Long-time readers have heard me comment on the work of George Friedman, the founder of the Austin-based geopolitical forecasting firm Stratfor. I consider Friedman to be one of the insightful thinkers in the field today, and I wrote a lengthy, highly-complimentary review of his The Next 100 Years.Today, I’m going to take a look at...Read More

There is a deep-seated belief in America that the United States is approaching the eve of its destruction. Read letters to the editor, peruse the Web, and listen to public discourse. Disastrous wars, uncontrolled deficits, high gasoline prices, shootings at universities, corruption in business and government, and an endless litany of other shortcomings—all of them...Read More

“What were we thinking?” ask John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper in the introduction to their latest book.“In a way, we acted like teenagers. We made the easy choice, not thinking of the consequences. We never absorbed the lessons of the depression from our grandparents. We quickly forgot the sobering malaise of the 1970s… We created...Read More

“We all know the story,” starts David Willetts in his book The Pinch. “The parents return home from a night away to find a teenage party has got out of hand and the house has been trashed… It plays to a deep-seated fear that younger people will not appreciate and protect what has been achieved...Read More

It was the most humiliating day in the history of the British Empire. Britain had been conquered before—by Romans, by Anglo-Saxons, by Vikings, by Normans—but nothing like this. Never to a people so strange and foreign. On April 3, 1848, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington, and much of the court knelt in...Read More