It makes former Bush aide Peter Wehner really unhappy that anyone would criticize President W. Bush. In our latest essay, we noted that the Bush presidency remains widely unpopular and that national Bush fatigue remains a serious political problem for the Republican Party. We said that “more went right under Bush than most of his critics understood,” but […]

What does it mean for the euro that, on paper at least, Spaniards, Italians, and Cypriots are much wealthier on average than Germans? That’s the question Wolfgang Münchau tackled in a must-read column in the Financial Times, and it’s one that VM readers would do well to spend some time thinking through.Here are the outlines of his […]

In the March 23 issue of The National Interest Amitai Etzioni castigated Japan and the United States for jointly pursuing a policy of containing China. The United States, he said, would be drinking from a “poisoned chalice ” if it supported the nationalist ambitions of Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an LDP leader who […]

It’s still too early to render definitive judgment on the Iraq War, but it’s high time to start asking the right questions. We may need the answers sooner than we think.

Some Australian strategists have taken a shine to Beijing. If Australia’s loyalty to America can be shaken, none of America’s Asian alliances is safe.

This piece is third in a series on the challenges facing the U.S. Armed Forces. Previous entries discussed the Army and the Air Force. As the U.S. Marine Corps winds down its operations in Afghanistan, it faces a different kind of battlefield back home, where the challenges take shape as numbers, ideas and purposes. This operational theater […]

In his reluctance to brandish America’s world leadership credentials at every turn, President Obama is tapping into an interesting if frustrating strain of American history—and it just might help America learn the wisdom of great power prudence and humility.

The errant 2002–03 U.S. intelligence estimate of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program are two of the most controversial judgments in the history of the U.S. intelligence community.

American passivity has already helped ensure that the fall of Bashar al-Assad will be worse than it might have been. What will Washington do with Syria when it can no longer do nothing?

Recent commentary on Europe has been overwhelmingly parochial. You can’t talk about the continent’s crises and future in a vacuum.