Yesterday’s North Korean attack on South Korea has evidently frightened many people. That’s natural, for there is some incalculable but not trivial prospect that the fighting could escalate into a huge bloody mess. The attack, and the South Korean response, seems to have led to an emergency National Security Council meeting from which the President […]

As regular visitors to this space will have noticed, I have been unusually slow to post during the last week.  This is not because I’m running out of steam as a blogger.  And it’s not because this is a slow news week.  In recent days the European financial crisis took a dark turn for the […]

In the current issue of The Christian Century there are three items about Lutherans. One is about the economic difficulties incurred by congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) who have left that denomination to protest its decision in August 2009 to allow non-celibate gay clergy and to bless same-sex unions. Thus far […]

Life keeps getting worse for President Obama.  It is not just that the conservative press, which never liked him, has a new note of confidence and even joy as it pursues a quarry whose blood reporters think they can smell.  It is not just that he lost control of Congress in the midterms.  No: the […]

The Iraqi political class has finally struck a deal on government formation—but what does the deal mean? To begin with, it means the Iranian project of entrenching in power incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Shiite religious parties that support him for another five years has succeeded—a project that has been in the works […]

In the book which has by now become an important point of reference, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington developed the thesis that after the demise of the Cold War conflicts would be between civilizations rather than ideologies. The thesis has been hotly discussed ever since, mostly unfavorably. I […]

President Obama has begun the second half of his presidential term with a planned ten-day tour of Asia.  Even beneath the haze of skepticism (from critics who accused the President of fleeing the country in the aftermath of the disastrous midterm election) and the clouds of spin (from administration staffers who sought to draw the […]

[Yesterday saw the beginning of The American Interest’s commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial over at The Long Recall. I will be following the Civil War era news day by day on our new aggregator, and from time to time will play Civil War pundit:  writing political commentary on the events of the day as […]

One hundred fifty years ago the election returns led the morning news: Abraham Lincoln gained enough electoral votes against a split Democratic opposition to elect him the 16th President of the United States.  His election would set off first a secession crisis, as South Carolina almost immediately began preparations to secede from the Union, and […]

No president in my lifetime has fallen from heaven to earth as rapidly as President Obama.  Others have lost popularity and lost control of Congress, but none fell from such a height.  Who can forget the rapturous cries of joy when he was elected in 2008?  Who can forget all those predictions of a ‘transformational […]