Foreign Affairs

When the United States started sending guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold War purpose: helping expel the Soviet army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And so it made sense that once the Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Washington would lose interest in the rebels. For the international mujahideen drawn to the Afghan conflict, however, the fight was just beginning. They opened new fronts in the… more

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once famously dismissed an aide worried about inflation by telling him that "this revolution was not about the price of watermelons." Today, Khomeini's successors are finding the high price of watermelons -- not to mention of meat, housing, and cars -- much harder to ignore. The untold story of post-revolutionary Iran is one of economic decline: the steady, 25-year deterioration of a nation that once boasted a per capita income equivalent to Spain's, pumped six million barrels… more

After World War II, the GI bill dramatically lowered the cost of home ownership for millions of young Americans. Its educational benefits also allowed millions of men still in their twenties to start earning nearly as much as their fathers. The bill's purpose was not to create a baby boom in the United States. But that is what it did -- a good example of how government policies, even when not explicitly pro-natal, can make the economics… more

You awaken to news of a morning traffic jam. Leaving home early for a doctor's appointment, you nonetheless arrive too late to find parking. After waiting two hours for a 15-minute consultation, you wait again to have your prescription filled. All the while, you worry about the work you've missed because so many other people would line up to take your job. Returning home to the evening news, you watch throngs of youths throwing stones… more

For most Americans, the events of September 11 came like a bolt from the blue on that beautiful, terrible morning. But as Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda observe in their well-written introduction to The Age of Terror, "the unforgivable is not necessarily incomprehensible or inexplicable." In fact, all three of these books make clear that although the attacks on New York and Washington were unexpected for many, the warning signs had long been evident -- at least to some… more

AMERICA'S DOVISH NORTH AND HAWKISH SOUTH

The war in Kosovo opened more fissures in the American public and the U.S. foreign policy elite than any U.S. military intervention since the Vietnam War. Many have remarked that viewpoints about the war transcended the ideological categories of left and right, producing unusual alliances of conservatives and liberals among both supporters and … more