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But it does not change the fact that one reason liberals (especially those of a European persuasion) have fallen out of love with Israel is that it — along with the United States — was founded on and persists in maintaining a democratic and nationalist vision. This is why the liberal critics bracket Israel and [...]
I don’t know how adamant the Chinese leadership is about the issue, but I suspect that it would rank rather high as a national security issue. If the price of winning over China on Korea is a pledge to withdraw U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula after Korea was made whole, would neoconservatives embrace the [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Moscow is not only seeking assurances from these countries that they will not seek to join the West. It is also seeking assurances from Western nations that they recognize this alleged sphere of special interest – and potentially give their tacit agreement to such new notions of limited sovereignty. That is one of the main [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president’s political judgment and instincts. There was the tearing and unnecessary war over [...]
Filed under: politics
Since June 12, U.S. realists and idealists have had an Iranian field day. The realists have dismissed the Green Movement, proclaimed a stolen election fair, and urged President Obama to toss aside human rights concerns and repair relations with Tehran in the American interest. The idealists have rained renewed fury on Ahmadinejad, called for his [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Consider China, by many measures the most significant emerging country in the world. It wants to maintain preferred access to Iran’s energy resources, but if conflict results from Iran’s nuclear aspirations, China will be paying much higher a price for those resources. The prospect of a threat to the stability of the greater Middle East [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Speaking of ideology and petty exercises in enforcement, Lee Siegel calls out Paul Berman for being one of the worst offenders: In the sense that it recalls the heated solipsism of Partisan Review’s early politicized days, Mr. Berman’s “smackdown” reflects the worst tendencies of intellectual life, not the best. He has a simple point to [...]
Filed under: Islam, foreign policy, politics
Republicans in Idaho’s First District had their primary election yesterday to determine the nominee who will face incumbent Democrat Rep. Walt Minnick. As I have mentioned before and many know already, Minnick has the distinction of being the only House Democratic candidate endorsed by a major Tea Party organization. This report by Kyle Trygstad helps [...]
Filed under: politics
Prof. Soli Özel has an interesting essay in World Affairs on the Turkish-Brazilian nuclear deal (via Scoblete). I was struck in particular by this observation: Looking at the way the press in the US covered this story, I was deeply surprised to see pundits and other members of the American news media once again commenting [...]
Filed under: economics, foreign policy, politics
No one will claim that Thomas Friedman knows what he’s talking about, but even for one of his columns this was remarkably bad: I confess that when I first saw the May 17 picture of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joining his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics