The decline of democracy and popular disenchantment with democratic institutions have recently become hot topics in academic and think tank circles. Freedom House, in its annual Freedom in the World report released in January, cites a seventh consecutive year of decline in freedom around the world but cautions that the decline is not a precipitous […]

Weakened by ethnic conflict and poor governance, the South Caucasus countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia) are losing international significance. Moreover, the West is preoccupied elsewhere with economic challenges and crises in the Middle and Far East. To sustain the Western support the three countries expect and need, they must implement reforms and lessen regional tensions.Two decades ago, war between […]

In the spring of 2012, a State Department consultant sat at a bar on Capitol Hill watching a baseball game. Across the bar, a young, boisterous American woman solicited funds, so she claimed, for the rebels in Syria. The consultant had served in USAID under the Bush Administration and had been to Syria just before […]

Sequestration unfairly gouges the Defense budget, and unless it’s offset by an improbable Herculean reform effort in the Defense Department, it will probably wreak havoc in international security. ???

The British journal The Tablet, which I find very useful for what goes on in the Roman Catholic Church, came out with a “Pentecost edition” on May 18, 2013 (the feast was on May 19). Pentecost was the event recounted in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit was poured out over a gathering […]

As I write a battle is raging in Qusayr, Syria. It has been going on now for several days at various levels of intensity, having started in earnest on May 19. As of yesterday midday one way to measure that intensity is by the number of rocket attacks on rebel areas: approximately 55 per minute, […]

Ron Radosh, writing for PJMedia, dug back into New Left history and political theory in coming up with an explanation for the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. Radosh provided a telling quote from Herbert Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance” article of 1965. I doubt whether it really applies to the IRS scandal, but it’s timely […]

Update: June 3, 2013 (see below). We might have thought that it would be hard to top the Obama Administration’s recent fiascos with respect to the administration of justice. So far the hit parade includes the IRS’s “unintentional” persecution of small-fry Tea Party groups, the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s)  warrantless spying on a score […]

When I read a certain front-page article in the New York Times on Friday, my mind immediately hurled itself, and much of the rest of me with it, back to Poland in 1772. I can’t help it; my mind does that sometimes, since, I guess, that’s where my forebears were living at the time. But […]

President Obama has a strategy for American counterterror policy and he is sticking to it; that was the core message of the speech the President gave Thursday at the National Defense University.Confronted by a troubling strategic and political situation in the world at large as well as in the complex conflict that he does not […]