen regional security competitions and contain Soviet expansion. With the collapse of the Soviet […]

Last week, the New York Times carried a front-page story on Libya entitled “Libya Struggles to Curb Militias as Chaos Grows.” If the headline were not enough to clarify the main point, the subheads in the print edition were: “Government Paralyzed” and “Officials Confronted by Rivalries, Grievances and Old Habits.”To my knowledge, this is the […]