Africa’s King of Kings, the Sword of Islam, the Guide of the People and the Great Loon of Libya is gone.  The crowds kicked his lifeless body through the streets of his hometown.  Those who trusted in him and who aided and abetted his crimes, are scattered to the four winds — the lucky ones.  […]

Will the European Union survive the weekend?  President Nicolas Sarkozy seems concerned that it won’t and, if it doesn’t, it will be terrible news for France.  The FT reports on France’s growing angst: As Moody’s, the US rating agency, warned that France could see its credit outlook cut as a result of the growing sovereign […]

The news that 175 people were arrested over the weekend in a Chicago OWS protest started me thinking about the ritualized nature of left demonstrations.  The drums, the chants, the defiance, the arrests — and, sometimes, the glass smashing and the fire setting:  it all unfolds according to a predictable pattern that in its modern […]

Years ago in the happy, halcyon years of the Clinton administration when NATO was bombing Serbia and liberal internationalists were celebrating the end of history, my email inbox at the Council on Foreign Relations was overwhelmed by a rash of first hundreds and then thousands of angry messages, largely identical, from Serbs.  The primitive email […]

The alleged Iranian assassination plot against Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in the US (if the allegations hold up) is not news in the sense that it doesn’t tell us anything new or represent anything new about the structure of relations in the Middle East.  But it is very important news about the temperature of Saudi-Iranian relations, […]

Stock markets have staged huge rallies since late last week on hopes that France and Germany were close to working out a deal that would finally put the euro crisis behind us.  But this morning European stocks are once again down as the euphoria wears off. Some of last week’s optimism was justified, since at […]

There is a flaming contradiction at the heart of President Obama’s Afghan war policy that threatens his strategy for safe withdrawal; the latest news from Pakistan suggests that the President now recognizes that something basic has to change.Many readers find their eyes glazing over when it comes to yet more bad news from Pakistan, the […]

The global market meltdown has continued overnight, as sharp falls in Asian market prepared the way for three to four percent declines in Europe.  The euro has fallen well below what as recently as a week ago looked like firm level of support at $1.35. The political and economic incompetence of Europe’s leadership is the […]

The Arab Spring has reached its first autumn, and it is still not clear whether Egypt will have a revolution.  In my view, it hasn’t had one yet.  The Mubarak family attempted a revolution of its own early in the year, replacing the military-business regime that has ruled the country since the 1950s with a […]

Good news from the Voldemort Affair (the unpleasantness formerly known as the Global War on Terror, these days it appears to be some kind of contretemps with Those Who Must Not Be Named). President Obama’s order to kill or capture Anwar al-Awlaki, one of Al Qaeda’s chief propagandists, has finally been carried out. The NYT […]