Many nations have aging populations, but none can quite match Japan. Its experience holds lessons for other countries as well as insights into the distinctiveness of Japanese society.

While everyone says they want more innovation, words are easy. The tough, practical questions remain: How do we get more innovation and how do we harness it?

Stability in the Indo-Pacific rests on the degree to which the United States continues to forward and base hundreds of thousands of its military forces, along with ships, submarines, and fighter planes. A precipitous U.S. withdrawal would certainly lead to unforeseen effects and a breakdown in relations would almost certainly cause economic disruption and possibly lead to wider global conflict.

Policymakers at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue want to get the American economy growing again. Growth can lower unemployment, and it can yield the revenues needed to fill federal coffers. The key to robust economic growth is innovation. So how do we get it?

It is too early to tell whether the revolutions sweeping across the Arab world will prove the long awaited "third wave of democratization." It is clear, however, that no regional regime is immune to their impact, not even the self-proclaimed vanguard of permanent world revolutions, the Islamist regime in Tehran.

The Iraq Effect is a thought-provoking but flawed study commissioned by the U.S. Air Force on the regional implications of the 2003 Iraq war. Trends discussed may be real, but their presence before Operation Iraqi Freedom suggests that they should not be attributed only to the war.

Should the U.S. government talk to terrorist groups? Freelance foreign affairs analyst Perry offers a resounding "yes." His argument, however, is based on a specious reading of recent events in Iraq, which he then extrapolates to other violent players in the Middle East.

If ever we need evidence of ideology run rampant, the House vote to eliminate the annual American Community Survey and the Economic Census to provide basic information on the state of businesses and industries in the country and data used for generating quarterly gross domestic product estimates is exhibit A.