When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks.

The great NATO enlargement debate never ends. In the 1990s, U.S. officials and academics argued about whether pushing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe was likely to sustain the post-Cold War peace or prematurely end it.

Americans are following the Ukraine situation closely, as might be imagined given its dominance of daily news coverage.