For all the differences between Democrats and Republicans that were laid bare during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, the parties' standard-bearers, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, do seem to have agreed on one thing: the importance of equal opportunity.

With its commandments and parables, its kings and its prophets, the Hebrew Bible has served as a reference point for Western politics for centuries. Almost every kind of political movement, it seems, has drawn its own message from the text.

This past Memorial Day, U.S. President Barack Obama marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War with a speech at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The argument of Thomas Ricks' new book, The Generals, is simple: since the end of World War II, the combat performance of the U.S. Army has been subpar, primarily because the highest-ranking generals have been reluctant to fire underperforming generals lower in the chain of command.

Every aspiring beauty-pageant queen knows what to say when asked what she wants most: "World peace." World peace is at least nominally what we all want most. But evidently, we are not very good at making it.

The War of 1812 gets no respect. It's easy to see why: the causes of the war are still subject to debate, and they were sometimes unclear even to the warring parties.

Andrea Campbell tips her hand partway through her essay "America the Undertaxed" (September/October 2012) when she writes that "the central debate in U.S. politics is whether to keep taxes, particularly federal taxes, at their current levels in the long term or emulate other advanced nations and raise them."

Graham Allison ("The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50," July/August 2012) seems to believe that U.S. President John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis was an unalloyed success.

Stephen Hadley and John Podesta accurately describe Washington's policy dilemmas and preferred outcomes in Afghanistan ("The Right Way Out of Afghanistan," July/August 2012).

After World War II, Europe began a process of peaceful political unification unprecedented there and unmatched anywhere else.

The euro's naysayers have it all wrong.

Germany seems like Europe's lone island of fiscal stability, but trouble lurks under its impressive export-fueled growth.

The United States worries about China's rise, but Washington rarely considers how the world looks through Beijing's eyes.

For decades, U.S. China policy has been driven by a combination of engagement and balancing.

Moscow's anti-Putin protesters have captured the world's attention. But does their message resonate outside the big cities?

Israeli authorities in the West Bank have long worried about stopping Palestinian terrorism.

Pundits predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Care Act would make history.

Compared with other developed countries, the United States has very low taxes, little income redistribution, and an extraordinarily complex tax code.

As a referendum on Scotland's independence looms, the question of the region's place in the United Kingdom has become the most pressing issue in British politics.

For two decades, the United States has dominated the global arms trade, reaping a broad range of economic and geopolitical benefits in the process.