As the saying goes, success has many fathers. George W. Bush is not one of them. The former president’s aides and other neocons are mounting a furious effort right now to make the case that Bush’s pro-democracy campaign during his second term led inexorably to the uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak out of office last week. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a canard. I know. I was the...

BRUSSELS ― For seasoned observers of Europe’s economy, the most recent European Union summit delivered a bizarre sense of dj vu. Little more than a decade ago, European leaders announced to great fanfare the “Lisbon Agenda,” a policy blueprint to make Europe “the most competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world.” The new “Competitiveness Pact,” proposed at the EU summit by France and German...

In Russia two weeks ago, President Dmitry Medvedev unveiled a 33-foot-tall marble statute of Boris Yeltsin, who, as Russia’s first president, helped bring democracy to the former communist state. In Tunisia right now, I would like to see the interim government erect a marble statue, at least 33 feet tall, of Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian vendor who immolated himself outside a govern...

At a time when corporate profits are through the roof, the Dow has reached 12,000, Wall Street paychecks are fat again, and big corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, you’d expect jobs to be coming back. But you’d be wrong. The U.S. economy added just 36,000 jobs in January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unusually bad weather may have accounted for some of the ...

WASHINGTON, DC ― Hosni Mubarak’s resignation as President of Egypt marks the beginning of an important stage in that country’s transition to a new political system. But will the political transition ultimately lead to democracy? We cannot know with certainty, but, based on the history of democratic government, and the experiences of other countries ― the subject of my book, “Democracy’s Good Nam...