It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities? Is there a bad smell, a genius loci, something about the landscape that might incriminate?

Travel is like a good challenging book: It demands presentness-the ability to live completely in the moment.

Bismarck's genius, as well as his great flaw, was the same as that of another outstanding nineteenth-century politician of the German-speaking world, Prince Clemens Metternich. Both men were artificers, able to hold off the future by building a fragile present out of pieces of the past.

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – half a world away from the United States – more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States’ southern border, Mexico will affect America’s destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East.