President Barack Obama’s ominous warning about climate change stayed in my mind long after his historic address to Ghana’s Parliament was over. He was correct in noting that a warming planet will spread disease, shrink water resources and deplete crops, creating conditions that contribute to the spread of famine and conflict. Still, as he optimistically [...]

President-elect Barack Obama has already demonstrated a sensible impulse: to make haste slowly as he prepares to tackle the nation’s pressing issues in a pro-active, bipartisan manner. His next steps will be most effective if they captivate, inspire, energize and assist Americans.
Obama has no choice about the No. 1 priority, the economy. He cannot avoid [...]

WASHINGTON — Huddled around tables in a private Georgetown garden, we waited for the main event, the reason that we had given up our evening: the promise of a bipartisan discussion on the major foreign-policy issues facing the United States.
Mere weeks before, I had written a column expressing the need for such an approach in [...]

Now that both the Democratic and Republican presidential-campaign teams have a strong component of foreign-policy expertise, how will they use it?
They had better act quickly, because time is short. During the few months before Election Day, voters should demand that the presidential contenders address the international challenges facing the United States with clarity and [...]

What will the dragon breathe in the years after the 2008 Summer Olympics conclude?
Will it be fresh air in the form of expanded economic reform, political change and environmental concern – or rhetorical smoke to continue justifying an overly intrusive governmental hand?

Two decades ago, when NASA scientist James Hansen presciently announced his virtual certainty that people were heating up the planet, critics understandably emerged in force. After all, we knew relatively little about climate change in those days. But now, with information in abundance, there is no excuse for the naysayers’ stubborn opposition.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — If America’s key asymmetric advantage is its people, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asserted during a national conference last week, then why are we waiting to engage everyone in a serious, public debate on how best to maximize the application of this nation’s strengths against the weaknesses of its [...]

Top scientists, in their most authoritative report yet, have sounded the alarm about certain unstoppable ramifications of climate gone wild, such as rising seas with potentially catastrophic consequences.
That stern warning from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coincides with the final weeks of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season, when those who live in [...]

Natural acts of mass destruction – from Hurricane Dean’s rampage across the Caribbean to the surprisingly powerful earthquake that struck Peru’s southern coast last week – clearly have taken their places as inevitabilities of our time.
Although some would argue that the world has always experienced bouts of extreme weather and other devastating phenomena, the frequency [...]