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To create jobs at home, the United States must forgo protectionism and embrace innovation.

The Iraq crisis reveals the need for a better approach than either militant unilateralism or feel-good multilateralism.

To survive, the monarchy must battle the militants, reassure the religious establishment, and give the middle class a taste of democracy.

Most of the 14,000 inhabitants of Elektrenai, Lithuania, voted to join the European Union in May 2003 because membership promised a better life. In some ways, however, their European future looks a lot like their Soviet past, with new bureaucratic masters, new rules, and the revival of a giant power plant that once made their town a model of state socialism. A parable about the promises and pitfalls of European integration.

The war against poverty is threatened by friendly fire. A swarm of media-savvy Western activists has descended upon aid agencies, staging protests to block projects that allegedly exploit the developing world. The protests serve professional agitators by keeping their pet causes in the headlines. But they do not always serve the millions of people who live without clean water or electricity.

Not since Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Vietnam has a U.S. president's foreign policy so polarized the country -- and the world. Yet as controversial as George W. Bush's policies have been, they are not as radical a departure from his predecessors as both critics and supporters proclaim. Instead, the real weaknesses of the president's foreign policy lie in its contradictions: Blinded by moral clarity and hamstrung by its enormous military strength, the United States needs to rebalance means with ends if it wants to forge a truly effective grand strategy.

Ideas matter, and sometimes they can be dangerous.

Roland Schatz is the president of New York-based Media Tenor Ltd., a provider of international media-content analysis (www.mediatenor.com).