A Warning From the Middle East
AFTER LIVING in Turkey for years, I concluded that Turkish democracy was deeply enough rooted so that no demagogic leader could throw it off track. I was wrong. Now I believe the same thing about the United States: that our institutions are strong enough to withstand even the force of an autocratic president. I may be […]
Waking the Mexican sleeping giant
ONE REASON it’s so safe to be American is that we have no enemies nearby. To our east and west are nothing more dangerous than fish. Canada, to our north, has been a reliable friend — some would say our better half — since we gave up the idea of conquering it more than a […]
Stop complaining about Trump — we earned him
AMERICANS WHO warned that Donald Trump would be a recklessly destabilizing president have reason to feel vindicated. Trump’s scorn for foreign alliances and diplomacy reflects his scatterbrained approach to governing, while his divisive rhetoric has measurably coarsened our national conversation. Lamenting this as a bizarre aberration, however, would be a mistake. Trump’s ascendancy reflects who we […]
Trump to walk America’s perpetual imperialist-isolationist tightrope
For every American president, the challenge of foreign policy boils down to a single word: intervention. Where, when and how should the United States intervene in the affairs of other countries? Do we more effectively shape the world by setting out to redeem and pacify it, or by tending to our own affairs and allowing […]
How Boston fought the empire
WHERE BETTER to launch a patriotic uprising than Faneuil Hall in Boston? It is a lodestone of American liberty, a cathedral for freedom fighters. That is why a handful of eminent Bostonians chose it as the place to begin a new rebellion on the sunny afternoon of June 15, 1898. Like all Americans, they had been […]
