Rajan Menon

Much about Syria's continuing carnage remains unclear -- above all, what outsiders can do to stop it. But there are also undeniable facts.

Bashar al-Assad's regime has not lost the capacity and determination to kill, even after 15 months of bloodshed that has left some 10,000 Syrian civilians dead...

Sometimes, you're strongest when you're weakest. This is the paradox presently prevailing within the Eurozone.

Until recently, the idea of issuing Eurobonds was dismissed as politically infeasible because it would in effect commit the EU's financially most prudent members to guaranteeing the loans of its most profligate ones. That...

Ever since austerity measures began in the eurozone, experts assumed that Germany would be in the driver's seat -- and for four reasons. First, as the EU's powerhouse it was certain to have the most influence in shaping the terms under which the most debt-burdened countries would be helped. Second,...

There's no sign that Europe's most debt-burdened, no-growth, high-unemployment economies are recovering. The austerity measures that they, above all Greece, accepted in exchange for loans from the EU have brought misery to their citizens, but without producing gains that would have made the pain (cuts in budgets and wages, massive...

America's Cuba policy has three distinctive aspects. First, though Bill Clinton and Barack Obama changed it at the margins, it has been remarkably consistent, regardless of who occupies the White House. Second, it has lasted for half a century despite the utter failure to achieve its declared purpose: producing fundamental...

Here we go again. American and North Korean negotiators met in February for talks. North Korea undertook to freeze its nuclear program and to not test ballistic missiles in return for food supplies. Alas, we should anticipate a continuation of the unproductive pattern evident since the run-up to the 1994...

Libya's current politics offer two lessons -- ones we really shouldn't have to learn yet again. First, military interventions that topple repressive regimes invariably offer occasions to observe, though at others' expense, the law of unintended consequences. Second, the constituencies that clamor for such campaigns move quickly to other matters...

In the predawn hours of March 12, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales allegedly left his military outpost in the Panjwaii district of Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan, entered a village, went door to door seeking unlocked homes, and shot or stabbed to death 16 sleeping people, burning...

The prevailing view among experts seems to be that there is a strong likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations. This may be the only point on which the opponents and proponents of that move agree. But the consensus is questionable.

True, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu...

As American troops withdraw from Afghanistan to fulfill President Obama's commitment to wind up the war by the end of next year, Kabul and Washington are engaged in a game of chicken as they negotiate the terms of a strategic partnership that would allow a "residual force" of U.S. military...

Bashar al-Assad's murder machine has claimed well over 7,000 victims by now. Many more have become refugees, within and beyond Syria. The intelligence services continue to arrest, interrogate, and torture the regime's opponents, real or imagined, many of whom are among the "disappeared." The Syrian army is again shelling Homs,...

The campaign to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms brings to mind a doctor who focuses on the symptoms while overlooking the disease. If Tehran is indeed building the bomb, it quest is a particular manifestation of a larger problem: nuclear proliferation.

Though dreaded for their capacity to kill millions...

The dual-veto cast by Russia and China that blocked Saturday's delicately-worded U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government to stop its crackdown and facilitate "a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system" through negotiations with the opposition was unsurprising. In the run-up...

How many of you who peruse newspapers and websites like this one regularly have concluded that this will be the Chinese century -- a Pax Sinica, which supplants the Pax Americana of the last six decades? If the answer is yes, you're not alone. Indeed, your assessment is reasonable, for...

History reveals several pathways to war; but, as the tension between the West and Iran revs up, two seem particularly relevant because of the lessons they offer for those seeking to contain the crisis.

The first might be called "slip-sliding into conflagration," and World War I (not that any dust-up...