The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable Western policymakers are to slogans and magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the credulity and carelessness of experts wreak havoc among millions of ordinary people.

War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen. And even if it were a police weapon, the United States does not have a commission to police the world of its radicals, jihadists, and religious fanatics, although for too many years it has acted as if it did.

Iran will be our next war, if neo-conservatives and certain advisers to the Obama administration have their way -- all acting with the support of the American public, which one might think has had enough of war, after nearly seventy years of it and gaining nothing.

Are northern Mali and southern Algeria about to be declared the new front in the war on terror that still preoccupies the American political class and the foreign affairs community?  

The threat posed by weapons of mass destruction was infamously used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That's why clear evidence and a convincing argument must be presented before any action on Syria's chemical weapons. 

When Israel wins its campaign to create a single, unchallenged Jewish state on all of the land given by the U.N. in 1948 to make parallel Jewish and Arab homelands, what happens to the Palestinian people left in the country?

As a method of war, unmanned drones are illegal and unconstitutional. But the two presidential candidates have each indicated a commitment to the continued use of drones for programmed unilateral killing of selected individuals in Muslim society.

The third debate added to the evidence that the United States is intellectually adrift when it comes to policies concerning the Middle East, and perhaps blundering into serious trouble with Russia and China. 

Does Mitt Romney possess a serious understanding of American foreign relations, their past, their present, and the problems they will pose for a new administration? 

As the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, President Mohamed Morsi has been looked upon by Washing with apprehension. But he has same well-founded words for the United States in how it should approach relations with Egypt and the Middle East. 

Afghanistan and Iraq remain awkward and troubling topics for both political parties.

Neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan seem close to the hawkish ideology that gave the United States its military deployments in Asia and Central Asia. But they seem to have no clear intellectual position at all, which is to say that they might easily become the instruments of others with aggressive ideologies of their own. 

Overwrought warnings from both campaigns suggest there will be no end to the current stalemate. 

With the Siena conference on euro reform ending in an even divide, the survival of the European Union seems at ever greater risk.

John Burnham may be known as the godfather of neoconservatism. But as the election approaches, it's his seminal work on the rise of the managerial class that should be recalled.

The Undemocratic Politics Of Austerity

The Afghan government's order a week ago to the U.S. to close its prison at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington, although President Karzai has before asked the U.S. to cease operations because of what he considered infringements upon Afghan sovereignty.

The great economic crisis has given birth to a smaller and tighter monetary union in Europe, under the influence of a Germany that is undergoing a certain estrangement from its European partners. This amounts to a possibly dangerous wager on what the European Union will ultimately become, which not everyone may like.

How Americans can save themselves from plutocracy

Can Americans Save Their Country from Plutocracy?

The only popular movements of modern times that made any difference to the United States were the civil-rights campaign and the anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations of the 1960s. Not even the Great Depression produced a popular protest that changed anything. What will Occupy Wall Street accomplish?

Will the United States ever leave Afghanistan?

Could Turkey lead Europe out of a tumultuous century?

The series of Arab uprisings during the past two months have yet to complete their destruction of what, since shortly after World War II, had seemed a fixed oppressive political order in the Muslim states of the Middle East and Central Asia, overseen by the United States.

The growing irrelevance of American power

Has America given up on land wars?

There are many in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere who believe that the democratic awakening of the Arab nations will consolidate a predominantly democratic order for nearly all the major states, with the United States enjoying a respected leadership role. Nothing is less likely.

Washington's confused response misses the mark on Egypt

America should butt out

Dictatorships rarely end happily—for rulers or their people

Are we committing economic suicide?

Africa's slavery system survives

Germans bankrolled the European Union's bailout of Greece. Now they want the EU's governing treaty to be changed to shield them and other better-off countries from shouldering such responsibilities alone. Could their buyer's remorse eventually undo the EU?

The challenges facing Europe make America's Afghan problem look simple

Why the French lost faith in Nicolas Sarkozy

Europe's Role in Obama's Mideast Negotiations

During his recent tour of TV news programs, Petraeus suggested that sending troops home a year from now might be premature. Defense Secretary Gates then intervened to say that the promise given the president in 2009 by the military would be kept. Who's right?

German intransigence could threaten Europe

The prospect of giving Afghanistan a functioning and competent democratic government and a new and functional army is slight. That was what the counterinsurgency doctrine drafted by Gen. Petraeus was supposed to do. It has rarely succeeded.

General McChrystal gets out just in time

American arms spending is supposed to make Americans safe from its problems, but that is not working. Congressional attempts to reduce military spending over the years have consistently failed because military spending is a politically irresistible cause, even when the results are irrational.

The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at the moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.

Lies have led the west into war again and again in the last century. Theories about the nuclear threat posed by Iran, and the need for a preemptive military response, could be the latest propaganda to have deadly consequences.

  What is the price of "progress"?

  Because the United States was founded on Enlightenment ideas, and nationalism is usually connected to romantic notions of terrain, history, and a unique cultural experience, little is ordinarily said about American nationalism. But, of course, the United States is perhaps the most nationalistic society on earth.