Roundup: Media's Take

Elliott Abrams: Gingrich is No Reagan

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan Administration and deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration.

Elliott Abrams: Of Gingrich and Reagan

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan Administration and deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration. In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House. The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong. The fights over Reagan’s efforts to stop Soviet expansionism in the Third World were exceptionally bitter. The battlegrounds ranged from Angola and Grenada to Afghanistan and Central America.

Heather Horn: France's Lesson for the U.S.: Don't Let Election Politics Ruin Foreign Policy

Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Minxin Pei: Remembering Deng in Our Era of Crony Compitalism

The writer is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.In most societies, dating the start of reform is easy, but pinning down its demise is not. Such appears to be the case with post-Mao China. Few would dispute that reform began in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping returned to power. Fewer still would disagree that reform was re-energised 20 years ago when Deng, alarmed by the prospect of economic stagnation and regime collapse, made his historic tour of southern China and forced the Chinese Communist party to liberalise the economy and embrace capitalism unabashedly.As China marks the 20th anniversary of Deng’s history-changing tour, the most ironic fact – and perhaps China’s worst-kept secret – is that pro-market economic reform in China has been dead for some time.

Elliott Abrams: Arab Spring Proves Neocons Were Right

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy in U.S. President George W. Bush's administration.There is a sour mood nowadays about the so-called Arab Spring. Armed gangs roam in Libya, Salafists win votes in Egypt, and minorities like the Egyptian Copts live in fear -- as does the Shiite majority in Bahrain. The whole "experiment" seems to some critics to be a foolish, if idealistic project that promises to do nothing but wreak havoc in the Middle East. These same critics cast blame at the Americans who applauded the Arab revolts of the past year: naive, ideological, ignorant, dangerous folk.As one of those folk, allow me to strike back.

David Maraniss: Time to Bring Back Bill Clinton

David Maraniss, an associate editor of The Post, is the author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton and the forthcoming Barack Obama: The Story.If Republicans, in their fervor to rid the White House of Barack Obama, are yet again experiencing The Temptation of Newt, then Democrats have only one illogically rational response in this modern American political hall of mirrors.They should bring back Bill Clinton.

Steve Kornacki: Last Time the GOP Lost Control of the Nomination, They Got Goldwater

Everything about Newt Gingrich screams “general election disaster.” He is burdened with far too much personal and ethical baggage, is far too prone to needlessly inflammatory and polarizing antics, and turns off far too many voters with his arrogance and unconcealed contempt for his opponents.......Candidates widely seen as unelectable by their party’s elites have emerged during past primary seasons as threats to win the nomination, and the elites have generally managed to stop them. The question is whether they’re still capable of doing it in 2012 — or if the tricks they’ve mastered in the past few decades simply don’t work anymore.After all, there was a period when both parties’ elites lost control over their presidential nominating processes.

Fareed Zakaria: Post-Communist Lessons for the New Middle East

Fareed Zakaria hosts CNN’s flagship foreign affairs show.As Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya transition from dictatorship to democracy, you'd think they'd look to America as a model for their new governments. But they don't. America is still too controversial in the Arab world.Instead, many of the countries transformed by the Arab Spring are looking in a surprising place for inspiration.Where is this new city on a hill?Take a look at the man landing at the airport in Tunis, Tunisia: It's Lech Walesa. He's the man whose actions 30 years ago in the Gdansk shipyard in Poland helped cause Communism to crumble across Eastern Europe. Walesa was in Tunisia to pass on the lessons he had learned.In fact, Poland is a good model for these countries...

Steven Hill: A Marshall Plan Won't Fix Europe This Time

Steven Hill is a political writer and columnist.Few subjects have so bitterly divided our insecure times than the double-edged sword of stimulus versus austerity. Consensus over which course will end the current economic malaise has eluded the duelling experts. Without clearer signals of success, many nations have tried a confused mix of both – let's call it "aust-imulus".While I tend to lean Keynesian, the case for fiscal stimulus is hardly the slam dunk that its most strident proponents claim. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman bases much of his call for massive amounts of stimulus on the American experience during the Great Depression. In Krugman's view, the policy intervention that finally lifted the sinking boats was an unprecedented amount of spending by the US government for its wartime effort.But this viewpoint ignores a fairly obvious counterpoint. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the world's conqueror with virtually every economic competitor destroyed. America was the big boy on the block, and our industries enjoyed numerous competitive advantages over international rivals. The dollar suddenly was the dominant global currency, and that granted Americans cheap money and influence...

James Grant: The Unsung Warren Harding

James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, is writing a history of modern American business cycles. His most recent book is Mr. Speaker! The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, the Man Who Broke the Filibuster.Our Great Recession ended 2½ years ago, according to the official cyclical timekeepers, but you wouldn’t know it by a glance at the news. Zero percent interest rates and $1 trillion in "stimulus" notwithstanding, the U.S. economy can hardly seem to heave itself out of bed in the morning. Now compare this with the first full year of recovery from the ugly depression of 1920-21. In 1922, under the unsung stewardship of the president best remembered for his underlings’ scandals and his own early death in office, the unemployment rate fell from 15.6 percent to 9 percent (on its way to 3.2 percent in 1923), while constant-dollar output leapt by 16 percent. After which the 1920s proverbially roared.

Paul Gillespie: Obama Channels Nixon in Asia Pivot

Paul Gillespie is a foreign editor and columnist for the newspaper The Irish Times.“If you are a strategic thinker in China, you do not have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to think that the US is trying to bandwagon Asia against China.” So says Simon Tay, chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, in a comment on the new United States “strategic pivot” towards the Asia-Pacific region. It highlights what promises to be one of the key geopolitical trends in coming decades.Last year Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made successive pronouncements on this shift of focus. It was woven into their positions on military spending, trade, regional security and relations with China. Obama repeatedly affirmed the US role as a Pacific power, while Clinton asserted US willingness to mediate conflicts between China and other states about mineral rights and access to the South China Sea and similar sensitive sea zones in China’s neighbourhood.

Brahma Chellaney: Escaping Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires

Brahma Chellaney is an Asian geostrategist and the author of six books.Since coming to office, President Barack Obama has pursued an Afghan war strategy summed up in just four words: "surge, bribe and run." The U.S.-led military mission has now entered the "run" part, or what euphemistically is being called the "transition to 2014" — the year Obama arbitrarily chose as the deadline to wind down all NATO combat operations.The central aim is to cut a deal with the Taliban — even if Afghanistan and the region pay a heavy price — so that the United States and its NATO partners exit the "Graveyard of Empires" without losing face. This effort to withdraw as part of a political settlement without admitting defeat is being dressed up as a "reconciliation" process, with Qatar, Germany and Britain getting lead roles to help facilitate a U.S.-Taliban deal.

Ben Hellwarth: The Other Final Frontier on the Ocean Floor

Ben Hellwarth is the author of “Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor.”THE United States has been out of the space shuttle business for a few months now, but the country is still seriously considering spending billions of dollars to send astronauts back to the moon, to Mars or to a nearby asteroid.It’s heartening that the pioneering spirit behind crewed missions into outer space has not been dampened by the nation’s tide of red ink. But with price tags like $50 billion to return astronauts to the moon in the next decade, there’s a strong bang-for-the-buck argument to be made for far less expensive missions headed in the other direction: down into the ocean depths, which remain largely unexplored and unseen by human eyes.

Adam Davidson: A Mess on the Ladder of Success

Adam Davidson is the co-founder of NPR's Planet Money, a podcast, blog, and radio series heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.”Throughout American history there has almost always been at least one central economic narrative that gave the ambitious or unsatisfied reason to pack up and seek their fortune elsewhere. For the first 300 or so years of European settlement, the story was about moving outward: getting immigrants to the continent and then to the frontier to clear the prairies, drain the swamps and build new cities.

John Lloyd: Of Rocks, Russian Reminiscences and Spy Rituals

John Lloyd is a contributing editor at the FT.In 2006 the Russian authorities announced they had discovered that Britain’s foreign intelligence service – MI6, now renamed the Secret Intelligence Service – was using a rock to help it uncover the secrets of the Russian state.A rock?When the allegations were put to him at a London press conference at the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair made light of it, repeating the formula that the "government does not comment on intelligence matters" – and adding, "except when we want to, obviously".Old hands murmured that the Russians had watched too many James Bond films, in which "Q", the irascible head of technical supplies, introduces 007 to a panoply of useful gadgets packed into lighters, pens, car exhausts and the heel of Bond’s handmade brogues.But it was true...

John Browne: Germany's War Against Keynes

John Browne is senior economist at the brokerage firm Euro Pacific Capital, based in Westport, Conn., and a former member of the British Parliament. As European leaders hurtle toward another make-or-break summit on the debt crisis Jan. 30, Germany’s economic leadership will again be put to the test. At the last summit in December, Berlin was unable to persuade London to back a plan to more tightly bind the economic policies of all 27 members of the European Union.

Stephanie Coontz: Couples are Marrying Later, But They're Still Marrying

Stephanie Coontz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now. Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly....

Daniel M. Kliman: The Last Kim of Pyongyang?

Daniel M. Kliman is a transatlantic fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.For more than two decades, Myanmar was a pariah state ruled by military generals that suppressed political dissent, straitjacketed the media, persecuted ethnic minorities, and -- despite resource riches -- failed to improve its people's living standards. The United States continuously sanctioned Myanmar and subjected it to regular rhetorical whippings in Congress. It was, for want of a better parallel, the North Korea of Southeast Asia. But the transformation of the past few months has been nothing short of remarkable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's landmark visit late last year underscored the changes within Myanmar, and on Jan. 13, the United States restored full diplomatic ties with the country after it made good on its pledge to release a significant number of political prisoners and signed a cease-fire with ethnic Karen rebels. America's breakthrough with Myanmar remains fragile; the government will have to meet other benchmarks such as abiding by the results of April's parliamentary by-election. Still, this thaw raises the question: Could it ever happen in North Korea?...

Flavia Dzodan: Falklands Colonialism is Coming from David Cameron, Not Argentina

Flavia Dzodan is a writer, media analyst and marketing consultant based in Amsterdam. I laughed heartily as I read the news last night. British prime minister David Cameron accused my birth country, Argentina, of "colonialism" over the Falkland Islands. I originally read about his jibe on an Argentinian news site, and immediately searched for a report in English – I thought this had to be a hilarious "lost in translation" mistake. It wasn't. Indeed, Cameron warned the British parliament: "What the Argentinians have been saying recently, I would argue, is far more like colonialism because these people want to remain British and the Argentinians want them to do something else."

Praveen Swami: America Embracing the Taliban, Again

Praveen Swami is Associate Editor Frontline magazine, and also writes for its sister publication, The Hindu.In the spring of 1839, the extraordinary Indian adventurer and spy, Mohan Lal Kashmiri, engineered one of the greatest intelligence coups of the 19th century: using nothing more lethal than cash and intrigue, he brought about the fall of Kandahar and secured the Afghan throne for Imperial Britain's chosen client, Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk.Less than three years later, in the bitter winter of 1842, Kashmiri found himself working undercover in insurgent-held Kabul, seeking to ransom the remnants of his masters' once-magnificent army — children, women and men at threat of being sold as slaves in Central Asia.For decades after, imperial historians agonised over the Afghan debacle of 1842, using tropes that still colour discourse on the country: religious fanaticism; treachery of native rulers; savagery of the tribal culture; primitiveness of its civilisation.