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Over the past month, we've watched from distant shores as Greece has plunged into a debt crisis. Mounting pressure from global financial markets forced Greece to begin a drastic austerity program.

With a fiscal deficit of 8.1 percent of GDP and government debt of 115 percent of GDP expected this year, Greece has promised to turn itself around by 2013.

Americans are convulsed, for today, by the chilling story of a naturalized American who allegedly plotted the murder of innocents in Times Square. Similar stories last fall -- of an Afghan-American from Denver who conspired with colleagues in New York, of a Pakistani-American from Chicago who was affiliated with the Mumbai murderers -- also gripped this country.

Statistics kept by the New America Foundation indicate that 30 percent of those who died in drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 were not militants. ...

There's nothing like traveling abroad to learn what it means to be American and what being American means to everyone else who is not. I lived in Europe for a year when I was 14, and two unpleasant instances brought the complicated nature of our national identity into sharp relief.

The first happened at a party. After finding out I was American, a young Italian hipster suddenly started attacking me for my country's voracious, imperialist appetite. She cited chapter and verse: interventions in Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala.

Peter Bergen, Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan group, suggested that the increase in drone attacks during the Obama administration is, in part, revenge for the bombing of a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan that killed seven Americans on December 30, 2009.

"The people who died in this suicide attack were involved in targeting people on the other side of the border," he said earlier this year....

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the United States stands at a crossroads. Though the Great Recession appears contained and the U.S. image is improving abroad, the nation remains challenged by war, debt, unemployment, energy, and climate change.

Before President Obama releases his strategy for Afghanistan, he should think twice about fully re-embracing Hamid Karzai.

By rigging the first round of elections with more than a million fraudulent votes, rigging the second round of elections with more than 500 'ghost' polling places to generate another flood of fake ballots and refusing to reform the electoral system, incumbent President Hamid Karzai abused his office to steal a democratic election from the people of Afghanistan.

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen wrote in 2008 that "there is plenty of evidence that [al Qaeda] has experimented with crude chemical and ...

Congress has stripped the jobs bill of the reinvestment in America's infrastructure that would put people back to work and make the country more prosperous in the long run.

Instead, the bill relies on tax credits that are too small and too temporary to make a dent in America's high unemployment.

In a recent piece, Robert Wright, of the New America Foundation, wrote: "In common usage, a 'terrorist' is someone who attacks in the name of a political ...