As the midterm elections approach, the political topic on everyone’s tongue is jobs. The discussion in the popular press, such as it is, takes several forms. Lately, the most common question one hears is how come the economy in general seems to be recovering from the recession but the unemployment rate is still so stubbornly […]

We have in The American Interest an ongoing project called “Nation-Building in America” and infrastructure renewal is a subject I have been trying to get covered now for some time, so far to no avail. The reason for my difficulties is my standard of adequacy: I don’t want an essay just telling my readers how […]

On Thursday, March 25, the newspapers announced on their front pages a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement. A slow news day, maybe, I thought. This sort of thing would have deserved front page coverage before 1991; now it may still, but that’s not so evident. During the Cold War, strategic arms control was bound up with […]

President Obama’s Afghan strategy has crimped his room for maneuver on an even tougher challenge: Iran.

It is appropriate, I think, to pause and reflect when a death finally brackets a part of one’s life. I briefly worked for Alexander Haig back in 1979-80, just before he became Secretary of State. I was a junior aide only, and he did not invite me, fresh out of graduate school as I was […]

Just a few selected comments on this weekend’s newspaper reading, as it were.First, in the New York Times “Week in Review” section under the headline “Our Decade of Deluded Thinking,” an unsigned author makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall […]

Today’s headline in the Washington Post tells us that our Ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, opposes the sending of more U.S. and allied troops to Afghanistan, putting him at odds with the commanding general in that war, General Stanley McChrystal. Eikenberry happens to be a general, too—3-star instead of 4-star, but who’s counting? The […]

An old obsession goes virtual in the age of globalization.

I have known Peter Rodman for so many years that I cannot remember when I met him. Peter and I were in email contact just last week (I asked him to write something for the next issue of The American Interest.), and he was reluctant to do it because he wanted to first finish the […]

Three decisions that define Harry Truman as a pragmatic moralist.