Turkish secularism is eroding before our eyes, and the resulting cocktail of religious intolerance and social activism may even threaten the current Islamist leaders who are mixing it up.

A lot of official Republican discourse tries to skate past the failures of the Bush years, but this won’t do.

Late last week the White House issued a new policy on security sector assistance. According to the White House press release, the aims of security sector assistance are to: 1) Help partner nations build the sustainable capacity to address common security challenges 2) Promote partner support for U.S. interests 3) Promote universal values, and 4) […]

The classical German sociologist Max Weber (who has been an icon in my professional ideology) distinguished various types of authority in his theory of politics. The modern world, he proposed, is dominated by what he called “legal-rational authority”. Its typical institutional expression is bureaucracy. Those who exercise power must be able to justify why their […]

She was, beyond a doubt, the greatest British political leader since Winston Churchill and, like him, she was cordially hated by many grandees of the party she led.The entire British establishment, from the royal family down, often wished she would just go away. In the end, a Cabinet cabal proved too much for her and […]

What Saddam Hussein and Richard Nixon tell us about nuclear weapons and the “rational actors” in Tehran.

Editors’ note: What follows is the fifth part of an exchange on Russian-Western relations following from David Kramer and Lilia Shevtsova’s monthly column at The American Interest Online (see especially their February 21 essay, “Here We Go Again: Falling for the Russia Trap”). On March 12, Thomas Graham responded with his essay, “In Defense of a Strategic […]

Editors’ note: What follows is the fourth part of an exchange on Russian-Western relations following from David Kramer and Lilia Shevtsova’s monthly column at The American Interest Online (see especially their February 21 essay, “Here We Go Again: Falling for the Russia Trap”). On March 12, Thomas Graham responded with his essay, “In Defense of […]

On March 21, 2013, Law and Religion Headlines, the very useful online newsletter from Emory University, carried a summary of an interview on the BBC with Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. He is an interesting and appealing figure. Born in 1956, he had an elite education at Eton and Cambridge, then an impressive […]

One of the ongoing perplexities of President Obama’s Syria policy has been the stark contrast between his muscular rhetoric and halting, hesitant actions. On the one hand, he has insisted that the country’s dictator Bashar al-Assad “must” go and has predicted that his fall is all but assured. But on the other, he has thus far […]