“Vote for a Republican,” my grandfather used to say, “and you get a depression.  Vote for a Democrat and you get a war.”  That seemed like a pretty good rule of thumb in the twentieth century: Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover gave us depressions, and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy (with […]

St. Patrick’s Day is usually a time for sentimentally celebrating Irish heritage and, in the United States, for highlighting the contributions that Irish Americans make to our common life. But this year we need something more.  This is a day to do more than toast Ireland; it is a day to offer Ireland moral support […]

Is America turning into Dixie?  And, if it is, is that a bad thing? The controversy over the blue social model keeps heating up.  With the controversy over Wisconsin’s restrictions on public employee unions metastasizing from the Madison protests to what increasingly looks like a national political battle, the blue state and red state models […]

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day; Paul Krugman was almost this lucky in his recent New York Times column: Degrees and Dollars.  It’s an important column and should be required reading even for people who stopped reading him a long time ago.  Krugman’s take on what’s wrong with the American economy and […]

The last two weeks in our grand strategy seminar have dealt with the war between Hannibal and Rome. The Second Punic War was one of history’s great confrontations, and the struggle has echoed and re-echoed down the millennia. Hannibal’s audacity, his tactical brilliance and his sheer military genius have challenged and inspired generations of strategists. […]

[As part of The American Interest’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I will be playing Civil War pundit from time to time: that is, I will post pieces about Civil War events as if they were happening now.  The goal of these posts is to illuminate the issues and problems of […]

When Muammar Gaddafi, the ‘Commander of Islam’, Africa’s King of Kings and the Great Loon of Libya addressed the United Nations General Assembly at unusual length in 2009, he asked about the hanging of Saddam Hussein.  “How is the member of a government and president of a country sentenced to hang? Who were these people […]

Who is killing the public unions?Some people, like the tens of thousands of protesters in Madison and the tens of millions of Americans who agree with them, believe that the villains are scheming corporate interests, Fox News, Tea Party ‘fanatics’ and opportunistically populist politicians like Scott Walker.Many of their opponents agree that the right is […]

It has been an eerie experience rereading Thucydides while watching governments totter across the Arab world.  In some ways, nothing has changed in 2500 years; revolution was an important part of Thucydides’ world and changes in government in Greek city states would cause those cities to shift from a pro-Athens to a pro-Sparta orientation.The revolutionary […]

Is America in a race to the bottom, or are we going through what the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter would call a process of “creative destruction”?As readers over thirty will remember, Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of two boys: a pessimist and an optimist.  A psychologist put the pessimistic boy in a […]