Remember, remember, The Fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot!I only got to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day once when I was a kid, but it was definitely the Best Holiday Ever.Three hundred and five years ago today, a deranged Roman Catholic named Guy (aka Guido) Fawkes and a group of accomplices were caught in the […]

Well, it’s not your real birthday, and I’m not Marilyn Monroe, but it is the first anniversary of your election – and the first time the voters have spoken since then.Welcome to the rest of your term.This isn’t the happiest day you’ve had in the White House.  Last night’s election returns weren’t what you’d hoped […]

The designer of a foreign policy success story looks back on what made it work.

“Normal” tends not to be an adjective that individuals or nations cherish for themselves. Who wants to be merely normal, average or typical when one can be exceptional or superior? Germans do, and it is not hard to understand why. As a united polity only since 1870, Germany’s bloody odyssey from the Franco-Prussian War to […]

It’s not where the buck stops; it’s how it gets there that counts.

Germany has undergone five different political systems in the space of a few generations: monarchy, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, the separation into democracy in the West and real socialism in the East, and finally reunification. It seems reasonable at first, given such tumult, to ask whether Germany is now a normal country twenty years […]

Japan’s August 30 election, which swept the ruling Liberal Democratic Party out of power, changes everything—perhaps.

Few differences between Europe and the United States have proven as enduring as the “religion gap.” Almost 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America: “On my arrival, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention.” And then he noticed something more astounding: “In France I […]

Prestige architecture casts long shadows over Third World cityscapes.

Declinists and triumphalists alike forget that the future is not fore-ordained; it’s ours to shape.