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In this Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017 file photo, President Donald Trump holds up a signed Presidential Memorandum in the Oval Office in Washington. Just two days after banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations, U.S. President Donald Trump invited the Saudi monarch, whose kingdom includes Islam’s holiest sites, to fly to Washington. It points to the delicate balancing act Trump faces as he tries to deliver on campaign promises to exterminate “radical Islamic terrorism” without endangering political and

AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File

Analysis & Opinions - The New Republic

Trump’s Foreign Policy Chaos

| Jan. 23, 2017

There is more to today’s prevailing gloom than concern about routine acts of terror. There is also a sense of strategic disorientation: After nearly three quarters of a century, the foundations of the liberal world order are giving way. In Europe, tepid growth, demographic decline, Russian revanchism and resurgent populism are testing the durability of Western cohesion.

Analysis & Opinions - The New York Times

What Would Lee Kuan Yew Do?

| March 23, 2015

WASHINGTON — With China accelerating its military modernization, Russia continuing its slow-drip incursion into Ukraine, and an expanding section of the Middle East devolving into chaos, it has once again become fashionable to argue that the United States is in decline. Strangely, Americans are often far quicker to accept this diagnosis than their counterparts abroad.

Analysis & Opinions - The American Interest

What is America’s role in the World?

| Thursday October 30, 2014

Rarely,” the New York Times observed this July, “has a president been confronted with so many seemingly disparate foreign policy crises all at once.” Some of these crises, like the ascent of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), are bloody and fast-moving. Others, like the civil war in Syria, are grisly, protracted, and slow-moving. Others are grinding along sufficiently slowly that they feel less like crises than enduring foreign-policy challenges: consider the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program, which Graham Allison likens to “a Cuban missile crisis in slow motion,” and China’s quiet but purposeful campaign to settle its maritime disputes, which will likely play out over several decades.

Analysis & Opinions

Some Thoughts on the Ethics of China's Rise

| Aug. 14, 2013

Any commentary with a title such as this one should begin with a disclaimer: distilling a country of 1.34 billion people down to a construct called "China" is presumptuous, verging on preposterous. Who best represents "the views of China?" Its government? Its dissidents? The individuals who may be critical of government policies, but choose to go about their daily business rather than investing the time and energy to express their criticisms?

Lee Kuan Yew visits the United States, 2002

Wikimedia Foundation

Analysis & Opinions - Forbes

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew Talks America's Strengths And Weaknesses

| February 13, 2013

Both in the United States and abroad, many influential observers argue that the U.S. is in systemic decline. Not so, says Lee Kuan Yew, the sage of Singapore. Lee is not only a student of the rise and fall of nations.  He is also the founder of modern Singapore. As prime minister from 1959 to 1990, he led its rise from a poor, small, corrupt port to a first-world city-state in just one generation.