To understand the Brotherhood's prospects in Egypt's upcoming elections, one has to understand the organization itself. This intensely disciplined operation has an intricate system for recruitment and promotion and a devoutly loyal membership -- one likely to triumph at the polls and move Egypt in a decidedly theocratic, anti-Western direction

Japan is undergoing profound changes that are empowering its political leadership at the expense of its bureaucracy. But rather than bringing about a clean transfer of institutional authority, the reforms have created gridlock. The U.S.-Japanese alliance isn’t dead, but it is getting more complicated

Every invasion of Afghanistan has eventually come to naught, either because the invaders paid insufficient attention to local culture or because they sought to impose centralized control. If the United States is interested in leaving behind a better Afghanistan than the one it found, it needs to take those experiences to heart