Years ago in the happy, halcyon years of the Clinton administration when NATO was bombing Serbia and liberal internationalists were celebrating the end of history, my email inbox at the Council on Foreign Relations was overwhelmed by a rash of first hundreds and then thousands of angry messages, largely identical, from Serbs.  The primitive email […]

The alleged Iranian assassination plot against Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in the US (if the allegations hold up) is not news in the sense that it doesn’t tell us anything new or represent anything new about the structure of relations in the Middle East.  But it is very important news about the temperature of Saudi-Iranian relations, […]

A few days ago I was with a group of people when the topic of the Armenian genocide came up. The immediate reason for the topic to come up was the action of several European legislatures to declare that the events of 1915 in Turkey should indeed be called a genocide (there has been a […]

Stock markets have staged huge rallies since late last week on hopes that France and Germany were close to working out a deal that would finally put the euro crisis behind us.  But this morning European stocks are once again down as the euphoria wears off. Some of last week’s optimism was justified, since at […]

There is a flaming contradiction at the heart of President Obama’s Afghan war policy that threatens his strategy for safe withdrawal; the latest news from Pakistan suggests that the President now recognizes that something basic has to change.Many readers find their eyes glazing over when it comes to yet more bad news from Pakistan, the […]

Preamble: What follows is not an argument for the truth of religion. It is an exercise in the phenomenology of religion—that is, a description of what the phenomenon of religion is all about. It is not an exercise in theology—that would be a reasoned proposition that the phenomenon is true. Anyone, atheists included, could engage […]

The global market meltdown has continued overnight, as sharp falls in Asian market prepared the way for three to four percent declines in Europe.  The euro has fallen well below what as recently as a week ago looked like firm level of support at $1.35. The political and economic incompetence of Europe’s leadership is the […]

Austria-Hungary and the Soviet Union both lost empries. What can we learn from how they coped?

America's system of checks and balances usually works well, but not when it comes to fixing the Federal budget.

The Arab Spring has reached its first autumn, and it is still not clear whether Egypt will have a revolution.  In my view, it hasn’t had one yet.  The Mubarak family attempted a revolution of its own early in the year, replacing the military-business regime that has ruled the country since the 1950s with a […]