Israel: The End of the Dream

When I was very young, I thrilled to the strains of "Exodus" – the music that accompanied the popular movie depicting the Israeli fight for independence. I played it over and over, every night, falling asleep to its crashing chords of defiance and...

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A Failed Formula for Worldwide War

They looked like a gang of geriatric giants. Clad in smart casual attire -- dress shirts, sweaters, and jeans -- and incongruous blue hospital booties, they strode around “the world,” stopping to stroke their chins and ponder this or that potential crisis....

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The Foreign Policy Debate: Coke or Pepsi?

Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy, as one might have expected, supplied more than its share of howlers. Mittens, for example, referred to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as one of the “world’s worst actors.” In response to an early Obama administration statement...

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Silence on Libya

The final presidential debate earlier this week was a tailor-made opportunity for Mitt Romney to rip into President Obama’s inconsistent, value-free, and at times incoherent foreign policy. And it was also an opportunity for the president to explain his...

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Blaming the Muslims

It is perhaps human nature to seek to blame someone else for one’s own personal failings. But what is possibly only a misdemeanor in personal interactions becomes rather more serious when entire nations and races are systematically and comprehensively blamed for the...

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Middle East Peace Remains Elusive

Jimmy Carter recently made news by traveling to Palestine two weeks before a U.S. presidential election and berating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama, an American president of his own party, for — despite their rhetoric to the contrary —...

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Christians Worry Over a Future in Egypt

CAIRO — The tranquil, green, upper-class Cairo suburb Maadi is a bubble of privilege separated from the city’s noisier, dirtier, overcrowded suburbs where working-class Egyptians struggle to make ends meet and where Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has established a...

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Debate Summary: Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel

One striking impression of this debate was that out of some 17,000 words uttered by both candidates and the moderator, about half of them were about domestic policy. Neither candidate wanted to talk about foreign policy — because the differences between them are...

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