er  After roughly two years of being on the defensive, Syria’s rebels are making dramatic gains in the north of the country. In the span of six weeks, coalitions of insurgent fighters captured the city of Idlib and won a series of key strategic victories elsewhere in the governorate. In the face of the opposition, the Syrian Army and its supporting militias appear at their weakest point since early 2013. However, while much of the subsequent commentary proclaimed this as the beginning of the end for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, we are still a long way from that. In fact, the regime…

The current moment confronts us with a paradox. The first fifteen years of this century have been a time of astonishing advances in communications and information technology, including digitalization, mass-accessible video platforms, smart phones, social media, billions of people gaining internet access, and much else. These revolutionary changes all imply a profound empowerment of individuals through exponentially greater access to information, tremendous ease of communication and data-sharing, and formidable tools for networking. Yet despite these changes, democracy — a political system based on the idea of the empowerment of individuals — has in these same years become stagnant in the world.…

Even if the Arab spring has sorely disappointed, dictators, even benevolent ones, are not the answer MANY people argue that it would have been better if the Arab spring had never happened. Think of the mayhem that would have been avoided in Egypt and Syria, not to mention Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, where the angry and the aggrieved have created chaos in the name of democracy. How foolish of Western governments, especially in America and Britain, to betray allies like Hosni Mubarak and to pander to the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted narrow-minded Islamists. Thank heavens that Egypt is back in…

  Cultural Gold Standard Let me begin this piece by first laying the cultural and moral foundation of right political conduct and its applicability to the just concluded Nigerian elections, including the respective roles played by the major ethnic groups with particular reference to the Yorubas, Ndigbo and the Hausa/Fulani ethnicities in advancing, retarding or otherwise deflecting the moral argument as the case may be. What is life without morality? As the reader may have noticed perhaps with some sense of alarm, our contemporary world is in a terrible state of flux and anarchy with good old morality and timeless…

Last week U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, an experienced diplomat, concluded bilateral consultations that focused on regional security and Algerian economics. The United States endorsed Algeria’s efforts to resolve the conflict in Mali, and the two countries pledged to work closely on counterterrorism. The United States also voiced support for Algerian efforts to diversify its economy and attract new investment, and the two countries will continue to build their bilateral cooperation in education. Algeria is an important partner of the United States, especially as both states confront new extremist threats in North Africa.…