A partitioning of southern and central Somalia between al Shabaab and Hizb al Islam has weakened the opposition to al Shabaab and increased the Islamist threat to the western-backed Transitional Federal Government.

Alan D. Viard, a resident scholar at AEI, reviews the budget outlook, the need for tax reform and the benefits of moving to a progressive consumption tax. He also discusses his forthcoming book, Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X Tax Revisited, which he coauthored with Robert Carroll of Ernst & Young. The book will be published by AEI Press in the Spring.

The structure and leadership of al Shabaab are of paramount importance to understanding how this radical Islamist group operates in Somalia.

The murder of four Americans should call attention to the increasingly dire situation in Mogadishu, which exacerbates the piracy problem.

Syria has always been among the Middle East's most repressive regimes. Any hope that Bashar al-Assad would usher in reform were naïve to begin with, the stuff of diplomats' fantasies. The question of what might come after Assad is a difficult one for American diplomats who have spent far more time trying to engage Assad and his functionaries than in reaching out to the Syrian opposition.

China's new leadership is threatening to stay content with slower economic growth, and the country's manufacturing, housing, and export sectors are experiencing problems. Nonetheless, China has an opportunity to influence economic growth in 2012 through stimulus measures to its own economy.

The United Nations has recently ratcheted up its criticism of the United States' decision to withhold humanitarian aid to parts of Somalia controlled by the Islamist terror group al Shabaab.

The president should propose large personal accounts with the goal of eventually phasing in the full Ryan-Sununu plan and forget about any cuts in future promised Social Security benefits.