At a time when both economic uncertainty and security concerns along NATO’s periphery are driving the Transatlantic relationship, Poland’s dynamic economy and growing geopolitical weight make it an increasingly important European ally for the United States. So it matters that during the past four years America has lost public support in Poland despite close state-to-state […]

During the brouhaha over George W. Bush’s nomination of John Bolton to serve as UN ambassador, I felt that the president ought to be represented by the person he had selected in the job. At Via Meadia we feel the same way in the debate over UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s possible promotion to be secretary […]

Recently, on the same day, I came across two religious news items that made me think again about a topic which has long interested me: that of dialogue between religious traditions. The first item was a story in the British Catholic periodical The Tablet on November 10, 2012. It concerns a collaborative project of the […]

“Is DR Congo’s cycle of agony unbreakable?” asks the BBC in this recent dramatic headline. The reason for the Beeb’s unhappiness: the latest round of fighting in the eastern Congo where a rebel movement backed, most observers believe, by Rwanda has recently humiliated a pathetic mix of feckless, poorly led UN peacekeeping troops and forces […]

On All Saints Day in 1755 a powerful earthquake destroyed most of the city of Lisbon. The earthquake, which was followed by a huge tsunami, devastated large areas of Portugal, Spain and Morocco, claiming tens of thousands of lives. As such natural disorders always do, it raised religious questions in many minds—in supposedly Christian Europe […]

I read with great interest Jeffrey Gedmin’s article on the state of U.S. international broadcasting (“Turn Your Radio On”, September/October 2012). The article reminds us of the powerful contributions made by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during World War II and the long Cold War that followed. In those days, VOA and […]

Again I come late to the gabfest, this time about the Hamas-IDF confrontation in and around Gaza. So much has already been said, and it falls in the usual categories: the thinly didactic, the fatuous, the banal, the shrewd and, especially, the emotional. The usual irrational Jewcentric crap, of all four sorts, too, can be […]

The United States confronts two major foreign policy challenges: China, and the weak and restless. The alternatives for China are well known, and there is consensus about which of these is most attractive; Romney would not have followed a different course from the one that has been chosen by Obama. In contrast, there is no […]

About ten minutes into the new James Bond film, I was already in love. Not because of the long, opening chase scene, which among its obligatory demolishment of fruit carts and motor vehicles, did feature one brilliantly iconic moment when Bond smartly straightens his cuffs after the narrowest of escapes. No, the moment I succumbed […]