Romesh Ratnesar: All Related Content

Susan Rice’s decision to withdraw from consideration to be the next secretary of state has averted a potentially bruising Senate confirmation battle. It may help the White House defuse the controversy over its handling of the September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Rice’s retreat also paves the way for John Kerry to succeed Hillary Clinton at Foggy Bottom, a prospect that has been received favorably among Kerry’s colleagues; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Kerry would be “would be a popular choice with the Senate.”

Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney had much to gain from Monday night’s foreign-policy debate. After four years, the country is familiar and largely comfortable with Obama’s handling of foreign affairs. The president’s principal goal was to remind voters, as early and often as possible, that he is the president who killed Osama bin Laden. Romney’s objective was even simpler: avoid any embarrassing gaffes that could halt his campaign’s momentum and raise doubts about his fitness to be commander-in-chief.

America: home to Apple Inc., Google, Amazon, and a slew of other powerful and innovative companies that rule the world of technology. The United States can no doubt claim many of the globe’s pioneering big businesses, but there’s also evidence the country faces declining rates of entrepreneurship and ranks far behind many other nations in educating its young people.

Mitt Romney’s response to the assaults on U.S. embassies in the Middle East was willfully misleading (accusing the Obama administration of issuing a statement sympathizing “with those who waged the attacks,” which it never did), indisputably ill-timed (trying to score political points off a national tragedy) and quite possibly fatal to his chances of becoming president. If Romney hoped to draw a foreign-policy contrast with Obama, he blew the opportunity.

Mitt Romney’s speech to the gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., offered his most expansive statements on foreign policy since the former governor clinched the Republican Party’s nomination for president. Making headlines was Romney’s suggestion that the White House, and possibly President Obama, has deliberately leaked sensitive intelligence for political gain.

In the beginning, there was the goat. Sometime during the Dark Ages, in a corner of present-day Sweden, a goat named Kare broke free from his herd and went frolicking in the woods near the town of Falun. When Kare returned home, his owner noticed the goat’s horns had turned red: the color of copper. The discovery of that valuable and versatile metal at the place Swedes call Great Copper Mountain would kick-start economic development in Northern Europe, sustain the ambitions of Sweden’s monarchs, and, for a time, turn a cold, remote kingdom into one of the world’s great powers.

... I came to the conclusion that I'd support it. It would have been easier to just go along with the surge from the beginning. I'm glad I didn't. By the time we undertook the decision to go forward, it was a better decision. — As told to Romesh Ratnesar.

Judged solely on outcomes, the decade-long war on terrorism has been a rousing success. Al Qaeda has been chased out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Its leader and most of his lieutenants are either captured or dead. The organization is on the brink of “strategic defeat,” according to both the U.S. Defense Secretary and the director of the CIA. Across the Middle East, support for jihadist violence has plummeted. Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda has not mounted one successful strike on American territory—and has failed even to pull off an attack against U.S.

"We prayed the revolution would succeed," says Magdy El Galad, the editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm, the largest independent newspaper in Egypt. "Because if it failed, we would have been assassinated." A wry smile crosses his face. He's joking, sort of.

When President Barack Obama announced on May 1 that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was among those who headed to the White House. The mood in Lafayette Square was joyous, ebullient, cathartic — though hardly the bacchanal of vengeful jingoism that some in the media have portrayed it to be, or an expression of "orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed" as David Sirota claimed on Salon.com.