Roundup: Media's Take

James Traub: Is It Time for America to Dump The Arab Autocrats?

[James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.] The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks prompted a radical rethinking inside the administration of President George W. Bush about the purposes of American foreign policy -- above all in the Middle East. "Realism died on 9/11," as an administration official said to me several years later.

Horace Campbell: 50 Years After Lumumba -- the Burden of History

[Horace Campbell is a teacher and writer. Professor Campbell's website is www.horacecampbell.net. His latest book is 'Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press.] In the experiences of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and of Africa, the iterations of assassinations were meant to kill the genuine self-determination of the African peoples. Of these crimes, the murder and cov

Jack White: President Obama and the New America

[Jack White, a former national editor of Time magazine, is a frequent contributor to The Root.] Today is the midpoint of Barack Obama's first term as president of the United States of America. When scholars look back at this moment a century from now, what will they make of it? They, of course, will have the advantage of knowing facts about which we can only speculate, starting with whether Obama was re-elected to a second term. And with the passage of time, they will b

Howard Fineman: Sputnik II And The State Of The Union

[Howard Fineman is the Senior Political Editor of the Huffington Post.] WASHINGTON -- In 2008, Barack Obama's supporters saw him as Franklin Roosevelt reincarnate: the smiling, amendable guy who wanted to use Big Government to pull the nation out of its misery, New Deal-style. As President Obama prepares for his State of the Union address to Congress next Tuesday, his aides are looking toward a different Democratic president as a political template: John F. Kennedy.

WSJ Editorial: Red Scare Reprise

Of all the differences between dictatorship and democracy, probably none is so overlooked as the ability of the former to project strength, and the penchant of the latter to obsess about its own weakness. In 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik and the U.S. went into a paroxysm of nerves about our supposed backwardness in matters ballistic. Throughout the 1980s Americans lived with "Japan as Number One" (the title of a book by Harvard professor Ezra Vogel, though the literatu

Bruce Laingen: Time to Build Trust with Iran

[Bruce Laingen, a Bethesda resident, was chief of mission at the American Embassy in Tehran and a hostage during the 1979-81 hostage crisis.] It is time, long overdue, to get serious about talking with Iran. Thirty years ago today, this country saw the end of its 444-day vigil with 53 Americans — I was one of them — who had been taken hostage Nov. 4, l979 by militant students in Iran. Thirty years since that fateful day that saw, that morning, the end of the last formal

David Rothkopf: As We Say in Chinese, "Why is This State Dinner Unlike Any Other?"

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] The agenda for the state visit was dominated by trade and economic issues. The world was recovering from a recent global economic crash. There was a certain tension because the visitor had strong autocratic tendencies and according to some, imperial ambitions. He had also regularly made statements that could be interpreted as hostile to U.S. and Western

Larry McMurtry: The Charm and Violence of Tucson

[Larry McMurtry, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is the author of 30 novels, including "Lonesome Dove," "Terms of Endearment" and "The Last Picture Show." He lives in Tucson.] The shooting of 19 innocents in Arizona, one of them a girl only 9 years old, brought forth a flood of commentary, raising questions not easily answered about the possible effect that overheated political invective might have on the least stable elements of the body po

Artemy Kalinovsky: Obama's Gorbachev Predicament

[Artemy Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan, to be published in May 2011.] In recent months, as U.S. President Barack Obama struggled to enact his legislative agenda and his party lost its majority in the House of Representatives, commentators have seized on any number of historical metaphors. Although comparisons of Obama to former U.S. Presidents Truman

Nadia Marzouki: Tunisia’s Wall Has Fallen

[Nadia Marzouki is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.] For the first time in decades, Tunisia is free of one-man rule. The extraordinary events of December 2010 and January 2011 have been nothing less than a political revolution: The consistent pressure of popular fury forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali first to make an unprecedented promise to relinquish power; then pushed him to step down; and finally halted an attempt at unconstitu

Fouad Ajami: Hillary Clinton Echoes the Bush Doctrine

[Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] 'In too many places, in too many ways, the region's foundations are sinking into the sand," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Arab autocrats in a remarkable speech in Qatar last week. The Arab landscape all around her provided ample confirmation. In Tunisia, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, a despot who has been in power for nearly

Mohamed Ali Horrath: Why 14 January 2011 will go down in history

[Mohamed Ali Horrath is CEO of Britain’s Muslim television station, the Islam Channel.] 14 January 2011 will historically mark the democratisation of the Middle East. The Arabs watch Tunisia in solidarity, while every Arab dictator watches nervously at the tide of collective power of the people. Tunisia is the Poland of the Arab world and this is our 1989, the tide is turning, we will see many corrupt Presidents and dictators who abused their positions running from the people.

Michael Lind: America in the Age of Primitivism

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] Is the 21st century a Dark Age, compared to the 20th? Is the culture of modernity and enlightenment slipping away, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world? Is this really an age of neo-primitivism and superstition? These questions can’t be dismissed by pointing to

Josef Joffe: Why Tunisia Isn’t a Tipping Point for the Arab World

[Josef Joffe is publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.] How to explain the Tunisian revolution? By consulting Samuel Huntington—not the Huntington of Clash of Civilizations fame, but the author of The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, published in 1991. His model is too complex to be laid out here in all of its subtleties. But the basic message, to borrow from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, is: “It’s the economy, stupid!” We should also add education

Chris Matthews: What Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill Could Teach Washington Today

[Chris Matthews hosts "Hardball"on MSNBC and "The Chris Matthews Show." He was a senior aide to House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. from 1981 through 1987.] A vigorous debate over the role of government is always at the heart of our democracy. Since the shootings in Arizona, however, many have said that our partisan ferocity is unhealthy. So it seems like a good time to reflect on Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. It would serve us well

Michael J. Green: Hu and the Communiqués

[Michael J. Green is a senior adviser and holds the Japan Chair at CSIS, as well as being an associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University.] In the lead-up to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s state visit with President Barack Obama, two past architects of America’s China policy have called for the creation of a new intellectual framework to stabilize the increasingly perilous U.S.-China relationship. Writing in the New York Times The on January 2(“How to Stay

Gordon G. Chang: How Would Reagan Handle China?

[Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China.] Zbigniew Brzezinski has high hopes for President Hu Jintao’s state visit to Washington this week. Writing in the New York Times — often a showcase for hyperbole — President Carter’s national-security adviser terms the January 19 summit “the most important top-level United States–Chinese encounter since Deng Xiaoping’s historic trip more than 30 years ago.” Why is the meeting so consequential? Relations bet

Jonah Goldberg: America's paranoid China syndrome

[Jonah Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author.] Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit this week has rekindled the familiar debate over American "decline." Our sole-superpower moment is over, we're told, and the 21st century will prove so much tougher than the 20th. I'm just not sure what all the fuss is about. Perhaps one source of confusion is this whole sole-superpower business. It's true that from the early 199

Richard D Wolff: The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes

[Richard D Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008.] One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citi

Rick Unger: Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798

[Rick Unger is an attorney in Southern California, and a frequent writer, speaker and consultant on health care policy and politics.] The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in a Florida District Court.The pleadings, in part, read -The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens