It is old news that the S&P rating agency downgraded the US foreign-credit rating from the coveted AAA to the less impressive AA+ on August 5. But as Republicans look ahead to the possibility that they might defeat Obama, they will inevitably seek ways to recover the exalted AAA status. If history is any guide, repairing the damage done to the U.S. bond rating will be a long, hard slog.

Twenty-first century economists blithely talked of the "risk-free debt" of governments, and European bank regulators set a zero-capital requirement on the debt of their governments. The manifold proof of their error is that banks and other investors are now taking huge credit losses on their Greek government bonds. The only question is why anybody would be surprised by this.

The stage now seems to be set for perhaps the final act in the Euro-zone debt crisis. With its economy literally imploding, social tensions close to the boiling point, and its IMF program woefully off track, there is every prospect that Greece will experience a hard default by year end.

The Palestinian Authority succeeded last Monday in becoming a member state in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Recently there have been a number of disturbing economic and political developments in Europe that heighten the risk that the Eurozone will experience a spate of sovereign debt defaults within the next six months.

Saving the euro is up to them, not us. They're perfectly entitled to try to create an alternative to the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, but we are equally free to let it fail.

History shows us that sovereign governments often default on their loans, particularly in times of war or economic upheaval. Europe finds itself in this situation now and would do well to examine past sovereign debt crises—particularly, the European sovereign debt crisis of the 1920s—for lessons.

This book provides analysis of the Napoleonic era in Europe and the revealing interaction of continental politics and war shaping our modern world.