Reihan Salam

If you believe the nightmarish forecasts, the American labor market will take a decade to return to full employment. That means that kids in high school and middle school are going to walk directly into an economic buzz-saw by the time they graduate, and that's assuming, rather wishfully, that all of them will indeed graduate. Roughly half of these children are college-bound, which means that they will have the time and resources to gain some valuable and not-so-valuable skills.

In an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August, President Obama made an impassioned case for the American military effort in Afghanistan. "If left unchecked," Obama said, "the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." Indeed, he went so far as to call the war in Afghanistan a "war of necessity," a term one normally reserves for repelling a foreign invasion or foiling an imminent attack. One of the vitally important points the… more

Every Wednesday (on WashingtonPost.com), Reihan Salam examines the ideological struggle for the future of American conservatism and how to revitalize the Republican party. ...

After the revelation of Iran's previously secret uranium-enrichment near facility Qom, home to the country's clerical elite, Barack Obama, flanked by Gordon Brown and the hawkish Nicolas Sarkozy, eloquently condemned Iran for its contemptuous disregard for international law. The visuals were powerful: while the Bush administration had been condemned for its unilateralism, here was President Obama standing with the leaders of America's allies, all of them offering a single forceful message. It didn't hurt that Obama towered over the perpetually

A book conversation, with Reihan Salam and Sam Tanenhaus, on The Death of Conservatism ...

President Obama's address to the United Nations General Assembly neatly captured his strengths and weaknesses, from his admirable focus on the difficulties involved in meeting global challenges to his easy solipsism. On Tuesday, he delivered a widely praised address on climate change, one that offered a message that was hopeful and urgent in equal measure. In one memorable passage, the president noted the United States "has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in… more

During a wide-ranging interview with John King of CNN, President Barack Obama distanced himself from former President Jimmy Carter's contention that the recent surge of opposition to big government is motivated by racism. Rather, the president observed that the debate over the size and scope of the federal government has been ferocious since the days of Andrew Jackson. And to his credit, he noted that harsh language has been used not just to condemn the partisans of government expansion, like FDR, who was also derided as a… more

In Memoirs of a Trotskyist, Irving Kristol, one of the most daring and provocative American intellectuals of the 20th century, recounted his years as a young radical at New York's City College. What he recalled most vividly weren't the seminars and lectures that made up his formal education, but rather the mostly playful--but occasionally very heated-arguments that took place among friends in Alcove No. 1, a small corner of the dark and dank college cafeteria that was home to the anti-Stalinist left. 

One of the many ironies of this political moment is that some of President Obama's worst enemies are poised to become his best friends. Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, is widely credited with crafting the strategy that defeated Bill Clinton's 1993 healthcare overhaul. This time around, Kristol has been an equally fierce critic of Democratic health-reform proposals. But as one of the founders of the Foreign Policy Initiative, successor to the pro-war Project for the New American Century, he has also worked to persuade… more