It is ironic that since September 11, the United States has adopted the Bismarckian approach to foreign policy, dominant in late-nineteenth-century Europe, placing dramatic displays of military might at the heart of its strategy. Europeans, meanwhile, have behaved more like early-twentieth-century American idealists, advocating measured and principled foreign interventions.

Today's [US] leaders no longer resemble former Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, with their deep personal knowledge of Europe and its heritage.

Today, in the eyes of many Americans, Europe is neither a subject nor an object of history. To assume, as some Americans do, that a country's degree of modernity is determined by its standing in Washington is misguided and narcissistic in the extreme.

In classic Declan style, a storm rages on Declan's list about a quote of mine that ran in the Economist.

Declan read the article and concluded from it that "Lessig wants to preserve freedom by ending anonymity" and so of course, his list, and my inbox, raged with the outrage at such a thought.

But what no one seems to have taken time to do is actually look at the article. For Declan's statement has no relation to anything the article actually says.

The challenge we face today is the possible stagnation of scientific progress. We can respond with indifference, activism, or rebellion.

What about biotechnology, including genetic engineering? It has encountered severe opposition, and its political future remains gravely in doubt. Information technology has not yet become the target of retrograde political movements, but this could well happen in the near future, especially in reaction to the increasing government ability to conduct intrusive surveillance by means of computer networks.

Progress will not simply happen automatically. We must take action. We must take risks. We must accept the challenge.

In the end, I fear, many of us may be forced into rebellion against the power structures of traditional society.

Social movements operating entirely outside the powerful institutions of society seldom succeed. Successful movements generally operate both inside and outside.

Absolutely essential will be creative communication of new ideas.

In the long term, revival of the scientific imagination will mean the death of many popular illusions, so the public will resist it.

A sorely neglected area is rigorous research on culture, not replacing the humanities which have their own values and reason for existing, but creating alongside the humanities a new quantitative anthropology, perhaps modeling culture mathematically as a complex, evolving system.

Perhaps the most interesting quality of Internet and other data transmission networks is their potential to alter power relationships with respect to personal privacy and intellectual property.

The idea that government should regulate intellectual property ... is relatively recent in human history, and the details may vary and change. Consider music.

Extensive economic research has not conclusively answered the question of whether the patent system really promotes innovation.

This is a nation of confounding murkiness, where every kind of deception, collusion and outright sham are recurring motifs in the political theater.

It seems that most Pakistanis, including a great many of the college-educated, continue to believe that the World Trade Center was attacked as part of a Jewish conspiracy. When I responded with incredulity, I was pitied as a naif.

Even in largely Pashtun Peshawar, the masses are being tugged in multiple directions, including toward modernity and the West. Internet cafes, which the Taliban would never have tolerated, are opening one after the other. Training in English is a chief selling point of private academies. Music and movies are sold openly. Pinups of Indian actresses are marketed side by side with those glorifying Osama bin Laden. More than 200 cable-TV operators are collecting a $4 monthly fee from tens of thousands of subscribers; even more people are stealing the service.

The legendary investor and philanthropist issues a pointed, astute, and intensely critical analysis of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

George Soros combines his razor-sharp sense of economic trends with his passionate advocacy for open societies and decency in world politics to come up with a workable, and severely critical, analysis of the Bush administration's overreaching, militaristic foreign policy.