Americans love generals. We have elected twelve of them president. But for a president, generals can be an enormous pain—and a political threat. James K. Polk worried (rightly) that Winfield Scott wa…

The U.S. Navy marks 248 years of service.

This is a guest post by Natalie Kitroeff, a research associate here at the Council on Foreign Relations who works with me in the Latin America program. She received her BA from Princeton University’s…

The Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate of inflation is not strictly empirically derived. Should it modify this target moving forward?

A casual observer of world events might believe that interstate wars, civil wars, and terrorism, given the prominence of media coverage, are the primary causes of violent deaths. In fact, of the esti…