Foreign Policy

China was cracking down in Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall still had a few months left to stand when 36-year-old Francis Fukuyama published a wonky essay in the summer of 1989 proclaiming the triumph of democracy and flee markets. "I thought it...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If you wanted to know how Bill Clinton thought when he was president, you ignored the scripted set-piece speeches and instead went to listen to him talk off the cuff at an evening fundraiser. At night, he would ruminate extemporaneously...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] (1) Ben Bernanke for staving off a new Great Depression. CHAIRMAN, FEDERAL RESERVE I WASHINGTON The Zen-like chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve might not have topped the list solely for turning his superb academic...

The financial markets may have survived 2009; the same can't be said for the ideology of the market. No surprise, then, that the big ideas and big thinkers of the year are an entirely different bunch than FOREIGN POLICY might have collected before...

Pushed and prodded by a wonky group of Ph.D.'s, the U.S. military has in the last year decisively embraced a Big Idea: counterinsurgency. Not everyone in uniform is a fan, but David Petraeus and the other generals in charge of America's wars are solidly...

The World's next great thinkers may well be just as brilliant as the ones on this list, but they're likely to come to our notice in very different ways. Take William Kamkwamba, a 22-year-old from Malawi who already exemplifies a new generation of global...

Sometimes it's the page A14 stories--the ones that never see the light of cable news or take oil a second life in the blogosphere--that tell you the most about what happened during any given year. From a naval alliance that could shift the military...