Something big is up in Havana. So big that some are saying that Fidel Castro has finally moved on to the next world -- though I don't believe this to be the case. Others are saying that they saw Fidel out in public today on an odd shuffling, walk about, flanked by well armed security guards -- and a...

Though it sometimes frustrates friends, one of my core beliefs is to engage those who disagree with my views -- and also to give credit when and where credit is due. When I saw that the right-anchored Jerusalem Post was running an interview of Elliott Abrams with Ruthie Blum Leibowitz, I expected th...

During the battle over John Bolton's Senate confirmation to serve as US Ambassador to the United Nations, a post that Bolton ultimately achieved through presidential recess appointment rather than by Senate vote, I noticed a peculiar difference between leading Democrats and leading Republicans. On t...

No Team of Rivals on the economics side. The deep ideological divide that is emerging in the economics profession between those who worried about manic neoliberalism and Bob Rubin-style turbo-charged tilts towards an increasing unregulated finance industry is not hitting the Obama administration - b...

Neoconservativism existed before Bill Kristol, but before him none had figured out how to market the brand and go viral. Some may argue that Kristol's neoconservative policy work never actually did go viral, but they'd be wrong. His thinking animated much of Washington, and a rather small group of t...

Barack Obama is about to become the 44th President of the United States and like most Presidents, he will begin (if he hasn't already) to read as many profiles and biographies of great leaders as he can pile on his night table. Or Lincoln's. Obama will try to understand how they processed complex ch...

A lot of Middle East watchers have been stunned by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's snotty depiction of both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush with regard to UN Security Council Resolution 1860 calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. While the US abstained when the vote wa...

I have just been communicating in the last few minutes with two friends over Facebook -- one a prominent Jewish American blogger now visiting family in an Orthodox community in Israel -- and the other a prominent Arab Muslim blogger living in the Middle East. I don't want to disclose the identities ...

Hot damn! I am very excited today. A book, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy that I was very involved in helping to hatch made it to Michiko Kakutani's top 10 list for books from 2008. And to top off a great day, my colleague and friend Steve Coll's The Bi...

Greetings Bart. . .and very much look forward to being back tomorrow when I'll weigh in on your must read book for those wishing to understand the core sculpting force of the Bush years. But Jacob Heilbrunn suggested that I wrote a piece saying Biden should learn from Cheney. Actually, I think that ...