California’s embattled high-speed rail project has been attracting skeptics for some time—not least for its $100 billion price tag. But defenders of the program aren’t giving up the fight easily. The Wall Street Journal reports that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has now reduced cost estimates for the project to $68.4 billion, mainly by running […]

It’s been a bad year for solar power. Last year’s Solyndra scandal was one of the biggest public relations setbacks the industry has faced in years. And in recent months, more solar companies have been filing for bankruptcy, and even those that remained have had difficulty securing the government-provided loan guarantees they depend on.Now yet […]

An explosive joint report by a top Chinese scholar and a leading American analyst argue the two countries are locked in a corrosive cycle of distrust that, if left unchecked, could lead to outright antagonism within 10-15 years. The idea behind the report was for each co-author to write candidly about how his country views the […]

Hafiz Saeed is a hero to some Pakistanis. To almost everyone else, especially Indians and Americans, he is reviled as the face of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group responsible for many atrocities, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people. Naturally the Indians consider him Public Enemy #1, and he is high on the list of […]

In recent years, the small, mountainous country of Nepal, tucked between India and China, has been best known in international circles as the home of a violent Maoist insurgency. But with the Game of Thrones heating up, Nepal may be taking on a new role on the international stage: a site of proxy competition between […]

It was thirty years ago on Monday that war erupted between Argentina and Great Britain for control of the tiny Falkland Islands. A lot has changed for both countries since then. As the Financial Times reports, decades of cuts to the defense budget have left Britain’s Royal Navy with about 20 surface combat vessels, a sharp […]

One of east Africa’s most important stories has been hidden from the headlines recently: Kenya and Ethiopia’s push into lawless Somalia to wipe out al-Shabaab, the motley gang of pirates, thugs, and al-Qaeda-linked militants that has ruled swathes of Somalia for years. After a rough start, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces have booted al-Shabaab out of […]

The blue model continues to crumble in the face of harsh fiscal realities. The latest example: public sector pensions, where desperation over falling returns has pushed fund managers into riskier investments in private equity, real estate, and hedge funds. As the NY Times notes, this hasn’t worked out very well, especially for Pennsylvania: The $26.3 […]

I’ve been visiting the University of Tennessee this week, talking with faculty here about teaching grand strategy and gave a lecture yesterday on American strategy in the nuclear age.Today at 12 noon, I’m entering blogging Valhalla: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit (and a professor at the UT law school) and I will be talking about how […]

Is the Obama administration edging toward intervening in Syria? The New York Times reports on the latest incremental escalation in our proxy war with the Assad regime: The United States and dozens of other countries moved closer on Sunday to direct intervention in the fighting in Syria, with Arab nations pledging $100 million to pay […]