Wars rarely begin when the missiles launch. They begin years earlier, sometimes decades earlier, in ideology, threats, and actions that slowly accumulate until a response becomes unavoidable. For the United States and Iran, that timeline stretches back nearly half...

For most of the twentieth century, the argument between capitalism and socialism existed largely in textbooks and foreign policy speeches. Americans watched it play out in Europe, in the Soviet bloc, and in the Cold War’s ideological theater. Today, that argument...

Nearly a decade after the first tremors of what became known as “Russiagate,” the story refuses to disappear. It lingers in Washington like unfinished business — a political scandal whose documentation has grown steadily thicker while accountability has remained...

Politics often reduces complex policy debates into a few fundamental questions. One of those questions surfaced recently in both rhetoric and polling: What is the primary duty of the American government? When voters were presented with the statement, “The first...

With November approaching, the national picture is neither a wave nor a collapse. It is a stalemate. The generic congressional ballot — the broad measure of which party voters intend to support — is effectively dead even. In a polarized electorate, that equilibrium...

National pride is not a policy issue. It’s a cultural barometer. And the latest polling suggests that barometer is shifting — not uniformly, but politically. Seventy-three percent of American adults say they are proud to be American, a solid majority but down eight...

Crime. Apparently, Americans are still worried about crime. Shocking, I know. After years of being told that rising violence was either exaggerated, misunderstood, or simply a matter of “perception,” it turns out the public has stubbornly refused to feel safer just...