Newsweek

Sherle Schwenninger, an infrastructure expert at the New America Foundation, a leading Washington think tank, says that a kind of anti-bigness mindset developed in the 1990s, that era in which the besotting buzzwords were “Silicon Valley” and “West ...

The fate of Muammar Gaddafi's son wasn't inevitable. There was a choice and a decidedly better one. In February, as the Arab Spring unfolded, he dispatched an op-ed to several American newspapers, expressing a willingness to move toward a more open Libya. Every paper rejected it. But if that lost piece had been published, perhaps the dictator's son, Saif al-Islam, would have found a place among the rebels.

U.S.-Pakistan relations in recent years have been founded on a kind of bargain—an unstated and unstable bargain, but one that until this week seemed basically workable. The U.S. administration would turn a partially blind eye to the shelter given by Pakistan to the Afghan Taliban leadership; in return, Pakistan would genuinely cooperate against international terrorist plots directed at the American homeland. The location and death of Osama bin Laden in the vicinity of a Pakistan military academy calls that bargain, and the whole future of the American-Pakistani alliance, into question.

Predator drone attacks have drawn intense criticism and protests for causing civilian deaths, but they are also very effective at their primary goal: killing terrorists. The New America Foundation estimates that as many as 1800 militants—including 33 ...

“I just don't see a reasonable way to get there through spending cuts alone,” says Maya MacGuineas, director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “And I'm saying that as someone who doesn't think revenues should be the bulk of the ...

“This town is going tribal,” says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow with the New America Foundation who's known for his carefully constructed dinner parties. More fundamentally, say social types, it increasingly seems as though Washington has forgotten ...

They're exhilarating, of course. But from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They're sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been. Since September 11, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those wars have cost thousands of young Americans their lives and maimed many more. And for what? We were told (and I, for one, believed) that in jihadist terrorism we faced a threat of epic military and ideological power.

(From 2004 to 2008, Bush authorized 42 drone strikes, according to the New America Foundation. The number has more than quadrupled under President Obama—to ...

... “In Egypt we were totally reactive. But we need to be preemptive, to provide tools to people before they go dark,” says Dan Meredith, a 28-year-old software developer and self-described “technivist” (technology activist) who works for a group called the Open Technology Initiative, which is run by the New America Foundation, a left-leaning public-policy institute in Washington, D.C. ...

What do the mass protests in Egypt and the leaked documents about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have in common? They show that the Middle East is spinning out of America's control. For decades, Washington has backstopped Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship and chaperoned the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Today both efforts are on the brink of failure. No wonder that intermingled with the pro-democracy rhetoric coming out of the Obama administration is a truckload of fear.