In early 2004 Howard Dean was running for the Democratic presidential nomination and went on a tour of the Holy Land to shore up his foreign policy credentials and squash speculation that he was a secularist who couldn’t connect with religious Americans.  A New York Times story of January 4, 2004 details some of the […]

Walking down 68th Street yesterday between Lexington and Third Avenues – the spot where, historians think, Nathan Hale was hanged in September of 1776– I felt the world change. A sidewalk vendor was selling pretty decent neckties for $5 each.Neckties are one of my subjects. Since I was thirteen years old, I’ve spent more time […]

When I was a young kid living in South Carolina, you would still sometimes see mule-drawn wagons on country roads.  You also saw advertisements for Burma Shave: typically a series of six to eight small road signs at short intervals with a rhymed message of some kind.  “Don’t go passing up a slope/Unless you have […]

I had one of those wonderful life moments last week. I was at CNN on a Lou Dobbs panel about Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic rant at the UN; heading out to the elevator I ran into E. Benjamin Skinner in the hallway. Ben is the author of A Crime So Monstrous, a book on global […]

Greetings, TAI readers and other visitors. My name is Walter Russell Mead; I’m on the editorial board at TAI and Adam Garfinkle and the editorial team have courageously and graciously offered me a platform from which to blog.This is not, quite, my first date with the internet. For the last few weeks I have participated […]

The issues I will discuss with all of you are the blossoming relationship between what might seem unlikely bedfellows…. the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whether we have a national security crisis looming on the horizon, and whether our national security and law enforcement communities are sufficiently focused on this […]

As with fascism and communism before, we’re underrating ideology and “split modernity” in confronting our enemies.

Why does the West have such a hard time naming its terrorist enemies?

What Republicans can learn from the Age of Reagan.

Creating a coherent strategy means aligning goals, missions and resources; we can do it if we try.