Earlier this summer U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo H. Daalder stepped down from his posting to become president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. TAI editor Adam Garfinkle recently spoke with him about his tenure in Brussels, focusing on some of the key issues that continue to animate Transatlantic discussions. Adam Garfinkle: Looking back […]

What happened in Egypt yesterday and is continuing to happen today is sad, disheartening and about as completely unsurprising as any such event can be. In Tuesday’s short post I referred in passing to “the impending street clashes in Cairo.” In my August 2 post I specified the epicenter of the violence to come, the […]

Back on July 1, just a few days before the military ousting of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, I wrote a politically incorrect post about the pre-modern character of much of the Muslim Brotherhood cadre. I did so because it was directly relevant to the fact that a very large number of Egyptians were in the […]

New adventures in America’s faith-based foreign policy.

I’ve been going on a lot lately about time. My editor’s note for the forthcoming Autumn 2013 issue of The American Interest focuses down on that, and since not everyone who reads this blog also reads the magazine (shame on those of you to whom this applies….we need your money), I offer it here in […]

Sometimes it’s not what a statesman says in public that matters most, but both how he says it and the context in which he says it.  Case in point: Secretary Kerry’s remarks yesterday in Islamabad.Having written speeches for two Secretaries of State, I am particularly sensitive to such nuances. I am also sensitive to the […]

For my money (no serious pun intended, as you’ll see), today’s big news is yesterday’s District Court decision by Richard J. Leon to slap down the Federal Reserve’s violation of Congress’ intent in implementing the order in Dodd-Frank to reduce the fees banks can charge for the use of debit cards. This sounds arcane, I […]

It looks as though direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will begin again after a three-year-plus hiatus, probably in Washington, sometime during the next week or so. What does it all mean, for the protagonists, for the wider region and for U.S. foreign policy?For starters, it means John Kerry has landed on the map of history. No one […]

Since I finished my TAI ebook Broken: American Political Dysfunction and What To Do About It back in March, I have continued to collect data points relevant to the subject. (One of these, a real doozey that some of you may recall, concerns a May 26 post that mentions a certain Congressman Jim Hines from […]

I promised you yesterday, dear reader, a post arguing that the Manichean pro- and anti-democracy polarity with which most Americans think about the situation in Egypt is deeply and dangerously misguided. I promised, as well, an argument to the effect that this view is an expression of a secularized evangelism anchored in the Western/Christian mythical, […]