Yesterday’s post on climate change was pretty gloomy.  A combination of scientific uncertainty, green ineptitude and the volume of other insistent global problems competing with the green agenda for resources and attention add up to near-certain for greens who think the only way to Save the Planet is to cut carbon use by international decree […]

Sometimes, you don’t have to be an emperor to have no clothes.  Just being the Prince of Wales can be enough.  After all, in May of 2008 Prince Charles warned the world that we had only eighteen months left to save the planet from spiraling climate disasters.  Twenty-three months later we are struggling to cope […]

Two cheers for AIPAC; this is not the most popular sentiment in the foreign policy world, where the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is often both feared for its power and loathed for an approach to Middle East policy that, in the opinion of its many critics is often seen as unsubtle, one-sided and unhelpful.I’d […]

Today’s post was written by Sam, Research Associate for Team Mead at the Council on Foreign Relations. He studied political science and English at Yale.Giving me the reins of The Blog for the day (and Easter no less!) is daunting—a bit like when Mr. Mead lets me dust and clean the statue collection in the […]

A few years ago I was lucky enough to have some time in Athens, while attending one of those endless conferences during which the world’s affairs are handled in such an exemplary fashion.  I think this one may have been about relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.  It went as these things usually do; the […]

Et tu, Britain?This is what a lot of Americans are thinking with the news that a British parliamentary committee has pronounced the special relationship ‘dead’.Actually, one of the wonderful things about a special relationship is that it has more lives than a cat.  Brits and Americans have been pronouncing the special relationship dead since the […]

In my recent “Faith Matters” post, I expanded on a topic I discussed in a recent Council on Foreign Relations conference call on Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country: as a follow-up to a 2006 article I wrote in Foreign Affairs–“God’s Country?”–about the politics of Protestant religion in […]

Yesterday I wrote about a pattern of choices in our foreign policy that may make sense individually but that overall project an image of weakness before our enemies, disloyalty to our friends.Today I want to write about something bigger: a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it […]

The health care win has given the President his mojo back at home, but things overseas are still looking grim.  We are neglecting or quarreling with our friends and reaching out to our enemies — but neither policy is yielding much in the way of results.The latest case is Canada; on a visit to Ottawa […]

On Thursday, March 25, the newspapers announced on their front pages a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement. A slow news day, maybe, I thought. This sort of thing would have deserved front page coverage before 1991; now it may still, but that’s not so evident. During the Cold War, strategic arms control was bound up with […]