Roundup: Historians' Take

Andrew J. Nathan: What the Olympics reveal, and conceal, about China

[Andrew J. Nathan teaches at Columbia University. He is a co-editor of How East Asians View Democracy (Columbia University Press).] The two million foreign guests who are expected to visit Beijing in August will encounter a largely familiar and exceedingly cosmopolitan environment. They will find clean air, smooth traffic, easy Internet access, and standardized restaurant menus, all intended to provide them with seventeen days of physical, mental, and moral ease. Beijing has trained

David Greenberg: How the Republicans Claimed the "Patriotism" Mantle in Presidential Politics

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge.] The 1988 race for the White House was the last campaign of the Cold War. By the time Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and Vice President George H.W. Bush emerged in midspring as their parties' nominees, Mikhail Gorbachev had begun his historic reforms, and the superpowers had signed a landmark arms-reduction deal. Still, the Berlin Wall and the S

Martin Kramer: Is America washed up in the Middle East?

Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) is running a pile-on over this Fourth of July question: Has the American era in the Middle East ended? It's in response to the arguments of Richard Haass, Fareed Zakaria, and others, that America just doesn't have the pulling power it once had in the Middle East. There are twelve outstanding contributions in the MESH discussion at the moment. The sweeping consensus is that this sort of declinism is a cyclical fashion, and that America isn't finished in t

Victor Davis Hanson: The Can't-Do Society

[Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).] We have become a nation of second-guessing Hamlets. Shakespeare warned us about the dangers of "thinking too precisely." His poor Danish prince lost "the name of action," as he dithered and sighed that "conscience does make cowards of us all." With gas over $4 a gallon, the public is fin

Daniel Pipes: Which Has More Islamist Terrorism, Europe or America?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] "Since 9/11, there have been over 2,300 arrests connected to Islamist terrorism in Europe in contrast to about 60 in the United States." Thus writes Marc Sageman in his influential new book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror N

Robert S. McElvaine: "Bring 'Em On!" - The Fifth Anniversary of Bush's Declaration of Indecency

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America.] . On Friday, Americans will mark the 232nd anniversary of a statement that ranks

Ron Radosh: Obama in Independence

Senator Obama is seeking to don the mantle of President Truman, choosing a visit to Independence, Mo., to talk about the nature of patriotism. "How do we keep ourselves safe and secure while preserving our liberties?" he asked. The senator avoided much that is in the news — the Supreme Court grant of the privilege of habeas corpus to Guantanamo base internees who are not citizens; warrantless wiretapping, the Patriot Act. They are all on the list of his most progressive supporters to b

Benny Morris: Swapping live terrorists for dead soldiers

[Benny Morris is the author of many books about the Israeli-Arab conflict, including, most recently, "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War."] Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and the rest of the region's terrorists are no doubt rubbing their hands with joy. Israel has once again been humiliated by its Arab foes, and Nasrallah's depiction of the Jewish state as a "cobweb" polity, a Middle Eastern paper tiger, has been significantly reinforced.

Andrew J. Bacevich: What Bush hath wrought

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."] FEW AMERICANS, whatever their political persuasion, will mourn George W. Bush's departure from office. Democrats and Republicans alike are counting the days until the inauguration of a new president will wipe the slate clean. Yet in crucial respects, the Bush era will not end Jan. 20, 2009. Th

Daniel Pipes: [The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] [This version includes some materials cut from the published National Review version.]"Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist," said socialist

Martin E. Marty: More Pew Findings (Re: Religion)

In this business and with pleasure one cannot not comment on the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life surveys. They are the most ambitious and expansive polls and draw the most public attention. Chancy as all opinion polls are, these Pew products provide at least some broad-brush understandings of the subject. In the nature of things, press releases lift out and slightly exaggerate evidences of trends in the face of so much continuity in American religion. For example, last winter we were t

Victor Davis Hanson: Ten general-election strategies Obama can use to disguise his hard-left views

I think we are beginning to see the full measure of the Obama general campaign strategy, framed along ten or so key directives that can allow the election of the most leftward candidate in American political history. So far the candidate himself needs no coaching, inasmuch he has proved to be one of the most pragmatic, flexible, and ambitious figures in recent memory, with superb handlers who understand the challenge of getting such a hard leftist past the suspicious American elect

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: What the Beijing protests of 1989 have in common with activism in China today

[Jeffrey N Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent book is China's Brave New World-And Other Tales for Global Times (Indiana University Press, 2007), and his next will be Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge, forthcoming).] It is three weeks since the nineteenth anniversary of the massacre of 4 June 1989 in Beijing, forty-nine until the symbolically potent twentieth. The routine in advance of the event, by now well established,

Mike Davis: Living on the Ice Shelf

[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.] 1. Farewell to the Holocene Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, h

Andrew Arato: The Turkish Constitutional Crisis and the Road Beyond

[Andrew Arato is Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory at The New School for Social Research.] We should be deeply worried about Turkey’s unfolding constitutional crisis, that could end in many things: the continuation and even conclusion of the long democratic transition; military coup with entirely uncertain consequences; or, in between them an unproductive stalemate. Obviously only the first can enable Turkey to become a member of the European Union, and r

Jack Rakove: Scalia's selective history

[Jack Rakove teaches history and political science at Stanford University. His book, "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History.] Appeals to the evidence of history figured prominently in last week's Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller, striking down a sweeping ban on handguns and affirming that the 2nd Amendment protects a fundamentally individual right "to keep and bear ar

Tom Engelhardt: The Good News in Iraq (Don't Count on It)

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad B

Victor Davis Hanson: Security and Freedom ... an age-old tension

[Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] *The Margaret Thatcher lecture delivered to the Heritage Foundation, June 3rd, 2008. There cannot be freedom without security nor true security without freedom. The Greeks from the very beginning understood this symbiosis between the two, and framed the nature of

Priyamvada Gopal: Mugabe has recolonised his people

[Priyamvada Gopal teaches postcolonial studies at Cambridge University.] Africa's greatest liberationist thinker, Frantz Fanon, once warned that a national leader should not "fall back into the past and become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch leading up to independence". His portrait of a once-effective leader who gradually secedes from reality and betrays his people has prophetic resonances today. Though Mandela finally spoke out yesterday, pan-African l

Juan Cole: George Carlin, Iraq, and Hard Truths

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The late George Carlin did not like the phrase"post-traumatic stress disorder." He famously said, ' I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble d