As President Obama travels to John Brown’s old stomping ground in Osawatomie, Kansas where Theodore Roosevelt made his New Nationalism speech in 1910, Newt Gingrich has announced that he is a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. If you asked Theodore Roosevelt what kind of Republican he was, he would — and did — tell you that he […]

Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin as Russia’s President next spring will once again align real and formal power in Russia, as they were during his earlier two terms in office. Although the Russian Prime Minister is nominally subordinate to the President, Putin has dominated Russian politics throughout Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency. As if to underscore […]

In one of the Bush Administration’s most infamous moments, President Bush boarded an aircraft carrier under a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner just as the serious problems in Iraq were beginning to emerge. Eight years later, Vice President Biden has visited Iraq to deliver a much more subdued speech with the same message — America has […]

Secretary Clinton’s visit to Myanmar this week has been billed as a “significant shift in policy”, a “huge gamble”, and a “real opportunity” as the commentariat comes to grips with the latest twist in the new Great Game. True, it is the first visit of such a high-level American official since John Foster Dulles ran […]

Joe Nocera has been a welcome addition to the New York Times op-ed page since his start there as a regular some months ago. On Tuesday he wrote another fine column, this one on why the current German leadership is on a path to do what he thinks, in retrospect, will look completely insane—not to […]

Welcome to the “Democratic Republic” of the Congo, called the world’s least developed country in the United Nations. (Eat your heart out, Afghanistan.) Elections here are a joke, and not a funny one. The most recent presidential and parliamentary vote is currently being counted, but early reports sound familiar: The incumbent president is accused of […]

Some perspective on the twilight of the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is becoming smaller and more dangerous.

What many saw as a revolutionary conflict at Tahrir Square fizzled away yesterday as an astonishing (and peaceful) turnout of Eygptians all over the country demonstrated their preference for voting over Molotov cocktails and strikes. Although much too early for final results in the multi-round Egyptian election process to be clear, observers from all over […]

Some years ago there was a cartoon in The New Yorker showing Zeus in conversation with two other Olympian divinities. The caption read: “They call it monotheism. I call it downsizing.” Also some years ago, a Japanese philosopher (whose name I forgot) wrote that Western civilization has been dominated by two fallacies: monotheism, the belief […]