In 2007, the World Bank was in crisis. Some saw conflicts over its leadership. Others blamed the institution itself.

Last August, the Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney performed what has become a quadrennial rite of passage in American presidential politics: he delivered a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Nine years after U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein and just a few months after the last U.S. soldier left Iraq, the country has become something close to a failed state.

The United States, facing deepening economic and fiscal woes at home, is preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, articulates the idea that it is wrong to exclude any member of the human species from the circle of moral concern.

Nearly 90 percent of the world's economy is fueled every year by digging up and burning about four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo

James M. Lindsay discusses the political calculations behind President Obama's State of the Union address.

Abandoning counterinsurgency doctrine after Afghanistan would doom the U.S. military to irrelevance and impotence, writes Christopher Sims and Fernando Luján. Not so, says Bing West; like it or not, the United States will be much less ambitious in future wars.

Selections from the Foreign Affairs archives tracing the ideological battles of the past century and the evolution of the modern order.

Today's troubles are real, but not ideological: they relate more to policies than to principles. The postwar order of mutually supporting liberal democracies with mixed economies solved the central challenge of modernity, reconciling democracy and capitalism. The task now is getting the system back into shape.

Stagnating wages and growing inequality will soon threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood. What is needed is a new populist ideology that offers a realistic path to healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies.

Globalization is widening the gap between what voters demand and what their governments can deliver. Unless the leading democracies can restore their political and economic solvency, the very model they represent may lose its allure.

Intelligent observers of Europe in the 1930s thought its future belonged to communism or fascism and would have ridiculed the notion that decades later the entire continent would be democratic.

Opponents of military action against Iran assume a U.S. military strike would be far more dangerous than simply letting Tehran build a bomb. Not so, argues this former Pentagon defense planner. With a carefully designed strike, Washington could mitigate the costs—or at least bring them down to a bearable level—and spare the region and the world from an unacceptable threat.

The United States gives Pakistan billions of dollars in aid each year. Pakistan returns the favor by harboring terrorists, spreading anti-Americanism, and selling nuclear technology abroad. Washington must tell Islamabad to start cooperating or lose its aid and face outright isolation.

As the United States looks ahead, it faces two central challenges in foreign policy: enlarging the zone of prosperity and democracy in the West while balancing the rise of China and allaying the fears of the United States' Asian allies.

The collapse of the euro is no accident; the seeds of the crisis were planted before the monetary union even began, argues a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Confidence in the dollar and the euro continues to falter, threatening the international monetary system.

China seems to want the yuan to dethrone the dollar as the global reserve currency. But don't expect China's currency to take over anytime soon.

John Lewis Gaddis' magisterial authorized biography of George Kennan tells the story of a brilliant diplomat who helped define postwar U.S. foreign policy. Yet the public triumph was matched with private frustration, and the prickly Kennan never won the influence he craved.