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The Clinton presidency may have two years to run, but after the events of these past few weeks it seems fair to wonder whether, substantively speaking, it is already over. [...]

Today, the terms of the nuclear predicament have been altered fundamentally. The barrier of impossibility has fallen. The Soviet Union has unexpectedly--almost magically--cleared itself out of the way. We have [...]

The presidential election of 1996 places a paradox before us. Polls and other reports show that the public is disillusioned with politics. With one era-- the era of the Cold [...]

Let us assume for a moment that the dismissal of Paula Jones's lawsuit against President Clinton for sexual misconduct is not overturned on appeal and, further, that the Monica Lewinsky [...]

One of the most difficult things to judge in the world today is the extent of American power. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the United States [...]

Introspection is not the purpose of this occasional column, but a moment of it seems appropriate in the wake of the election recently held in Iraq. That election might have [...]

The war in Iraq has given birth to an issue that may one day be seen as more important than the war, the question of torture. Just as H.J. Res. [...]

As I followed the initial coverage of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I was reminded of a time in the early1980s when I spent some months researching the effects [...]

Osama bin Laden has been thinking. Perhaps he has a lot of time to think in his cave, or four-star hotel, or wherever he is. And like so many who [...]

For some time now, American political discussion has seemed to revolve around little stock phrases, such as 'defining moment' (at the time of the first Gulf War), 'the end of [...]

A remarkable number of those in Blue America who hoped for an end to the Bush era on November 2 received the news of his election victory almost as if [...]

As the final week of the campaign season expires (this column goes to press on October 27), George W. Bush has boiled his one-theme campaign message down to a few [...]

Twenty months ago, when the Bush Administration was steering the country toward war in Iraq, we noted a parallel with another military misadventure, the Spanish-American War, in which Cuba and [...]

Why does the United States--born in a people's war for national independence from the greatest empire of its time--have such a difficult time understanding the people's wars of independence of [...]

The Supreme Court of the United States has had two historic encounters with George W. Bush. The first was its decision to stop the recount of the presidential vote in [...]

Perhaps the most important question--for present policy-makers as well as historians--posed by the presidency of Ronald Reagan is what role he played in ending the cold war. And perhaps the [...]

On April 28 the subject of torture was discussed in oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The context was not the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the [...]

The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival [...]

John Kerry has been twice a hero. First, as a soldier in Vietnam, he displayed extraordinary physical courage, winning the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Once, [...]

A new justification for our war on Iraq has been born out of the war itself. No one will have forgotten that the war was launched to remove weapons of [...]

Sometimes when I feel I want to raise my voice against the American folly in Iraq, my zeal is infected with boredom. I get the urge to say that the [...]

The basic mistake of American policy in Iraq is not that the Pentagon--believing the fairy tales told it by Iraqi exile groups and overriding State Department advice--forgot, when planning 'regime [...]

Events have suddenly and unexpectedly handed the Democratic Party an opportunity to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. His main justifications for his war in Iraq (existence of weapons of [...]

The United States seems to interpret the news these days through a prism of catch phrases borrowed from history. Once, the phrases of the Second World War--'Munich,' 'appeasement' and so [...]

Robert Kaplan is a hugely well-informed, indefatigable journalist who combines firsthand reporting, mostly from poor, badly governed or ungoverned countries, with wide reading on the political, economic and ecological ills [...]

It is notoriously difficult to prove a negative. At what point can you be sure that something does not in fact exist? For example, if I lose my glasses and [...]

In the months before the American-Anglo invasion of Iraq, the peace movement was out on the streets demonstrating. Since the fall of the Iraqi regime, it has been less in [...]

Madmen During the cold war, nuclear strategic doctrine was riven by a fundamental contradiction. Governments thought it sensible to threaten nuclear war--the better to 'deter' a foe from doing something [...]

In this space last week, I commented that the choice for the United States in North Korea was probably between a catastrophic war and permitting North Korea to keep its [...]

Now that the regime of Saddam Hussein has been overthrown, the Bush Administration, like a submarine that, having successfully sunk one ship, resurfaces its periscope to find others, is looking [...]

In the past 200 years, all of the earth's great territorial empires, whether dynastic or colonial, or both, have been destroyed. The list includes the Russian empire of the czars; [...]

A Vesuvius of violence has erupted from the dead center of American life, the executive branch of the government. No counterbalancing power, whether in the United States, the United Nations [...]

As the war began, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised a 'campaign unlike any other in history.' What he did not plan or expect, however, was that the peoples of earth--what [...]

The decision to go to war to overthrow the government of Iraq will bring unreckonable death and suffering to that country, the surrounding region and, possibly, the United States. It [...]

The United States has arrived at an imperial moment in its history, but it is not the first time. Long before a President talked about an 'axis of evil' and [...]

On the day after the September 11 attacks, Jonathan Schell began a series of reports in this magazine that explored the questions raised by those attacks and the government policies [...]

On June 12, 1982, 1 million people assembled in Central Park in New York City to call for a freeze of the nuclear arms race. In the years that followed, [...]

New York, the city in which I was born and grew up and have lived all my life, and in which my children were born and have now grown up, [...]

Long before the atomic bomb turned night into day in the desert of Alamogordo in July 1945, it was an idea in the minds of scientists, who deeply pondered the [...]

At the outset of the war on terrorism, President Bush announced a doctrine: Regimes that harbor terrorists will be dealt with as severely as the terrorists themselves. Three months later, [...]

'It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914,' Hannah Arendt wrote in 1950, in words that also seem to apply, with [...]

The sudden collapse of the Taliban in most of Afghanistan is one of those events that seem to have been designed by the fates to teach policy-makers and pundits humility. [...]

When I began this column after September 11, I chose to name it 'Letter From Ground Zero' because it seemed to me that at the heart of the new darkness [...]

Hawk and dove agree: The war in Afghanistan is not going well. Hawks point to the resilience of the Taliban, which has 'surprised' Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem by not collapsing [...]

As the conflict that began on September 11 heads into its sixth week, two clouds of danger hang over its two battlefields, the United States and Afghanistan. In the United [...]

The horrors that have been sprung upon the world since September 11 have come with a rapidity that threatens to overwhelm the capacity of the imagination to respond, not to [...]

One month after September 11, ground zero--six blocks from where I live--remains unquiet. Inextinguishable subterranean fires belch smoke into the neighborhood, as if the ruin were an active volcano, spreading [...]

On September 1, 1939, Hitler's armies rolled across the western border of Poland. On September 3, England and France declared war on Germany. But the two great powers, unable to [...]

This article is the first of a series of entries in a sort of reflective public diary that will chronicle and comment upon the crisis set in motion by the [...]

The blow against the United States has landed. As we go to press, the counterblow is awaited. Those deciding what it will be face a devilish conundrum. A great injury [...]