“Normal” tends not to be an adjective that individuals or nations cherish for themselves. Who wants to be merely normal, average or typical when one can be exceptional or superior? Germans do, and it is not hard to understand why. As a united polity only since 1870, Germany’s bloody odyssey from the Franco-Prussian War to […]

Germany has undergone five different political systems in the space of a few generations: monarchy, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, the separation into democracy in the West and real socialism in the East, and finally reunification. It seems reasonable at first, given such tumult, to ask whether Germany is now a normal country twenty years […]

Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, economic theory trumped economic history; no longer. But what does that history tell us?

Why IKEA is just as bad as Wal-Mart.

Japan’s August 30 election, which swept the ruling Liberal Democratic Party out of power, changes everything—perhaps.

You could say that we began going wobbly over Afghanistan in March, when the much-heralded new strategy embodied the best nation-building aspirations, but did not quite add up to a renewed declaration of war. There are good reasons too. It is a huge leap from calculating how much we can afford to lose to trying […]

The issues I will discuss with all of you are the blossoming relationship between what might seem unlikely bedfellows…. the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whether we have a national security crisis looming on the horizon, and whether our national security and law enforcement communities are sufficiently focused on this […]

Meet William Playfair, 18th-century philosopher, writer, inventor, spy.

California is broke. Ungovernable, too.

An old obsession goes virtual in the age of globalization.