NEW YORK — During the past two decades, the United States has approached the Middle East though its own conceptual frameworks — dictatorships versus democracy, secularism versus religion, order versus chaos. But the most significant trend shaping the region today is something different — Sunnis versus Shiites. That sectarian struggle now infects almost every aspect […]

NEW YORK — I think of myself first and foremost as an American. I’m proud of that identity because as an immigrant, it came to me through deep conviction and hard work, not the accident of birth. I also think of myself as a husband, father, guy from India, journalist and New Yorker. But in […]

NEW YORK — The recent controversies on American campuses from Yale to the University of Missouri have been sad to watch. They reveal a country of chasms, in which ethnic and racial groups see, experience and speak of the world so differently. I find it difficult to comment confidently on what triggered the outrage among […]

NEW YORK — Henry Kissinger has noted that in his adult lifetime, the United States has fought five major wars and began each one with great enthusiasm and public support. But in all of them, Americans soon began to ask, “How quickly can you withdraw?” In three of these conflicts, he says, the United States […]

NEW YORK — Today’s conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s best days are behind him and that his poll numbers will soon begin to descend. Maybe. But Trump has come to represent something fundamental about the Republican Party — the growing gap between its leaders and its political constituency. Even if he disappears, this gap […]

NEW YORK — It is difficult to find anyone in the Obama administration who believes that putting up to 50 Special Operations soldiers on the ground in Syria will make much of a difference in the raging civil war there. And yet, the president has authorized this expansion of America’s military intervention for the same […]