A veteran Peace Corps hand volunteers to help, again.

A friend as troubled as I am at President Obama’s mounting misadventures in foreign and security policy said, “I hope he knows what he’s doing.” I hope he doesn’t.I hope he doesn’t because I prefer the alternative explanation: that he has spent nearly a year getting it wrong out of inexperience, naivety, the distraction of […]

An exercise in thinking through what ought to be the ultimate goal of U.S. policy toward Korea requires Americans to invite two handmaidens along for the effort: caution and humility. Those who would set such goals must understand that the United States does not have the power by itself to compel North Korea to reform […]

Here is the recurring problematic of U.S. policy toward North Korea: Policy starts out principled and long-term, with a clarion call for irreversible denuclearization, the promise of a transformed relationship with Pyongyang and the requisite assurances of close coordination with allies. Invariably, this policy ends up becoming incremental, tactical and reactive, as sterile debates over […]

The servers at the humming headquarters of The American Interest collapsed for about 12 hours yesterday, perhaps overcome with excitement that as Christine Russell points out today, New Year’s Eve this year falls on a blue moon.However, not to worry.  The-American-Interest.com is on top of the problem; we’ve reviewed the literature and are handling this […]

Now it gets tough.  That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from […]

Yesterday I blogged about how theists and atheists are the same; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life.  Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching, and we want to do something real with our lives.  […]

[While I’m mostly staying away from politics over Christmas break, here are some thoughts on the White House reaction to the attempted bombing of the Detroit flight last week. ] A lot of the things that presidents have to do are hard.  That is all the more reason why they should do the easy stuff […]

Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a pretty holiday about presents and elves.  Christmas is serious business, at least as Christians understand it.  The birth of the baby in the manger is connected with the murder of […]

Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes, as in ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger’ were used to wrap up the limbs of newborns so they […]