Two gender-related issues have been all over the media recently. On January 24, 2013, the Pentagon announced that it was reversing the policy of barring women from combat roles in the military. On January 28, 2013, the Boy Scouts of America said that it was considering a reversal of the national ban on gay youth […]

Of all the world’s major religious faith communities, only Islam has yet to acknowledge the autonomy of politics from religion. The aspirations of any American “Freedom Agenda” must acknowledge the reality that, where there is an established “church” of that sort, political liberty cannot develop or remain secure.

The November elections confirmed that instability is the watchword in U.S. politics today. The only similar period in our history is the late 19th century—when the political economy was also being buffeted by rapid technological and social change.

D ecember 2012 saw the passing of the great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97. Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This […]

The contemporary vocabulary of “American Exceptionalism” comes to us courtesy of doctrinaire Communists and Catholics, from as recently as the 1930s. Really.

Most countries think they’re special, and they have a master narrative to prove it. The key to making American diplomacy more effective lies in figuring out what those narratives are.

Filibusters, the foibles of the Senate, and the trials and tribulations of campaign finance reform.

America may once have been “exceptional” next to Europe, but it is so no longer.

If America isn’t careful, rising nationalisms in China and Japan may “pivot” it into a strategic typhoon.

Whatever the main dangers of Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, it would also wreak havoc in the international oil mar- ket. That, too, would have major strategic consequences.