The United States went through a near-miss terrorist attack during the Christmas holidays. A Muslim, this time a Nigerian Muslim, was involved. Consequently, the country is going through another silly season whereby a number of “experts” with diarrhea of the mouth are eagerly expressing their idiotic views. At the government level, there [...]

If the United States is the declining hegemon, then who will replace it?  Are we entering an era when another global hegemon will replace the U.S., or will we witness the emergence of power blocs?  There are two schools of thought in the West on this issue.  The first school of thought suggests that the [...]

The confluence of the waning months of the Bush presidency—when the lameduck factor is looming large— the continued insistence of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the U.S. set a timetable of withdrawing from Iraq, the Russian invasion of Georgia, and the forced resignation of General Pervez Musharraf—President Bush’s favorite strongman in Pakistan—are creating a new [...]

There is something imprudent about strategic thinkers when it comes to history.  For some reason, for some of them, it has to come to an end when an idea experiences a temporary—but significant—success.  But when that idea appears to fail, they make an equally rash extrapolation, and start talking about the “return” of history.  Francis [...]

If the 1990s and the first eight years of the first decade of the 21st Century represented an era when transnational terrorism dominated world attention, the remainder of this decade and the next one promise to be a period of a new global crisis, which might be even more obdurate than fighting global terrorism.  Robert [...]