Noah Feldman

Just what is Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas thinking? At the new United Nations session, he has announced, the Palestinian National Authority will ask the Security Council to recognize Palestine as a state. The application will be dead on arrival: the U.S. has already said it will veto.

Here is a bet about the decade since Sept. 11: Historians are going to be mystified by it.

If you think balanced-budget amendments are the stuff of madmen or dreamers, you were in for a surprise this month.

Is the Communist Party of China behind the Tea Party? Via the Xinhua news agency, the Chinese government told Americans that their days of borrowing their way out of economic troubles were over. Instead, the U.S. must cut spending on social programs and defense. There was no mention of raising taxes.

Imagine you are a senior official of the Chinese Communist Party trying to figure out whether democracy is a good idea. The brinkmanship over raising the debt ceiling is a prime example for the argument that democracy is irrational, right?

At least since Julius Caesar came back from Gaul and made himself emperor, generals who overthrow the government have followed the same script: They take power only to make the country safe for rule by the people. Then they usually find a way to maintain their influence, even if they allow elections.

What do you do with a captured terrorist? Throw him in the brig. That’s what was done with Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, the Somali who in April was plucked from a fishing boat off the East African coast between Yemen and Somalia.

The surge in Afghanistan was supposed to change the incentives of the Taliban so that they would choose to join the government rather than fight it.

For all the excitement about the twilight of the dictators, only two -- Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia -- have been officially knocked over since the start of the so-called Arab Spring six months ago. It isn’t even clear whether that count will reach three.

It’s Justice Anthony Kennedy ’s country -- the rest of us just live in it. Or so it sometimes feels when the U.S. Supreme Court ’s most important and decisions come down from Mount Olympus, aka 1 First Street, NE, where the justices preside in their white marble temple in Washington.