In this series of posts on the nature of effective government, I want to keep the focus narrowed to questions of implementation. Many of the comments made by the governance specialists on my “What is Governance?” paper on the Governance web site criticized my effort to restrict my focus to implementation. They argued that it […]

A New Era in U.S. Health Care: Critical Next Steps Under the Affordable Care Act by Stephen Davidson (Stanford University Press, 2013), 128 pp., $12.99It’s a bad time to be a supporter of the Affordable Care Act. Public support for the law remains low, and seems to be getting lower. Moderate and conservative Democrats who backed […]

It looks as though direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will begin again after a three-year-plus hiatus, probably in Washington, sometime during the next week or so. What does it all mean, for the protagonists, for the wider region and for U.S. foreign policy?For starters, it means John Kerry has landed on the map of history. No one […]

On July 16, 2013, Asia News, an online Roman Catholic newsletter published out of Rome, carried a story involving Hindu-Muslim relations in India. I want to put this story into a wider context.The story reports on a controversy sparked by an offensive remark by Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and currently […]

It turns out that the smart diplomats and strategery buffs in the White House have taken another look at the situation in Syria and reached a new conclusion: that Assad isn’t going anywhere after all. The Syrian civil war is going to drag murderously on into the indefinite future, jihadi groups will fester and multiply […]

Have you noticed that a particular word is cropping up more and more in our political discourse? The word “dysfunctional” is increasingly used to describe the world we are living in. Zigmunt Bauman has offered another word to describe our times: “interregnum”, a void separating past and future.Some authors seem to think that we can […]

Since I finished my TAI ebook Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It back in March, I have continued to collect data points relevant to the subject. (One of these, a real doozey that some of you may recall, concerns a May 26 post that mentions a certain Congressman Jim Hines from […]

I have not posted anything to this blog in several months because I’ve been working to complete the second volume of my book on political development, which is tentatively titled Political Order and Political Decay: From the French Revolution to the Present. It complements The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French […]

For some Iranians, the recent elections were a hopeful signal; for many outsiders, they were a signal for cautious optimism. But there’s one country that has good reasons to be skeptical of any good news from Tehran: namely, Israel. That skepticism has driven Israel to search far and wide for geopolitical partners in places that […]

Edward Snowden’s elaborately staged press conference at Sheremetyevo Airport on Friday culminated in his renewed request for political asylum in Russia, if only to enable his eventual flight to Latin America. So far, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador have all offered him asylum (in Venezuela’s case, the offer was legally certified), but it nonetheless must have […]