The world has been watching the upheavals and protests shaking the Middle East these days, but it’s just possible that the disturbances in Madison, Wisconsin mark what will ultimately prove to be a bigger turning point in world history.In the heart of Blue State America, we are seeing a challenge to some of the fundamental […]

The difference between Egypt and Bahrain is that Egypt has a national army, and Bahrain does not. The Egyptian officer corps is drawn from the nation’s elite while conscripts from ordinary families fill the enlisted ranks. But every Egyptian speaks Egyptian Arabic (little more than regional accents survive from the old dialects) and the population […]

On February 5, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about Eva Golinger, a lawyer from New York, in her thirties, who has become a fervent advocate for Hugo Chavez and his “Bolivarian revolution.” She came to Venezuela in the 1990s and now lives in Caracas, and speaks Spanish with a pronounced American accent. […]

If a specter haunts the chancellories of America, it isn’t communism and it isn’t Karl Marx.  It’s Thucydides, the chronicler of the 30 year Peloponnesian War between ancient Sparta and Athens that led to the comprehensive defeat of the world’s first great democratic power.  The assumptions most Americans bring to the study of foreign policy […]

Pharaoh Hosni is out; the Mubarak dynasty is done.  This had to happen and, whatever comes next, the downfall of an undemocratic leader well past his sell-by date is a good thing in and of itself. The nation of Egypt is not a personal possession to be handed down like an heirloom from generation to […]

The shock waves of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation have just started to roll across the Middle East, but in Egypt the upheaval has barely begun. The country now embarks on what the protesters in Tahrir square hope will be a transition to a true, civilian-led democracy. In the meantime, Egypt is headed for a period of […]

My recent post “Virginity, Polyamory and the Limits of Pluralism” provoked more comments than any previous one. Almost all the comments latched on to a single sentence: “Once you legitimate same-sex marriage, you open the door to any number of alternatives to marriage as a union of one man and one woman,” from polygamy to […]

Reading Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War for the Bard grand strategy seminar this winter was an unsettling experience.  Of course, that is the point.  The Art of War is one of those books that doesn’t want to sit there in your lap; it wants to reach up and slap you in the face.My […]

Today we are starting a new feature at Via Meadia: our StratBlog.  At Bard College I’m teaching a modified version of the Yale Grand Strategy curriculum developed by John Gaddis, Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy to a group of undergraduates this semester and the students have been generous enough to agree to share this experience […]

As the Tunisian government fell, Egypt erupted, Jordan’s cabinet was ousted, Algeria and Yemen protested, and Syria braced for a wave of demonstrations—what was happening in Iraq? Nothing much. Mainly business as usual: The country resumed oil exports from the Kurdistan region for the first time since 2009 in the wake of a breakthrough agreement […]