Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind.

To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

Many Muslims in Saudi Arabia believe that the core values of Islam, namely acknowledgement of God's sovereignty and basic human equality before God, are themselves compatible with liberty, equality and free political choice.

In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.

Cyber attacks are not what makes the cool war cool. As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage.

We like democracy because why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we need to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it - and why electoral democracy hasn’t self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?

Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?