U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently met for extensive discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Among other things, they discussed how to restart almost certainly futile talks between the Syrian regime and Syrian rebels. This latest American-Russian engagement must be seen not only in light of the failure…

Ideas matter. They matter so much that they cause seismic shifts in history. Extremist ideas foster revolutionary fanatics so beholden to ideology that attempting to contain them can be like placing a Band-Aid on an open wound. Sept. 11 upended previous notions of deterrence; you can’t simply deter someone who intentionally dies for a cause….