Roundup: Media's Take

Jonathan Martin: Obama ... Bush-era diplomacy is over

[Jonathan Martin is a Politico reporter.] Barack Obama devoted much of his inaugural speech and first few days in office to repudiating his predecessor - and it was no different Wednesday when he set foot on the world stage for the first time. On a day of dizzying diplomacy with three world powers, Obama made one thing clear: The Bush era of foreign policy is over. In strokes of symbolism and on issues of substance, the president’s international debut was

Bartle Bull: No, he can't - Obama and the Carter malaise

[Bartle Bull is foreign editor of Prospect.] Barack Obama was always going to disappoint. When you promise almost everything to almost everybody—I’ll stop the fighting in Iraq but I’ll also keep going after al Qaeda there; I’ll make the economy grow more but I’ll spread the wealth around, and so on—you will inevitably let many people down. Human beings, even those who read fluently from teleprompters, simply cannot walk on water. But few expected the wheels to come off

Jon Talton: What Happens After the Crash? America Faces a Future of Discontinuity.

[Jon Talton is the economics columnist for the Seattle Times and proprietor of the blog Rogue Columnist.His latest book is the mystery novel

Jonathan Freedland: Where is the new JFK we expected? He's stuck in a rut with Gordon Brown

[Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997.] Someone tore up the script. Here's how it was meant to go. Barack Obama was supposed to sweep into Europe on his first major trip abroad as the new JFK, greeted by adoring fans moistly waving little American flags. His progress would be part celebrity world tour, part celebration of the end of the Bush era. A needy Gordon Brown would bask in the Obama glow, hoping its rays would improve his own deathly pallor. Me

Alan Wolfe: Obama vs. Marx (Hint ... One of them's not a socialist)

[Alan Wolfe is a contributing editor at The New Republic.] The word "liberal" was first used in its modern political sense in 1812, when Spaniards wrote a new constitution liberating themselves from monarchical rule. As it happens, the word "socialism" originated in roughly the same period; it came into existence to describe the utopian ideas of the British reformer Robert Owen. Such timing suggests two possibilities: Either the fates of liberalism and socialism

Christopher Hitchens : What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis

THE LATE HUW WHELDON of the BBC once described to me a series, made in the early days of radio, about celebrated exiles who had lived in London. At one stage, this had involved tracking down an ancient retiree who had toiled in the British Museum’s reading room during the Victorian epoch. Asked if he could remember a certain Karl Marx, the wheezing old pensioner at first came up empty. But when primed with different prompts about the once-diligent attendee (monopolizing the same seat number, alw

Walter Shapiro: Forget the GOP; Obama's enemy is the angry public.

Seventy-three years after a white-suited Huey Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge, the iron-fisted Louisiana governor is all the rage in Barack Obama's Washington. At a time when a crash course in the New Deal has supplanted Watergate studies as the capital's requisite history lesson, attention is suddenly being paid to the Kingfish, as well as radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, the two leading 1930s tribunes of little-man economic anger. When you sit down with Obama insiders, Long's name po

Malte Lehming: Obama ... Just Another Bush - A German Perspective

[Mr. Lehming is op-ed page editor of Der Tagesspiegel. Belinda Cooper translated this essay from the German.] Is the financial crisis for Angela Merkel what the Iraq war was for Gerhard Schröder -- namely, a reason to seriously strain Germany's relationship with the U.S.? One need not answer with an unconditional "yes" to be very concerned. Naturally, at the G-20 meeting in London this week, Europeans will celebrate and praise the new American president. There

William Rees-Mogg: Reform the monarchy? Let's wait for a century

[William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times.] The Act of Settlement 1701 is a central constitutional statute; it determines the succession to the Crown of England. As the historian Andrew Roberts has pointed out, it has been a success. In the three centuries since it was enacted, the UK has led the global industrial and scientific revolution, emerged victorious from five world wars, built and liquidated an empire comparable to

Ellis Weintraub: Israel Can Learn from 'The Troubles'

[Ellis Weintraub is currently pursuing a Masters in Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.] Upon the arrival of Sinn Fein President and Northern Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams into the Middle East, Israeli officials will give him the cold shoulder - "We expect all dignitaries who come here to make it clear that they will not dignify Hamas with a meeting," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. On Adams's previous 2006

William Pesek: Reagan's Revolution Is Getting Chinese Makeover

[William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist.] Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be happy. The free-market revolution that the U.S. president championed in the 1980s isn’t just over. It’s about to get a Chinese makeover as officials in Beijing assert themselves as rarely before. The way they are scolding the world ahead of this week’s Group-of-20 meeting leaves little doubt about that. Now let’s see, what can China teach us about running an economy? First, don’t len

Robert Samuelson: Rage Could End Up Hurting Us

The story of American capitalism is, among other things, a love-hate relationship. We go through cycles of congratulation, revulsion and revision. Just when the latest episode of revulsion and revision began is unclear. Was it when Lehman Brothers failed? Or when General Motors pleaded for federal subsidies? Or now, when AIG's bonuses stir outrage? No matter. Capitalism is under siege, its future unclear. Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th century's eminent economists, believed that

Reuel Marc Gerecht: The Return of Weakness ... President Obama means well. Iran doesn't

[Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] In diplomacy and espionage, there is no worse mistake than "mirror-imaging," that is, ascribing to foreigners your own actions and views. For Westerners this is especially debilitating, given our modern proclivity to assume that others pursue their interests in secular, material, and guilt-ridden ways. Confession is an important part of the Western tradition; self-criticism is less acut

Humberto Fontova: Civil Rights Activist Dying on Hunger Strike Near Guantanamo

[Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara. Visit hfontova.com.] A civil rights activist inspired by Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King has been on a hunger strike since Feb.17th near Guantanamo Cuba, protesting the incarceration and "abuse" of hundreds of what he labels "prisoners of conscience." "The Armed Forces call these men "enemy agents" and "terrorists," h

Jonathan Alter: Obama is following Roosevelt's approach of making early down payments on big ideas

Mid-tweet in last week's press conference, reporters were already complaining that President Obama wasn't making news. And by the old standards, they were right. Obama didn't drop any bombshells, or rein in his agenda, as so many have been urging, or tee up a YouTube-ready sound bite. The same gasbags who had blasted him for demeaning the presidency by cracking jokes on "The Tonight Show" and drinking a beer at a basketball game (hadn't some favored George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000

Jonathan Rauch: Is Obama Repeating Bush's Mistakes?

[Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine in Washington and a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.] What year is this? Ross Douthat of The Atlantic asked that question in a smart Wall Street Journal article three years ago. What he meant was that how you viewed foreign policy depended on which of several watershed years you thought 2006 resembled: the 1938 of appeasement, the 1948 of containment, the 1972 of Vietnam, and so on.

Bruce Ackerman: We should not look upon presidential lawlessness as if it were an odd aberration of the Bush years.

[Bruce Ackerman is a professor of law at Yale and the author of We the People.] President Barack Obama started strong by announcing the end of torture and the closing of Guantánamo, but he has recently taken a more equivocal attitude toward the Bush constitutional legacy. While rejecting his predecessor's extreme claims, he continues to assert the presidential power to hold terrorists without trial and to keep state secrets from the courts. And he has already issued his first signin

Simon Jenkins: At last we get it - this war is Vietnam for slow learners

[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC.] One word shines through the spin surrounding this week's Barack Obama policy review on Afghanistan. The word is exit. Before he became president, Obama was much taken by the idea that Afghanistan was a good and winnable war, a usefully macho contrast to his retreatism on Iraq. But in a military briefing at the time, he asked what was the exit strategy fro

Harvey Wasserman: People Died at Three Mile Island

[Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.] People died--and are still dying--at Three Mile Island. As the thirtieth anniversary of America's most infamous industrial acciden

Dan Rather: What Obama Doesn't Know About Afghanistan

There’s been a lot of news concerning Afghanistan since President Obama took office, from the president’s decision to increase the U.S. force there by 17,000, to reports he is considering an outreach to moderate elements of the Taliban and being advised to carry out missile strikes in and around the Pakistan city of Quetta. Now there is word that President Obama will, within days, announce a new set of diplomatic and military tactics for the war he promised to put front and center. As