In the first major foreign-policy speech of his tenure, President Barack Obama told a wildly cheering audience in Prague that the United States would commit itself to "a world without nuclear weapons" and then described in detail the "trajectory"...

Today alone, James Traub and Daniel Larison have both used it, and Jonathan Steele made the result a key point in a column a few weeks back inveighing against Western involvement in the country. So it's worth noting the finding has been debunked. Brian...

"It was Leon being Leon." This is the take you get when you ask Obama administration officials exactly what it was that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta meant when he said last week that the administration wanted to move troops in Afghanistan from "a...

By coincidence, over the weekend I came across a dusty copy of a Fordham report from 1999 called “Better By Design.” Written by James Traub of the New York Times, the study profiles ten models of school reform—from Accelerated Schools to Core Knowledge...

If you listened on Thursday afternoon to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lay out the details of the 2013 Pentagon budget, warning that cuts yet deeper than the ones Congress had mandated could "inflict severe damage to our national security for...

Have you had it up to here with supposed allies who issue ultimatums to Washington? Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, seems to come up with a new one whenever he's in a bad mood. Last week's was: Hand over all the prisoners in the main...

This is one of the very best, most informative articles I have read in a very long time. It's amazing that you can look so closely at the present, understand the past, and give us such an accurate painting of what's going on in Algeria. Sad that such...

One of the enduring legacies of George W. Bush's magic-realist foreign policy was the discrediting of the word "freedom." The failure of Bush's "Freedom Agenda" made democracy promotion seem like a particularly inexcusable form of naiveté. Didn't he...

AP Photo Close James Traub -- riffing off the refusal of the Obama administration to apologize to Pakistan for a friendly-fire attack -- potentially sees domestic politics and Republican bracketing of the President at work in the decision: ONE of the...

The great experiment has begun. In recent days, Arab publics have gone to the polls in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt, and to no one's surprise, Islamist parties have come out on top in each case. Does this mean that Islamists have "hijacked" the revolution?

Kati Martin , Richard Holbrooke’s widow, joins David Rohde and James Traub to talk about the legacy of the renowned American diplomat. Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn’s son Stephan Solzhenitzyn discusses the recent translation of Apricot Jam , a collection of his

Kati Marton , Richard Holbrooke’s widow; James Traub , contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine ; and Reuters columnist David Rohde , talk about the career of Richard Holbrooke, who died last December, and was a pivotal player in U.S. diplomac