This issue: December 29, 2014 (Vol. 20, No. 16)

Obama’s Grand Reset

BY LEE SMITH

Last week’s announcement that the White House intends to restore normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba is part of Barack Obama’s larger project to overturn what he perceives to be wrongheaded, or at least outdated, foreign policies. From Obama’s perspective, the Cold War ended nearly a quarter of a century ago, so let’s catch up to the new reality.

For President Obama, amelioriating this country’s relations with Russia, Iran, and now Cuba amounts to a Grand Reset, a reevaluation of America’s position in a post-Cold War world. However, it’s not clear that either the president or his administration really understands what the Cold War was all about.

According to the White House press release last week: “Decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our objective of empowering Cubans to build an open and democratic country.” ...

The Uruguay Six

They weren’t kidnapped. They’re not refugees.

BY THOMAS JOSCELYN

On Sunday, December 7, a U.S. military medical aircraft landed in South America, to deliver six jihadists from the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay to Uruguay. For more than a dozen years, these six men had been held as dangerous enemies of the United States. Suddenly, Uruguay treated them as refugees, even victims, and the Obama administration didn’t object.

In a statement on December 5, two days before their arrival, the president of Uruguay, José Mujica, condemned the United States. “We have offered our hospitality for humans suffering a heinous kidnapping in Guantánamo,” Mujica wrote. “The unavoidable reason is humanitarian.” The Obama administration didn’t dispute his characterization and instead offered thanks on behalf of all of us. “The United States is grateful to the government of Uruguay for its willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantánamo Bay facility.”

In ...

The Next Shale Revolution?

The astonishing promise of enhanced oil recovery

BY SAMUEL THERNSTROM

Just five years ago, almost no one outside the natural gas industry had heard of fracking, even though the basic technologies were not new; today, the shale gas revolution has transformed America’s energy markets, with profound effects for economic growth, competitiveness, security, and environmental quality. In a nation still deeply concerned about its energy future, this extraordinary success story should prompt the question: Can we do it again?

The answer is yes​—​if we correctly understand both the model for innovation that shale gas exemplifies and an opportunity that now exists to emulate the shale model. That opportunity involves exploiting a technique called “enhanced oil recovery” (EOR).

Like fracking on the eve of its success, this concept is virtually unknown to most Americans, yet it rests not on pie-in-the-sky technological dreams but on the application and refinement of proven ...

Some Faces of War

Brave men, flawed strategies in Afghanistan

BY MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS

With his latest book, Bing West has reconfirmed his standing as one of the most intrepid and insightful observers of America’s wars over the past decade-and-a-half. Some have called him a latter-day Ernie Pyle. Embedded for the sixth time with soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, West demonstrates, as he has done before, Pyle’s empathy for the “grunts” who have borne the major burden of these conflicts. The empathy comes naturally, since West himself was a Marine infantryman in Vietnam. 

But the author brings something to his accounts that Pyle did not: an understanding of high-level policymaking arising from his service as an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. These two perspectives—a grunt’s eye view of close combat and the policymaker’s broader outlook—have made West’s previous books particularly illuminating. ...

A Philadelphia Story

Michael Warren's Christmas story

BY MICHAEL WARREN

I'll admit, I have few childhood memories of the nativity scene my grandparents kept on their mantel every Christmas. I recall more clearly the haunting portrait of Santa Claus hanging in the foyer and the towering Christmas tree, with its pink ribbons and bows. And, of course, the bounty of presents.

The nativity scene, delicate and out of reach, didn’t hold this little boy’s attention. Only now that it’s in my own house have I taken an interest. The stable’s wooden frame is cherry, and the slanted roof is made of small pads of straw. The whole gang is there in white ceramic: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherd, his sheep, the three wise men, their two camels, a cow, and an angel. Standard Bethlehem stuff—except that this crèche was handmade especially for my grandmother. In our order-it-on-Amazon, get-it-the-next-day, made-in-China world, my wife and I and our baby have something unique among our Christmas decorations. Our tree may be ...

There’s a Reason He’s Hard to Forgive

Does the New York Times have a Rolling Stone problem? The author of a celebrated op-ed, who confessed to having “tortured” while serving at Abu Ghraib, had previously said he played no role in prisoner abuse at the infamous Iraqi prison.

For most of the week after the New York Times published Eric Fair’s confession on December 10, 2014, to coincide with the release of the Feinstein report on interrogation, the op-ed was among the newspaper’s “most emailed” and “most viewed” articles. The first-person story was widely distributed on Twitter with praise for the author often accompanying a link to the story. Other prominent publications ran news stories about the Times op-ed.

The dramatic Times headline: “I Can’t Be Forgiven ...