I am sure that one of these days the ACLU will get around to ensuring that no government-funded entity can ever play this song again, but until that day comes the singing of the “Navy Hymn” with its stern and moving lyrics over its surging music will remain an inspiring and moving part of our […]

My review essay on The Bridge, David Remnick’s book on President Obama, is now up on the Foreign Affairs website.  I liked the book and learned from it: recommended reading.I grew up wanting to be a writer, and have been trying my hands at different writing forms since I was a kid.  At the tender […]

The first task for anybody these days who wants to follow world news in an intelligent way is to figure out what to ignore.  All over the world, commissions are meeting, legislatures debating, leaders are making speeches, demonstrators are marching, sabers are rattling and so on.  Nobody can follow it all or make sense of […]

Apologies to those of you who tried to reach this blog earlier today.  There was a problem with the company that hosts the mighty web force that is The American Interest Online.Following our tradition here in coping with problems of this sort, we’ve ended the practice of allowing interns free access to the water cooler […]

Most of the headlines that blare at us from newspaper pages and internet sites are noise.  Much of the breathless commentary that we get every day in the opinion pages and on cable news is fluff.But every now and then in this world something real happens; a news story comes along that points to profound […]

In an interview with one of the handful of serious newspapers that every informed person should read, Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told the (paywall-protected) Financial Times that Brazil would no longer seek a lead role in the diplomatic dispute between Iran and the United States.  “We got our fingers burned,” Amorim told the FT.  […]

I’ve completely missed out on TV this week; blame Jenny Uglow.  I’ve been reading her account of Charles II and his first ten years on the throne; A Gambling Man has been impossible to put down.Generally, I’m a sucker for biography.  This isn’t because I believe in the ‘great man’ theory of history and think […]

The grim news from Kyrgyzstan continues to roll in.  Hundreds and possibly thousands are dead; up to 400,000, half the Uzbek population in Krygyzstan, have been driven from their homes; like so many millions of victims of ethnic violence before them, they are frightened, terrified, suddenly destitute, separated from loved ones whose fates they do […]

In an earlier post, I wrote about the emergence of Turkey and Brazil on the world stage.  Since then, the ‘terrible twins’ voted against the Security Council’s latest set of (almost certainly ineffective) sanctions against Iran.  The Obama administration had worked hard to get both countries on board; their rebuff dramatized the limits of President […]

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have a lot to answer for in their 100-year-plus conflict over some of the most miserable and hardscrabble but somehow beloved land on the face of the earth.  But the sad and sorry truth is that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are really responsible for the mess that […]