The United States’ national deficit exceeds $13 trillion—over $42,000 per US resident. With U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) at $14 trillion in 2009, our debt-to-GDP ratio is 93 percent and growing. Japan enjoyed 90 percent debt-to-GDP levels in 1995. Following two decades of stagnant growth, Japan now risks exceeding 190 percent. 15 years from now, America’s Debt-to-GDP ratio may double as well.

Negative responses to austerity demonstrate the key danger of entitlement programs in democratic societies: Once they are instated or augmented, they are extremely difficult to diminish or abolish.

Mark Twain was probably right when he said that history doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes. But given the points of similarity that do exist, Obama should expect the worst and make use of the lessons of 1994 to understand how he can thrive with a Republican-controlled Congress.

Three years ago, 17-year-old Ogün Samast entered the upscale Sisli district of Istanbul, Turkey, wearing a white beret and carrying a gun. He turned onto the street of Sebat Sokak, reached the publishing house of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, and waited. Moments later, when the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Hrant Dink stepped out, Samast shot him dead in broad daylight.

It was misty that Monday night. Fog hung thick over the Potomac. There was nary a sound for miles. The noise of reporters, camera flashes and Greek choruses had quieted. Streetlights changed color for no one, except perhaps the odd lobbyist scurrying into his trashcan. After all the speculating and graphing and rebranding and redistricting and speaking and speaking and speaking, the city was asleep. All were resting.All, except for one man.

A conversation with Columbia University's Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Affairs and former president of the American Political Science Association on withdrawal and recovery in Afghanistan.

The Columbia Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. Rebiya Kadeer, a prominent Uighur rights activist currently living in exile in the U.S., has agreed to answer some of our questions. You can read Ms. Kadeer's biography, including information on her involvement in the July 2009 unrest in Urumchi, in the New York Times here. For background information on Xinjiang/East Turkmenistan, and the Uighurs, click here.

As the final issue of CPR was going to press, volcanic ash was still spewing out of the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland and bringing much of our globalized world to a relative standstill. When I first heard the news, I couldn’t help but laugh. The idea of ash covering huge swathes of land was simply ludicrous to me.

During the winter break between my two semesters abroad at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I made the trek to Xiaoshan, an administrative district of Hangzhou, one of southern China’s biggest cities. The occasion for this visit to Xiaoshan was a family member’s wedding. My grandmother’s cousin’s daughter, Chen Xingmei, was getting married to a young man, Chen Xingjiang, whom she met through work and with whom, by chance, she shares two of three characters in her name.

In a recent episode of ABC’s new primetime hit comedy Modern Family, audiences were treated to a familiar scenario. Three of the show’s characters—Jay Pritchett, his thirty-something son, Mitchell Pritchett, and the former’s preteen stepson, Manny—go on a trip to the great outdoors for some stargazing and male bonding, but unexpected events soon lead the evening hilariously awry.