No vote in the echo chamber of the Security Council can change the fact of Palestinian weakness and Israeli strength at this pivotal moment in world history.

It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia, going back to 2009: our annual Yule Blog when we update and present our 13 posts of Christmas running from the preparatory Advent blog on Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During the holiday season, we will blog on a light holiday schedule through New Year’s Day. On January 2 we will be back at full force.

The radical populists across Europe are wrong about many things, but they are right about this: governments that can’t protect their frontiers aren’t worthy of the name.

Almost everywhere you look, the gap between Obama’s stirring rhetoric and his underwhelming accomplishments is immense.

The Obama Administration misjudged Asian politics as profoundly (if not quite quite as spectacularly) as it misjudged the Arab Spring.

It’s probably not Sarajevo 1914 all over again. But don’t be so sure that this event will bring the Russians and Turks together, either.

Any kind of federal pension relief needs to be tied to reforms that ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

Russia is increasingly flexing its military muscle on the world stage these days, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the raw numbers.

The attack on a Cairo church strikes a blow at a Christian minority, the Sisi government, and a historic concept of Egyptian nationalism.

A troubled European business climate has German money looking for a new home in Russia.