Sep 26, 2024
After the disastrous failures of the U.S. projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans have soured on nation-building, especially if it involves the deployment of U.S. troops in a hostile country for years on end. Americans also remember the fiasco in Somalia in 1993 or the hazy national interest when it came to...
Sep 24, 2024
As another presidential election looms, so does the possibility that the ultimate winner will lose the popular vote. The race is decided by the Electoral College, which critics say is anti-democratic body that distorts outcomes. Since 1988, Republican candidates have won the popular vote once (2004), but twice won...
Sep 19, 2024
Is there a Biden Doctrine? What did it achieve? Where did it fail? The president sought to reset U.S. foreign policy after the unilateralism of the Trump years. Biden spoke of a global battle pitting democracies versus autocracies, and he reinforced U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia. Presidents from Truman to Reagan to...
Sep 17, 2024
A crushing economic crisis, caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown, and two failing wars were the backdrop for the election of 2008. At the onset of the year, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was a long shot taking on Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady with...
Sep 12, 2024
The Israeli military raids and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank are shifting, for a moment, the world's attention away from the ongoing war in Gaza -- and revealing the brutal realities of Palestinian life under military occupation. In July the U.N.'s top court issued a non-binding opinion saying Israel's...