Introduction Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, Mexico’s drug war has taken over 30,000 lives, destabilized the U.S.-Mexico border, and become a security crisis for the North American continent. Two years ago, a December 2008...

In the Beginning: The Indispensable Man               Four months and two days after his inauguration, President George Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox tried to perform a Constitutional duty by seeking...

Introduction FPRI’s Program on National Security held a conference on the foreign fighter problem, July 14-15, 2009, at the National Press in Washington, D.C. Michael Horowitz, Michael P. Noonan, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Harvey Sicherman, and Stephanie Kaplan served as...

Introduction Arab nationalism, territorial nationalism, and Arab socialism, among other ideologies, all heralded the restoration of the Middle East in early twentieth century to its pre-colonial, former glory. During the 1950s, various leaders and movements had surfaced, each attempting...

Introduction In November 2009, United States President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao held their first summit meeting in Beijing, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute published a collection of essays by scholars from the United States, the...

Introduction Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a bloody conflict broke out between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shias. This conflict has led some observers to see the entire region through the prism of the age-old Sunni-Shia struggle. However,...

Introduction In his recent study of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime leadership, Tried by War, the eminent historian James McPherson writes that “in the vast literature on the sixteenth president … the amount of attention devoted to his role as commander-in-chief...

This January 2009 e-book by James Kurth, FPRI Senior Fellow and Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, discusses the foundations of Western and specifically American civilization, the ideals which make them worth fighting for.   The...