How freewheeling bankers used offshore secrecy jurisdictions to escape regulation and contribute to the global economic crisis.

A bold new design for a master metric of national power.

[T]he Germans are the most impenetrable, hardest to define, most contradictory, least transparent, most incalculable, most surprising and self-intimidating of any people. They escape easy definition. —Friedrich NietzscheHas Germany become more normal over the past two decades? More normal than what? Today’s Federal Republic behaves quite logically for the situation in which Germany finds itself, […]

Simple questions do not always dispose themselves to simple answers, so in pondering what it means to say that Germany is (or is not) a normal country twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I turn first to analogies furnished by memory. Two memories, in particular, come to mind. In the early 1970s, I […]

 Ninety years after 1919, seventy years after 1939, twenty years after 1989: Could it be it time for Germany to declare normalcy, for Germans to stop obsessing about their history and start living in the present? After all, we Germans have accomplished what is today broadly reckoned to be an honorable and complete accounting of […]

Tracing the foundations of American global strength, from past to future.

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago changed the face of Germany, Europe and international politics. If the Cold War, with its dangerous nuclear competition, was some kind of protracted crisis, then it was by definition an abnormal period, and therefore its conclusion would open the way to a return to normalcy for […]

The improbable journey of a theory that helped wreck the economy.

It should be no surprise, I write today, that American officials desperately working to stave off military defeat and political collapse in Afghanistan find themselves cutting dirty deals with nasty people—like Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. In Afghanistan,  a country that’s been involved in chaotic civil and international conflicts for thirty years, the people […]

There’s a beautiful kilim on the blogging room floor here at the stately Mead manor in Jackson Heights; I bought it in Peshawar about three years ago when I was giving a series of lectures on American foreign policy across Pakistan.  I couldn’t buy it in the market; the security situation in Peshawar was so […]