“I’m not running, I’m not planning on running,” Mitt Romney told Fox News regarding the 2016 presidential election. “My time has come and gone. I had that opportunity. I ran and didn’t win.” Well, Mitt is a pretty smart guy, and I think his take here is 100% accurate, but I just wish that he…
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Meet the new liberators, same as the old liberators
In the past, I’ve raved, or at least praised, Pankaj Mishra and his book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. In his book, Mishra quotes a testy Egyptian on the original liberators of the benighted East, the army of Napoleon Bonaparte: “It is their custom not to bury their dead but…
How much does foreign policy rhetoric matter? Not enough, and too much
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison riffs on a column by Dan Drezner, who claims that we shouldn’t worry about foreign policy statements like those recently dished out by Hillary Clinton that seem more interested in striking poses than solving problems. Says Drezner, “The most important fact about American foreign policy and public opinion…
Time is Running Out! Again!
Time is running out, Secretary of State John Kerry writes, in the June 30 Washington Post: July 20, the deadline to negotiate a comprehensive agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, is fast approaching. All along, these negotiations have been about a choice for Iran’s leaders. They can agree to the steps necessary to assure the world…
Liberals and the war in Iraq: still not getting it
Frank Rich has an article in New York that pivots off the publication of The Last Magazine, the posthumous novel of deceased journalist Michael Hastings that, as Rich tells it, chastises those liberals who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003: It’s the default position of liberals to lay the blame for this…
Is Obama a realist? Well, that depends on what your definition of “reality” is
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison struggles manfully, as is his wont, over the minutiae of American foreign policy, in particular whether President Obama is a “realist.” Quite reasonably, he concludes that he isn’t. Realists don’t start pointless wars, as President Obama did by launching an air assault on a harmless country (Libya) because,…
Fred Kaplan: Getting Gates right
I’ve taken out some, though only some, of my many frustrations over our bloody and pointless war in Afghanistan by frequently ridiculing the columns of Fred Kaplan on the war. Writing for Slate, Kaplan, who has a lot of experience with foreign affairs, slowly metamorphosed from Afghan cheer leader to cautious skeptic to outright disbeliever…
Rot at the Top: Why U.S. foreign policy seems unlikely to improve any time soon
Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.S. had a Middle Eastern expert who was, you know, actually from the Middle East? Someone who understood Islamic culture from the inside out, someone with wide experience and education in western academia but also well-traveled throughout the Islamic Middle East and Asia, someone with long years of hard…
Don’t Know Much About Communist Spies
Several months ago, in a posting at the American Conservative, bearing the snappy title “Our American Pravda,” Ron Unz bemoaned the many failings of the American media, claiming that, among other things, the media had conspired to conceal the fact that communist penetration of the federal government was rife during the Roosevelt Administration, “Over the…
Calling Justice Scalia
I don’t know if Nino can protect me, but I’m putting through a call on, yes, my Verizon cell. Obama only wants to protect me, of course, regardless of what that awful Glenn Greenwald has to say. Or that awful New York Times. One can hope that reaction to this latest outrage will be the first step…