Earlier this week, Dilma Rousseff made the same trip that several thousand Brazilians have become addicted to: a trip to the United States. Unlike Rousseff, most of those Brazilians are on a historically unique shopping spree. Even with the U.S. dollar growing a bit more expensive in the last few weeks, for ordinary Brazilian citizens […]

\When the nice people at The American Interest invited me to start a blog on religion, they said that, if so moved from time to time, I could write on other topics. Mostly I have not been so moved. I am now. As I watch, with more or less appalled fascination, the unfolding circus of […]

One of the most important claims that the friends of the blue social model make is that it addresses the needs of the poor and the weak better than any other existing social system. This is a serious point that blue critics sometimes don’t think enough about, but the claim is more questionable than blues […]

For more than a century, Japan has pioneered global political trends. That it is now gravitating, truly for the first time, towards a revitalizing democratic West speaks volumes.

The stakeholder model of China’s full integration into the current liberal global order fails to reckon with the worldview and political interests of the Chinese Communist Party.

Seen from Kazakhstan, China looms as a change-maker and a potential big problem. Pro-Russian sentiment in Central Asia is thus more than just nostalgia.

The Nobel Peace Prize has a checkered history, to put it mildly. Here’s why.

I did not head off to work today meaning to write again about Syria, but some things just can’t be helped. I was launched into my current orbit by a remark in today’s Washington Post. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it was a sentence written in that telltale sign of basic journalistic fraud: weasely, evasive language that […]

The reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar, for good and for ill, will erode neither quickly nor dramatically. But change it will.

The Fed’s post-September 2008 monetary policy hasn’t worked as usual to stimulate a recovery. The reason lies in the unprecedented depths of the housing collapse. Conclusion: The United States must export its way to robust growth, as other countries have done.