Clinton Administration

Debates about the possibility of containing a nuclear Iran often hinge on judgments of whether the regime there is rational. But as a wealth of recently released Iraqi documents about Saddam Hussein’s tumultuous reign in Iraq show, even an arguably rational leader can be unreasonable -- and very hard to deter.

The United States may have reset its Russia policy, but the U.S. approach to the other states in the region is in dire need of a conceptual revolution.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has prompted much handwringing over the problems with prewar intelligence. Too little attention has been paid, however, to the flip slide of the picture: that the much-maligned UN-enforced sanctions regime actually worked. Contrary to what critics have said, we now know that containment helped destroy Saddam Hussein's war machine and his capacity to produce weapons.

A new book sees the troubled U.S.-China relationship of the 1990s growing as much out of domestic politics on both sides as out of overarching strategic considerations.