My resolution for 2012 is to restart the blogging I did on The American Interest’s web site, something I haven’t done since 2009. I stopped writing back then because I was in the process of drafting the first volume of The Origins of Political Order and didn’t have the time.I’m now in the midst of […]

America's system of checks and balances usually works well, but not when it comes to fixing the Federal budget.

How Samuel Huntington helps us understand the Jasmine Revolutions.

How do we explain the puzzling weakness of liberal populism?

There are three Democratic predecessors in whose footsteps Barack Obama could follow: Jimmy Carter, who was seen as a failure in both domestic and foreign policy; Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded at home but failed abroad; and Franklin Roosevelt, who achieved great things on both fronts. If Obama gets a reasonable health care reform bill through […]

I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night.  Republicans have been attacking it because they say that it sends a signal of weak […]

I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night. Republicans have been attacking it because they say that it sends a signal of weak […]

Our economists knew better than to encourage reckless finance, so why did they do it anyway?

This is no light recession we’re in, recent spin notwithstanding.

One of the most obvious policy initiatives that the United States could undertake right now is is to seriously up the amount of help being given Mexico to bolster security along the US-Mexican border and to help to reform the Mexican judicial system.  We started this process last year with the Merida Initiative, but the […]