Opening Gambit

How Russia's president morphed from realist to ideologue -- and what he'll do next.

Why the United States needs to stop playing peacemaker and start making China feel uncomfortable.

What Late Antiquity says about the 21st century and the Syrian crisis.

The morally conflicted world views of the two sons of Illinois.

How America's friendly northern neighbor became a rogue, reckless petrostate.

So what if it's a terrible slogan? It's still the right strategy.

Democracy is in retreat. And there's a surprising culprit.

How behavioral scientists could make Obama's second term a success.

Can this tiny, rich emirate really solve the Middle East's thorniest political conflicts?

How does the world look in an age of U.S. decline? Dangerously unstable.

How disaster hype became a big global business.

Life in the vanguard of the new Twitter proletariat.

The 9 most annoying sky-is-falling clichés in American foreign policy.

How Washington stopped worrying and learned to love Saudi Arabia, again.

Why the tech industry's unbridled optimism won't save the world.

The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity's finest -- even for the world's bottom billion.

People didn't drown the markets; a bad system did.

The world has a lot of problems. An exploding population isn't one of them.  

The biggest pain in Asia isn't the country you'd think.