Roundup: Media's Take

Charles Krauthammer: On the loss of American hegemony

[Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lecture, delivered last week in New York] Henry Kissinger once noted that the only way to achieve peace is through hegemony or balance of power. Well, hegemony is out. As Obama said in his General Assembly address, "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." (The "can" in that declaration is priceless.) And if hegemony is out, so is balance of power:

Paul Krugman: Peter Temin corrects my history

An email regarding my post on goldbugism: Germany went off gold before the UK in 1931, in July and August, that is, before late September when the UK devalued. The story however is a bit complex because Germany went off gold by eliminating the free flow of gold. They kept the value of the mark steady all through the Nazi period (see Adam Tooze’s good book), but they controlled the flow o

Paul Krugman: Misguided Monetary Mentalities

One lesson from the Great Depression is that you should never underestimate the destructive power of bad ideas. And some of the bad ideas that helped cause the Depression have, alas, proved all too durable: in modified form, they continue to influence economic debate today. What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred impo

WSJ Editorial: The Nobel Hope Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama yesterday was greeted with astonishment as much as any other emotion, even among many of his admirers. Our own reaction is bemusement at the Norwegian decision to offer what amounts to the world's first futures prize in diplomacy, with the Nobel Committee anticipating the heroic concessions that it believes Mr. Obama will make to secure treaties that will produce a new era of global serenity. Maybe he really is The One. M

Melvin A. Goodman: The Prospect of Change in US Relations With Russia, Iran and Afghanistan Alarms the Washington Post

[Melvin A. Goodman, Truthout's National Security and Intelligence columnist, is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His 42-year government career includes service with the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the US Army. His most recent book is "Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA."] The Washington Post is running scared these days with its editorial writ

Jerry Bowyer: Nobel's Stockholm Syndrome

[Jerry Bowyer is a radio and television talk show host.] It was because of a woman named Bertha Kinsky. She was a pacifist and a free-thinker (which means anti-religious). He fell in love with her, and they married, but she left him. He was wealthy, but not intellectually respected. He inherited his father's industrial business, which was, horror of horrors, an arms manufacturer. He was not a college graduate, but he learned chemistry anyway and developed dynamite, and became one of

Con Coughlin: In History Lies All the Secrets of Statecraft (review of the first official account of MI5)

[Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph and the author of "Khomeini's Ghost: Iran since 1979."] Espionage is not a subject that readily lends itself to public scrutiny. The guiding principle that has underpinned the response of successive British governments to requests for more information about the activities of Britain's intelligence services was best summed up by Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the 1960s. Responding

Michael Hirsh: Is Obamamania Like Gorbymania?

[Michael Hirsh is also the author of At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World.] They've given the prize to terrorists (Yasir Arafat), war makers (Le Duc Tho), and frauds before, as well as many true heroes of peace (Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, and on and on). But this may be the first time the Olympics committee—whoops, I meant the Nobel committee—has awarded the peace prize to an infant. I mean that metaphori

Soner Cagaptay: Islamists and Ottomans

[Mr. Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of "Islam Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk?" (Routledge, 2006).] The reaction in Turkey to the recent death of Ertugrul Osman, heir to the Ottoman throne and successor to the last Caliph, could not be more shocking. Islamists in kaftans and long beards gathered in Istanbul two weeks ago to bury the titular head of the world Muslim community. He was a scotc

Tony Blair: China's New Cultural Revolution

[Mr. Blair was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1997-2007.] Yesterday, just a week after the 60th anniversary celebrations of the People's Republic, China kicked off its first World Media Summit. It shows how far China has come—and how far it has to go. First, understand the problem. We all know China is a nation of 1.3 billion people, but that is just a statistic. Think of how we regard the United States—how different California is from Ohio, for example. Then quad

Jonathan Movroydis: The Plan That Would Have Saved Healthcare

[Jonathan recently graduated from the University of California, Irvine. His research and writing interests include political ideology, religion, and their respective impact on domestic and world politics.] The latest AARP Bulletin features the debate between RN and the late Senator Edward Kennedy on their respective proposals for healthcare reform in the early Seventies. According to the bulletin’s editor Jim Toedtman, RN introduced a bold national plan that — if passed

Robert Fisk: Genocide forgotten ... Armenians horrified by treaty with Turkey

[Robert Fisk is the Independent's award-winning Middle East correspondent.] In the autumn of 1915, an Austrian engineer called Litzmayer, who was helping build the Constantinople-Baghdad railway, saw what he thought was a large Turkish army heading for Mesopotamia. But as the crowd came closer, he realised it was a huge caravan of women, moving forward under the supervision of soldiers. The 40,000 or so women were all Armenians, separated from their men – most of who

Sergey Brin: A Library to Last Forever

[Sergey Brin is the co-founder and technology president of Google.] “THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and util

WSJ Editorial: The authors of the 2007 Iran NIE have some explaining to do

When it comes to politicized intelligence in the Bush years, the critics may finally have a point. Perhaps the work of America's intelligence agencies was manipulated to suit the convenience of a small group of willful officials, intent on getting their way against the better judgment of their colleagues. Except the intelligence was about Iran, not Iraq, and the manipulators weren't conniving neocons but rather the Administration's internal critics on the left. That's o

Mehdi Hasan: Barack W Bush ... Change we can't believe in

[Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) of the New Statesman.] On a cold February morning, less than three weeks after Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th president of the United States, a lawyer from the department of justice stood up in a San Francisco courtroom to defend the government from accusations of torture. Five detainees, including the British resident Binyam Mohamed, had filed a suit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc, a subsidiary of Boeing, for its alleged role in &quo

Marty Peretz: The Douglas MacArthur Analogy Fits Neither Petraeus Nor McChrystal.

[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] Our culture lives virtually without its history, which makes it a very weird culture, indeed. In France, on sabbatical a few years back, I listened to a dinner conversation about Marshal Foch. Who? Marshal Foch. How did we come around to him? Someone at the table said she'd been born in Tarbes, a small town known primarily for its proximity to Lourdes. Another guest noted that Foch had been born there. And then followed a lo

Carlo Strenger: Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu and the Holocaust: The ethics of memory

[Professor Carlo Strenger was born in Basel, Switzerland, trained in philosophy and psychology and received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently teaches at the psychology department of Tel Aviv University, a member of the Institute of Existential Psychoanalysis, Zurich and of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists.] When the German Foreign minister recently called Ahmadinejad a shame to his own country and people, h

Scott Whitlock: Newsweek Seriously Asks: 'Was Russia Better Off Red?'

[Scott Whitlock is a news analyst for the Media Research Center.] Proving yet again how out of touch the publication can be, the October 12 issue of Newsweek seriously asked the question: "Was Russia Better Off Red?" The "Back Story" page of the magazine featured a graphic comparing life under communism to now and bizarrely asserted: "Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has seen an increase in oligarchs and Louis Vuitton outlets. But by ma

Malou Innocent: Defining Victory to Win a War

[Malou Innocent is a foreign-policy analyst at the Cato Institute and the lead author of the Cato white paper "Escaping the 'Graveyard of Empires': A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan." Jason Reich is an Israeli journalist specializing in security and defense issues. He has just returned from a six-week embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan.] After nearly a decade at war in Afghanistan, the United States still has not defined the terms of the conflict. Seven months after Presid

Mark Thompson: Eight Years in Afghanistan: Can the U.S. Still Win?

[Mark Thompson is an investigative reporter.] President George W. Bush, eight years ago today, in his first press conference after launching the Afghan war, conceded he didn't know when the conflict would end. "People often ask me, 'How long will this last?' " he said 96 hours after the invasion began. "It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two, but we will prevail." Three weeks into the war, New York Times reporter R.W. Ap