Iran, not the Islamic State, is at the core of our strategic problem set. Understanding that is key to understanding some of the big stories to come out of the Middle East in recent days.

A Thanksgiving meditation.

If pluralization depletes social capital, then might cross-cultural non-believers find some way to join together to create new forms of social capital, both in situ and virtually via the internet for example?

The brighter side of the not-so-good headlines dominating the news.

How the intricacies of U.S.-Turkish relations may figure into the meek nature of the U.S. air campaign against ISIS.

We Americans talk about sex publicly all the time these days, but it rarely dawns on America’s cultural warriors that foreigners overhear these conversations. The consequences are not always trivial.

Reluctant warriors like Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, and President Obama make special kinds of mistakes. We will see how those mistakes develop this time around.

Is General Dempsey chomping at the bit to go kill Arabs? Not at all. He is simply worried, as a competent military professional ought to be, that the anti-ISIS coalition-building effort the President announced in a primetime Oval Office speech on September 10 is not going so well. Actually, it’s going so very not well.

The President’s speech was good as oratory, but the lack of understanding of what is really going on in the Middle East means that the strategy the White House seems bent on pursuing is unlikely to succeed.

Whenever the U.S. Government has a choice between doing nothing and sending in the cavalry to sort out a non-vital national security contingency, it is a sure sign of an antecedent failure of imagination and planning.