Matthew Dal Santo

With some European capitals increasingly inclined to soften sanctions against Russia, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council and former prime minister of Poland, has added his voice to those… more»

Peter Oborne

The usual voices have denounced last week’s nuclear framework deal with Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the way is now open for an Iranian bomb. Republican Senator… more»

Ali Wyne

In late 2010 I was working as a research assistant to Graham Allison, director of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. One day he asked me if… more»

Richard C. Longworth

The economic history of the American Midwest is repeating itself. No one knows if the region’s social and political history will do the same.… more»

Anatol Lieven

Qatar is a good place to think about migration. Thanks to a combination of a tiny indigenous population and the vast drawing power of Qatar’s gas wealth, some 75 per… more»

Richard C. Longworth

I’m writing this in a waterfront getaway on the shore of Lake Michigan, part of the single biggest freshwater reservoir on the planet. I’m indoors because it’s raining. That’s news… more»

Tom Switzer

Before the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, much of the world was not particularly anxious about Russia. Despite the warnings of Hillary Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski to the… more»

James Wilson

For most Australians, our close relationship with the United States is part of the diplomatic furniture. The alliance has endured for so long that few understand its history and depth,… more»

Richard C. Longworth

Caterpillar Inc., an icon of Midwestern manufacturing for more than 80 years, has been saving itself about $300 million per year in US taxes by routing most of the profits… more»

Anatol Lieven

The Ukrainian imbroglio is a virtual compendium of the difficulties the Obama administration has faced as it has sought to reduce US commitments in the world to match the combination… more»

Tom Switzer

For the people of Ukraine, at least those who are not ethnically Russian, the failure of Washington and Brussels to stop Moscow’s intervention in the Crimean peninsula and several eastern… more»

Anatol Lieven

Belief in the global “unipolarity” — a polite word for hegemony — of the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s was underpinned by a belief in the absolute… more»

Tom Switzer

The Obama phenomenon has imploded. Expectations were absurdly high five years ago this month when Barack Obama was inaugurated 44th president of the United States. Today, however, Americans are bemused… more»

Richard C. Longworth

Chicago is a city mesmerised by planning. Blame it on Daniel Burnham. … more»

Richard C. Longworth

Most debate on Detroit so far has discussed how that city, once the car capital of the world, became the urban ruin it is today. Less asked is the real… more»

Anatol Lieven

It is beginning to seem strange not that the US political system is breaking down, but that a constitution so extremely complex, so loaded with checks and balances and possibilities… more»

Tom Switzer

Several decades ago, before the free-market fervour of the Thatcher-Reagan years set in, Joseph A. Schumpeter published an insightful book on the essence of capitalism. Writing in Capitalism, Socialism, and… more»

Melanie Jayne

Old-style American journalism is gasping for its final breath. Rebellions are being captured through the lens of a smartphone camera. Current affairs are condensed into bite-sized packages of 140 characters… more»

Richard C. Longworth

Some sixty years ago, Charles E. Wilson, then CEO of General Motors, told Congress: “What is good for our country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.” This was… more»

Anatol Lieven

Ever since the Obama administration announced that all US ground troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, I have argued against calling this an “endgame”. After… more»

Richard C. Longworth

There’s a geography of inequality in modern America and you can explore it in a day’s drive.… more»

Anatol Lieven

Pakistan exemplifies a problem for the United States in the Muslim world, and, indeed, in other parts of the world as well. This is that, on the one hand, US… more»

Tom Switzer

This year is already a reminder of two important security lessons of the post-9/11 era: that heightened defences against very real terrorist threats in the US remain necessary; and that… more»

Rory Medcalf

What does social media mean for the big issues of war and peace? Is the endless conversation of Twitter and the blogosphere going to break down barriers of misperception or reinforce the… more»

Tom Switzer

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Barack Obama remarked in one of… more»

Anatol Lieven

The United States is facing two interlinked domestic challenges which are unprecedented in their scope. The first is the rise of the Latino (and, to a lesser extent, Asian) populations… more»

Richard C. Longworth

The American Midwest, that great belt of farms and factories stretching south and west from the Great Lakes, has always lived on nature’s gifts. First was the farmland, perhaps the… more»

Rory Medcalf

Does social media help start wars or stop them? This has lately become a topical question, not least as China and Japan face off over the contested islands and resources of the… more»

Richard C. Longworth

Finally, the rains have come, flung up the Mississippi River valley by the tail of Hurricane Isaac, cooling temperatures and greening the crops—or what’s left of them. It’s been a cruel summer,… more»

Anatol Lieven

Whatever happens, the United States is going to try to redeploy a large part of its armed forces, diplomatic attention, and (perhaps) development aid to East and Southeast Asia. That is now… more»

Jeff Kingston

This was supposed to be the Year of Sino-Japanese Friendship, but rather than celebrating the 40th anniversary of normalising relations, the two nations have derailed bilateral relations over disputed islands in the East… more»

Richard McGregor

Politicians, political parties, and a hoard of billionaires supporting them have spent upwards of $5 billion on America’s presidential and congressional elections in 2012, a record amount by a wide margin.… more»

Felix Donovan

Twilight has come to the lonely superpower. We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of American primacy. The emergence of China and India in the East,… more»

Anatol Lieven

As far as US strategy in Afghanistan is concerned, the die is now cast and the gamble made. The United States will continue to support the Karzai administration and whatever its successor… more»

Richard McGregor

In Phoenix earlier this year, I met Tony Valdovenos, one of a small army of on-the-ground volunteers deployed by Barack Obama’s campaign to register new voters in Arizona.… more»

Jason Miks

My magazine is funded by US think tanks who themselves are funded by the US government as part of a global disinformation campaign. But we’re also funded by the Japanese… more»

Rory Medcalf

Can the microblog change the megastates? In China and India, social media is leapfrogging official and mainstream media narratives, giving voice to the wants and frustrations of the new middle classes.… more»

Richard C. Longworth

The last session of the NATO summit in Chicago in May was devoted to a salute to 13 NATO “partners”, which are nations that don’t belong to NATO but take part in… more»

Bates Gill

In a relatively rare occurrence, early 2013 will see two newly mandated administrations setting up at the same time in the United States and China. If President Obama returns to the White… more»

Jason Miks

Xi Jinping will not have taken it personally. He knows that it’s an election year, and that an American president and his administration cannot be seen to be soft —… more»

Ali Wyne

The candidates hoping to succeed President Barack Obama are working to distinguish themselves from one another on a host of foreign-policy issues. To name just a few: how to counter the Islamic State terror group, how to respond to a newly assertive Russia, and how to shape relations with an… more»

Neville Meaney

This week marks the centenary of the ANZAC landings in Gallipoli, and it would appear that Australia is determined not to forget the great human cost it paid in not just that conflict but the broader global struggle of the Great War. … more»

Walter S. Montaño

Every semester I ask my college students an important question: Who was the last true modern-day statesman or stateswoman in America? Usually, I receive blank stares or puzzled looks, as if I were asking a trick question. The fact is most millennials don’t know how to answer the question because… more»

Daniel McCarthy

There are four major factions in the modern Republican Party, and this first phase of the contest for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination is about rival candidates bidding to lead their respective blocs.… more»

John B. Judis

Nuclear negotiations have almost always been about more than curbing an arms race. For instance, Ronald Reagan’s agreement in 1987 with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to eliminate intermediate-range missiles in Europe was also about ending the Cold War. The same can be said about the negotiations that the United States… more»

J. Berkshire Miller

For all the criticisms of the Obama administration’s “rebalance” to the Asia–Pacific, one key achievement has been overlooked. In recent years, there’s been a stronger networking of US alliances in the region.  … more»

Tom Switzer

For the third time in as many decades, the United States is leading a coalition of allies into Iraq. But unlike president George H.W. Bush’s liberation of Kuwait in 1991 — and like president George W. Bush’s liberation of Iraq in 2003 — President Barack Obama’s war-by-any-other-name in 2014 is… more»

Mary Kissel

Watching the birth of a radical Islamic caliphate in Iraq, which was stable and democratic not so long ago, reminded me of the first line of Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s seminal Commentary magazine essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” It began: “The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to… more»

Nicole Hemmer

“Where are the women?” The question came from Representative Carolyn Maloney, following a 2012 hearing about a new regulation requiring companies to provide health insurance coverage for contraception. Five people testified before the House Oversight Committee about the impact of the requirement. All five were men.… more»

Simon Heffer

In the final ten days before Scotland voted by 55.3 per cent to 44.7 per cent to remain a part of the United Kingdom it was not only the British government that started to feel the stirrings of panic. Europe is littered with independence or separatist movements of varying degrees… more»

Melissa Grah-McIntosh

The year 2014 was not a progressive one for Australia or the United States. Notwithstanding attempts by Tony Abbott and Barack Obama to champion paid maternity leave programs, neither Canberra nor Washington advanced policies that improve equality or female participation in the workforce.… more»

Simon Heffer

In the winter of 2002–03 those of us who write about politics in Britain were in no doubt our country would sooner rather than later engage in a military action against Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq. We were less clear about how it would come about.… more»

Christine Gallagher

In the years after his presidency, Ronald Reagan became a conservative idol: a status marked by an outpouring of adulation after his death in 2004 and an upswing of memorialisation during the centenary of his birth in 2011. Various factions have come to stake a claim to Reagan but an… more»

Ali Wyne

It is again becoming common to characterise the United States as a bystander to international affairs. That this argument has often been made — and proven premature — is unlikely to assuage those who believe this time is different. … more»

Karl Eikenberry

Like several states in the Asia–Pacific region, Australia faces a defining foreign policy challenge in coming years: how to reconcile a rapidly expanding trade relationship with China with a deepening security and defence alliance with the United States. Given the significance that this dilemma poses for states throughout the region,… more»