Roundup: Historians' Take

Tyler Cowan: Bailout of Long-Term Capital ... A Bad Precedent?

THE financial crisis is a result of many bad decisions, but one of them hasn’t received enough attention: the 1998 bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund. If regulators had been less concerned with protecting the fund’s creditors, our current problems might not be quite so bad. Long-Term Capital was advised by finance quants, or quantitative analysts, who made a number of unsound, esoteric bets, including investments in interest rate derivatives. When Russia’s inabil

Tom Lewis: Obama should be the new Eisenhower

[Tom Lewis is the author of several books, including"Divided Highways," a history of the interstate highway system that was made into a PBS documentary. He teaches English at Skidmore College.] In his Dec. 6 radio address, President-elect Barack Obama vowed to" create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s." The story of President Eisenhower's decision in 1956 to create the i

Daniel Pipes: Insight into Obama's Middle East Policy?

[Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]Two events earlier this month summed up differing views of George W. Bush's Middle East record.In one, Bush himself offered a valedictory speech, declaring that"the Middle East in 2008 is a freer, more ho

Andreas Umland: Ukraine's Window of Opportunity

[Dr Andreas Umland is editor of the book series"Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society" (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.hmtl) as well as the Russian journal"Forum for the Contemporary History and Ideas of Easter Europe" (http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forumruss.html) and administers the website"Russian Nationalism" (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism .] As president Victor Yushchenko's rating plummets further there is a chance that Kiev's political elite may agree to form a pa

Ashley Wayne Cruseturner: How Bill Clinton Inadvertently Saved George W. Bush's Presidency

[Ashley Wayne Cruseturner is an Instructor in history at McLennan Community College, Waco, TX.] Reflecting back on the star-crossed eight years of the George Bush administration, the outgoing chief executive might feel some gratitude to his predecessor. In a perverse way, Bill Clinton and his desperate campaign to retain power in the face of scandal probably saved the Bush presidency. The framers designed impeachment as the ultimate (as in last resort) "check"

Mackubin Thomas Owens: Lincoln, Obama, and Bush

[Mackubin Thomas Owens is editor of Orbis and a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. His study of Lincoln's wartime presidency will be published early next year by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia.] ... [M]ost of the reason the press portrays Obama as "Lincolnian" has to do with the former's rhetoric. These days, there is a tendency to dismiss rhetoric as somehow unimportant. But Aristotle wrote a treat

Mark Naison: Will The Recession End in June 2009 ? Who Are Economists Kidding!!

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] " If the recession ends in June 2009, as many economists are forecasting, it would have lasted 18 months, making it the longest recession in the post-World War II period".--AP, December 23, 2008 One of the most frustrating things about reading economic news these days is the disconnect between published reports on the health of the banking system, the housing market

William Lambers: School Lunches for Peace in Iraq

[William Lambers is the author of "The Road to Peace."] U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower once said, "The world cups its ear to hear the rattling of rockets. It listens less closely to the sounds of peace and well-being which emanate from the slow but steady improvement in world health and nutrition." These words ring true even today. When we listen to news reports from Iraq, seldom do we hear about the fight against hunger and malnutrition in the country.

Victor Davis Hanson: Caroline Kennedy’s Moment—A Sad Reflection of Our Times

The probable appointment of Caroline Kennedy, the 51-year-old daughter of former President John Kennedy, to fill Secretary-of-State nominee Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat is both laughable and yet a parable for our bankrupt times. Consider aristocratic entitlement. Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha’s Vineyard. She has had no real experience with the or

John Brown: Thoughts on the So-Called 'War of Ideas'

[John Brown compiles the Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review. He is Adjunct Professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University.] "No matter how powerful our military is, we will not be powerful if we lose the war of ideas."- Senator Joe Biden, soon after 9/11; cited in Ira Teinowitz, "Congress will support the war of ideas" (Advertising Age, 6/17/2002)"We're in a war of ideas."- Donald Rumsfeld, cited in Bill Gertz, &qu

Thomas Fleming: Obama's from Chicago ... Why that Shouldn't Worry Us

[Thomas Fleming is a past president of the Society of American Historians. He is the author of a much praised memoir, Mysteries of My Father.] Good old Chicago. Thanks to garrulous Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, we have just learned that in the home town of President-Elect Barack Obama, who has promised us a regime dedicated to change, nothing seems to have changed. I write as lifelong student – and survivor-- of Democratic politics, Jersey City division. We

Ami Pedazhur: From Munich to Mumbai

[Ami Pedazhur, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism.”] OW that India and the world are over the initial shock of the terrorist attacks last month in Mumbai, efforts to understand what happened and prevent future calamities are being hampered in ways familiar to Israelis like myself, who have lived through far too many such events: pointless eff

Jelani Cobb: The Barack Problem

[ Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman.] It's too early to know how Barack Obama will govern which is why each of his cabinet appointments has been followed by rounds of tea-leaf reading by pundits, pols and regular folk . But I think that his selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inaugural, maybe more than anything so far, highlights one of the central problems that Obama will face as president. The Warren pick is exactly the

Nasir Khan: The Kashmir issue and the violence in the Indian subcontinent

[Nasir Khan, Dr Philos, is a historian and a peace activist. He is the author of Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx's Writings and Perceptions of Islam in the Christendoms: A Historical Survey. He has written numerous articles on international affairs and human rights. He has his own blog at http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com through which he can be contacted.] Almost the whole world has condemned the Mumbai at

Juan Cole: Top 10 Reasons Obama Should Resist Military Plans for American Bases in Iraq

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] I present below the top 10 reasons for which President-Elect Obama should stick to his guns and withdraw US troops from Iraq despite any resistance he may get from the US officer corps and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.In fact,

Tyler Cowan: Fiscal policy and the burden of proof

[Mr. Cowan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and at the Center for the Study of Public Choice.] I'd like to drive home the point that the case for fiscal policy has not yet been made by its advocates. I believe that most current advocates of a huge fiscal stimulus have two major arguments in mind.  The first is that "when resources are unemployed, in principle government spending can put them back to work, times are dire so we need this."  The s

Timothy Garton Ash: On an auspicious anniversary, here are four keys to China's peaceful rise

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] As we mark the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's launching the country's world-changing economic reforms, I want to address the $65 quadrillion question of China's peaceful rise. Some reactions I've had to columns I recently wrote from China indicate a large potential for misunderstanding, especially among Chinese readers, so let me make the argument plain. Start at a possible bad end. When

Paul Krugman: What to Do

... "We have magneto trouble," said John Maynard Keynes at the start of the Great Depression: most of the economic engine was in good shape, but a crucial component, the financial system, wasn't working. He also said this: "We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand." Both statements are as true now as they were then. How did this second great colossal muddle ar

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith: Will War Crimes Be Outed?

[Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below, and, co-edited with Brendan Smith and Jill Cutler, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond (Metropolitan/Holt). He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work. He is a co-founder of WarCrimesWatch.org.. Brendan Smith is a legal analyst whose books i

John Steele Gordon: Pyramid Schemes Are as American as Apple Pie

[Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).] By his own admission, Bernard Madoff has catapulted himself into the major leagues of Wall Street fraud. That is no small accomplishment, given some of the more famous frauds of the past. But a $50 billion Ponzi scheme is no small thing. To be sure, the number of still unanswered questions is huge. How could a Ponzi scheme last as long as thi