As the U.S. and Iran continue their geopolitical chess match in Syria, the Wall Street Journal has written an absorbing and detailed profile of one of the region’s most important players: Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani commands the elite Qods Force, a network of soldiers and spies operating overseas to advance Tehran’s agenda.Soleimani is believed […]

All those who think the U.S. is declining for the next however-many-years should give Tyler Cowen’s latest TAI essay a close read. Writes Cowen: American manufacturing employment has been badly hurt by the mobility of capital seeking lower production costs abroad, but the growing wealth of foreign populations in rising economies is creating new demand […]

In the old days of Iraq’s Ba’athist dictatorship, Saddam Hussein’s government terrorized religious minorities under the banner of secularism. For years, Kurds and Shiites were brutally subjugated in the name of Iraqi secular nationalism.Today, the banner of repression is a different color, but its message is quite the same. In the name of Islam, divergent […]

For his first hundred days at the helm, Italian technocratic Prime Minister Mario Monti has enjoyed a respite from the political chaos that usually bedevils Italian politics. Approval ratings were high (as high as 70 percent in the beginning), and his support in parliament stemmed from a broad coalition combining the major parties of the […]

Over at BuzzFeed Politics, columnist John Ellis has penned a provocative column about the collapse of the blue social model and the failure of both President Obama and Mitt Romney to face up to it: In a speech to the nation’s newspaper editors this morning, President Obama announced that he was running for re-election to […]

As Iraq tries to steady itself, Via Meadia has been losing sleep—particularly over how the Gulf Arab states and Iran use Iraq as a proxy battleground, supporting various political groups or militias in an ongoing struggle for control of politics and oil.Last week, fugitive Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who has been hiding from Iraqi security in Kurdistan […]

As I’ve been writing about the crisis of the blue social model, I’ve mostly focused on its consequences for North American and European societies. Canada, the US and the countries of western and central Europe are the places where the blue model has become most solidly entrenched and fully developed, and in the first instance […]

The student loan market has become a classic blue model example of good intentions gone wrong. In the beginning, subsidized federal loans helped make a college diploma part of the American Dream, but over time the combination of rising tuition costs and some dubious choices regarding course selection have saddled students with increased debt levels […]

Maryland is one of the bluest states in the union. Obama won nearly 62 percent of the vote against McCain in 2008. Both of its senators and three-quarters of its representatives are Democrats. At the state level, Democrats control both houses with supermajorities, and its governor, Martin O’Malley, is a Democrat.Yet Maryland has just joined […]

The AP reports that Egypt’s Copts have pulled out of the drafting committee for the country’s new constitution: Egypt’s Coptic Church withdrew Monday from an Islam­ist-dominated committee that will draft the nation’s new constitution, and a leading Christian figure said the minority was never really represented to begin with.The move fed growing fears that Islamists […]