If America wants to constrain tyranny and prevent anarchy in ways that are both just and sustainable, it must resist the temptation of empire and embrace again a vision of international collaborative peacekeeping.

Terry Ascott’s solution for the Middle East tramples over one of the region’s most sacred cows: Redraw the map.

Ian Bremmer’s Superpower gives a good critique about America’s incoherent foreign policy and is a good introduction to different foreign policy choices.

In every year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, without exception, the cause of freedom has been in retreat around the world.

For America today to truly be America, it must be the world’s leading proponent of human rights at home and abroad. It is when it answers this great national vocation (first glimpsed by the nation’s founders) that America most fully gives expression to what, in seed, it has been from the very start.

We return to the unanswered question: “What, if anything, should be the purpose of American power?”

Debates over the appropriate American response to the Syrian refugee crisis reflect division and uncertainty about a deeper question: What is America’s national purpose?

Just war aims at peace. As Augustine argued, “Every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace.” We do not fight war for its own sake, or for revenge, profit, or prestige. The only conceivable rationale for waging war is to create a world of better, deeper, more lasting peace than the one that led to war in the first place.

While I am an optimist with regard to global poverty alleviation, my optimism is sorely tested when it comes to my beloved birth continent, Africa.