U.S. policy makers have all too often clung to orthodoxies even as they fail. Yet a select few have managed to turn the ship of state around, to a better course.
Those nations falling between the developed West and the world’s poorest countries are jockeying for position in their own regions and playing powers against each other. They will make life increasingly difficult for the reigning great powers.
The world we know is changing. The result is an uneasy mixture of the traditional Westphalian state system and the forces of globalization. Until we find a balance between them, this is a recipe for drift, transition and increasing chaos.
They are being swayed by mindless alarmism, not sober considerations of what a nuclear Iran would mean—which makes their expressed aversion to a war all the more telling.
George Kennan presents a study in paradox. With penetrating scholarship, John Lewis Gaddis explores Kennan’s complex psychology and provides an intellectual history of the Cold War in his comprehensive and wonderfully written biography.
The story of the AK-47 reads like a Stalinist myth. Whether it's true or not, the gun is a sure sign of humanity's penchant for violent solutions to conflict.
The conventional wisdom says Sayyid Qutb is the forefather of modern-day Islamic fundamentalism. What is less known is how the thinker's intense anti-Semitism and contempt for female sexuality contributed to this vulgar worldview.
