It’s still much too soon to tell how America’s Libya liberation venture will work out.  The international coalition is shaky; the UN mandate is dubious; air power has frequently disappointed those who trusted that it alone can win wars; political support in the US is shaky; the Great Loon of Libya, a statesman in the […]

Two milestones in the long, painful decline of the blue social model were reached this week and reported, of all places, in the pages of the very éminence grise of the monde bleu: the New York Times. The first was a piece of national and historical news: The Census reported that waves of blue state […]

With the world melting down and the Bard semester heating up, I’ve fallen behind in my grand strategy posts; apologies to all and I hope to catch up with a post next week (during Bard’s spring break) on Machiavelli. But today’s business is still the Second Punic War, the conflict between Carthage and Rome that […]

“Vote for a Republican,” my grandfather used to say, “and you get a depression.  Vote for a Democrat and you get a war.”  That seemed like a pretty good rule of thumb in the twentieth century: Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover gave us depressions, and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy (with […]

St. Patrick’s Day is usually a time for sentimentally celebrating Irish heritage and, in the United States, for highlighting the contributions that Irish Americans make to our common life. But this year we need something more.  This is a day to do more than toast Ireland; it is a day to offer Ireland moral support […]

Is America turning into Dixie?  And, if it is, is that a bad thing? The controversy over the blue social model keeps heating up.  With the controversy over Wisconsin’s restrictions on public employee unions metastasizing from the Madison protests to what increasingly looks like a national political battle, the blue state and red state models […]

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day; Paul Krugman was almost this lucky in his recent New York Times column: Degrees and Dollars.  It’s an important column and should be required reading even for people who stopped reading him a long time ago.  Krugman’s take on what’s wrong with the American economy and […]

The last two weeks in our grand strategy seminar have dealt with the war between Hannibal and Rome. The Second Punic War was one of history’s great confrontations, and the struggle has echoed and re-echoed down the millennia. Hannibal’s audacity, his tactical brilliance and his sheer military genius have challenged and inspired generations of strategists. […]

[As part of The American Interest’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I will be playing Civil War pundit from time to time: that is, I will post pieces about Civil War events as if they were happening now.  The goal of these posts is to illuminate the issues and problems of […]

When Muammar Gaddafi, the ‘Commander of Islam’, Africa’s King of Kings and the Great Loon of Libya addressed the United Nations General Assembly at unusual length in 2009, he asked about the hanging of Saddam Hussein.  “How is the member of a government and president of a country sentenced to hang? Who were these people […]