Above the Fold. My BlackBerry buzzed this morning with email alerts informing me that President Obama intends to ask Congress for authority to merge several of the federal government’s trade- and com…

Above the Fold. The hot topic in Washington this weekend—assuming that the rumor of Kim Jong Un’s assassination is just that—is the upcoming Valentine’s Day meeting between President Obama and Xi Jin…

It is fair to say that Omar Suleiman’s bid to be Egypt’s next president is one of the most unexpected developments in post-Mubarak Egypt.  The last time anyone had seen or heard from Suleiman, he app…

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a stunningly gifted politician.  He can be thuggish, high-handed, painfully arrogant, but he also seems to have an innate sense of what makes many Turks tick and how to connec…

Nussaibah Younis, “Why Maliki Must Go,” New York Times, May 2, 2013. Given the two-year-old Syrian civil war escalating next door, a sectarian crisis and political collapse in Iraq would be a disast…