I’ve been blogging enthusiastically about Brazil and the potential for a new kind of relationship between the two most populous and dynamic republics in the western hemisphere.  And I’d add a little more: for young Americans wondering what country and language they can study that will give them an edge in life, let me suggest […]

Last year I posted a series on the top ten trends that would shape the new decade and introduced it with a piece on the core reality driving events in our time: the accelerating pace of change.  Driven by forces hardwired into science and capitalism, history is speeding up, societies around the world are being […]

Most of what people write and say about international relations is sheer claptrap.  That is especially true when diplomats and distinguished journalists convene.  Get yourself on the international rubber chicken circuit and you will soon discover a world of pompous gasbags relentlessly pounding their audiences with barrages of platitudes.  Worse, you may start flapping your […]

Brazil is ground zero for global greens.  Home of the largest and richest rainforest system in the world, Brazil is where the fight for biodiversity and the fight against deforestation will be either won or lost.  At the Copenhagen Summit, Brazil played a key role in failed negotiations that killed the Green Dream of a […]

For regular readers wondering why there haven’t been many posts for the last week, I have been on a lecture tour in Brazil, participating with American Interest colleague and longtime friend Dr. Josef Joffe of the Hoover Institution and Die Zeit, in a series of conversations, seminars and exchanges with Brazilian thinkers, businesspeople, journalists and […]

There are two big mistakes most Americans make about our inner city problems:  we believe that the troubles of the inner city are mostly about race, and we believe that they can be solved without God.The failure of the blue social model to solve the problems of the underclass in America’s inner cities was one […]

Niccolo Machiavelli is one of those rare writers so well known that his name has become an adjective; ‘Machiavellian’ means crafty and ruthless.  And over the centuries, Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, has vexed moralists for its seeming defiance of all moral laws. The ruler, Machiavelli tells us, must not just learn to do […]

It’s still much too soon to tell how America’s Libya liberation venture will work out.  The international coalition is shaky; the UN mandate is dubious; air power has frequently disappointed those who trusted that it alone can win wars; political support in the US is shaky; the Great Loon of Libya, a statesman in the […]

Two milestones in the long, painful decline of the blue social model were reached this week and reported, of all places, in the pages of the very éminence grise of the monde bleu: the New York Times. The first was a piece of national and historical news: The Census reported that waves of blue state […]

With the world melting down and the Bard semester heating up, I’ve fallen behind in my grand strategy posts; apologies to all and I hope to catch up with a post next week (during Bard’s spring break) on Machiavelli. But today’s business is still the Second Punic War, the conflict between Carthage and Rome that […]