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.

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

Americans are opting out of public venues like the playground and the sidewalk for private venues like the healthclub and the mall. We're living our lives inside one form of corporation or another.

We talk a lot about individual rights, but in fact Americans are very willing to give up our individual rights if it means our property values will be protected, and so on.

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?

What Americans cant face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

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.