Hans Morgenthau years ago warned a generation of American idealists against imagining that at some point “the final curtain would fall and the game of power politics would no longer be played.” Yet such hopes are hard to quash for children of the Enlightenment, who believe fervently in human progress and perfectibility. Similar hopes ran […]

The Obama Administration is a work in progress, and a fair-minded report card would feature far more incompletes than letter grades. Still, one may venture some interim judgments.On the positive side, the President has put in place a competent White House and Executive Branch, which seem to be functioning reasonably smoothly and with no more […]

President Obama inherited the most daunting and intractable tangle of foreign policy challenges of any American leader since the early years of the Cold War. The new Administration found itself saddled with crises and festering problems complex in character and long in the making: unfinished and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stalled peace talks […]

Barack Obama is a symbol—a truly inspiring example of what a half-African, half-American man can achieve in the United States. He is also a gifted orator, if a little over-reliant on the teleprompter. Into the bargain, he is a streetwise Chicago politician who outsmarted Hillary Clinton in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. Above […]

Following the money reveals the growing dangers of an unlikely partnership.

A letter from an expat describes a beautiful, baffling country.

Our great foreign policy experiment with North Korea and its nuclear weapons program is over. For most of the past twenty years, three strands of thought about how to deal with this problem have competed for primacy. There were those who advocated energetic engagement with North Korea, forgiving their serial trespasses and being willing to […]

The history of patent law shows its great and enduring power.

It is axiomatic that successful Presidents must focus their political capital on just a few priorities. Barack Obama has had no such luxury. Just on the international front, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the deepening Israeli-Palestinian conflict, near-term deadlines requiring policy reversals on nuclear proliferation and climate change, a broken relationship with Russia, and a global financial […]

It is in the best interest of China to see a nuclear-free Korean peninsula; that’s what the Chinese government should want, has wanted and still wants. The reality, however, is that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has already obtained nuclear weapons, as proven by its two tests, and has accumulated enough nuclear materials […]