A few years ago I was lucky enough to have some time in Athens, while attending one of those endless conferences during which the world’s affairs are handled in such an exemplary fashion.  I think this one may have been about relations between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.  It went as these things usually do; the […]

Et tu, Britain?This is what a lot of Americans are thinking with the news that a British parliamentary committee has pronounced the special relationship ‘dead’.Actually, one of the wonderful things about a special relationship is that it has more lives than a cat.  Brits and Americans have been pronouncing the special relationship dead since the […]

In my recent “Faith Matters” post, I expanded on a topic I discussed in a recent Council on Foreign Relations conference call on Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country: as a follow-up to a 2006 article I wrote in Foreign Affairs–“God’s Country?”–about the politics of Protestant religion in […]

Yesterday I wrote about a pattern of choices in our foreign policy that may make sense individually but that overall project an image of weakness before our enemies, disloyalty to our friends.Today I want to write about something bigger: a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it […]

The health care win has given the President his mojo back at home, but things overseas are still looking grim.  We are neglecting or quarreling with our friends and reaching out to our enemies — but neither policy is yielding much in the way of results.The latest case is Canada; on a visit to Ottawa […]

I was on a Council on Foreign Relations conference call Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country.  The call was on the record; when it’s available I’ll provide a link for those of you who want to listen to it.  The subject was timely: what’s happening with evangelicals in […]

Does money buy happiness?  This is one of humanity’s most pressing questions, and for some time I’ve wanted to do an in-depth, long-term study to resolve this one way or the other.  I think the empirical method is best, and like all great scientists who are also humanitarians, I would first test it on myself.  […]

The Obama administration seems to have significantly stepped up its demands on Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  This at least is the takeaway from a story in Ha’aretz, a moderately dovish Israeli newspaper.  The more conservative Jerusalem Post is basically saying the same thing; Washington is pressing Netanyahu for answers by Saturday to a list […]

One of the most dangerous and most common mistakes people make about the Middle East is to believe that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just around the corner. This is an easy mistake to make; peace is such a good idea, who could be against it?  After all, it’s very easy to see […]

The blue social model posted a big win today as President Obama signed the Senate’s health care bill into law .  I think it’s a bad bill that locks the United States more tightly into a medical system that is unsustainable in the medium term, and it is grossly unfair to the young.  But extending […]