Roundup: Media's Take

Derek Chollet: Holbrooke: A Historian at Heart

[Derek Chollet is principal deputy director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff.] Richard Holbrooke will always be remembered as his generation's premier diplomat and statesman -- a doer. But he also was a person who had a keen sense of the past and the role memory plays in defining today's world -- he was a historian at heart. Holbrooke loved history. He loved books and arguments, stories and sweeping narratives. In that sense he shares so much with the his

Jonathan Alter: Holbrooke: An American in Full

[Jonathan Alter is columnist for Newsweek and author of "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope."] The tributes to Richard Holbrooke now pouring in are out of proportion to the various positions he held over the years as an assistant secretary and ambassador. They are more befitting a cabinet officer or even head of state than a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, arguably the most grueling and thankless job in the whole government

Michael Hirsh: Holbrooke: An Appreciation

[Michael Hirsh is chief correspondent for National Journal.] Right up until the end, he was the old Dick Holbrooke, touchy and vain about his reputation, acutely aware of what the media were saying about him. In an interview with me on December 3, shortly before he fell ill, Holbrooke insisted that his tense relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai had never really gone off the rails, although virtually every pundit in Washington was writing that it had. "I was not the p

Ray D. Madoff: Give Up on the Estate Tax

[Ray D. Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, is the author of “Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead.”] ...[The estate] tax, first enacted in 1916, was never intended to be simply a device for raising revenue. Rather, it was meant to address the phenomenon of a small number of Americans controlling large amounts of the country’s wealth — which was considered a national problem. As Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have concentrat

Bret Stephens: Europe Needs a Tea Party

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Once upon a not-very-long-ago time, Europe was the land of the future. In 2005, American trendspotter Jeremy Rifkin published "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream." The same year, Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid came out with "The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy.&q

Per Wirtén: So terrorism has just come to Sweden? Get real

[Per Wirtén writes for several Swedish newspapers, and co-founded the progressive political magazine Arena.] On Saturday, an Iraqi-born Swede, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, from the small provincial town of Tranås, travelled to Stockholm to spread death among the houses there. For the next 24 hours we all thought the same thing: suppose he hadn't fumbled with his tailpipe bombs. Suppose all six he was wearing had exploded, not just one. In public comments and in private conversation

David Rothkopf: On the Death of a Wise Man

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] There will be a thousand eulogies for Richard Holbrooke. Heads of state and foreign ministers, journalists, and chief executives, movie stars and Foreign Service officers will remember him vividly even if they only knew him briefly. They will remember him that way because Richard Holbrooke was one of those great and complex characters who filled up every

Kori N. Schake: Bob Gates Is Obama's Machiavelli (In a Good Way)

[Kori N. Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She blogs regularly for Shadow Government on Foreign Policy.] When Napoleon marched his army into Berlin in 1806, he took his generals to the tomb of Frederick the Great, saying "hats off, gentlemen; if he were alive we wouldn't be here." The same could be said of the Obama administration's policy on Afghanistan: without Defense Sec. Robert Gates, we would not be here. Over the weekend, the Obama

Gideon Rachman: America should give Assange a medal

[Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times.] After two weeks of WikiLeaking, many Americans want to see Julian Assange locked up. Instead, they should give the man a medal. Of course, it is embarrassing and awkward to have all these secret diplomatic cables published. Mr Assange certainly seems to be no fan of the US. Nonetheless, he and WikiLeaks have done America a massive favour, by inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its

Richard Reeves: It’s Morning in China

[Richard Reeves writes for Truthdig.] PALO ALTO, Calif.—In 1982, Richard Nixon told me he thought that by the middle of this century the world would be dominated by Asians, primarily Chinese. He reminisced about a conversation with China’s leader, Mao Zedong, in which Mao said 300 million Chinese would be willing to die for that goal—and 300 million Americans would not. Nixon was a gifted global analyst and a racist. During a two-hour conversation, he said a confrontati

Joel Wit: Time to Get Serious About North Korea

[Joel Wit is a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the founder of its North Korea website, 38North.] As James Steinberg, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, leaves for Beijing this week to discuss North Korea's most recent provocation, it is tempting to describe his trip using time-worn quotations from two well-known foreign-policy experts: Yogi Berra (it's "déjà vu all over again") and Albert Einstein (t

Anne Applebaum: In Britain, Outrage Without a Thoughtful Outlet

[Anne Applebaum writes a column for the WaPo.] In the photograph that appeared the following day, her mouth was open, her eyes were wide, and she seemed to be shouting as her car window shattered. But those who know her insist that the Duchess of Cornwall - Camilla Parker Bowles, wife of Prince Charles - was not frightened by the demonstrators who attacked her car during a demonstration-turned-riot in London late last week: She was angry.... Still, this kind of violence

David Brooks: Ben Franklin’s Nation

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] ...American culture was built on the notion of bourgeois dignity. We’ve always been lacking in aristocratic grace and we’ve never had much proletarian consciousness, but America did produce Ben Franklin, one of the original spokesmen of middle-class values. It did produce Horatio Alger, who told stories about poor boys and girls who rose to middle-class respectability. It does produce a nonstop flow of self-help leaders, from Dale Carnegie

Ronen Bergman: Killing the Killers

[Bergman is a senior military and intelligence analyst for Yedioth Ahronot, an Israeli daily. He is currently working on a book about the Mossad and the art of assassination.] During his years as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion was haunted by a recurring nightmare. In it, the Holocaust’s survivors had taken refuge in Israel only to become the targets of another Holocaust. The nightmare seemed to be coming true in July 1962, when Egypt’s then-president Gamal Abdel Nas

Jim Manzi: Unbundle the Welfare State

[Jim Manzi is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and chairman of an applied-artificial-intelligence software company.] The fundamental issue of political economy in the Western world has been the same for at least the past 200 years: drawing the right lines between government authority and individual initiative. In the broadest terms, freedom has been winning. What the West has invented through Burkean trial and error has not been a libertarian utopia, however, but a workab

Michael Barone: Obama’s New Deal Blues

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.] The template for the Obama Democrats’ policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place a tolerable but not dynamic status quo. The New Deal’s father, Franklin Roosevelt, believed that the era of economic growth was over, just as many contemporaries believed that technological progress was at an end (how far could you go beyond the radio and

Nikolas K. Gvosdev: Barack and Dmitry's Special Relationship

[Nikolas K. Gvosdev, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor of national-security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.] Why has the Obama administration invested so much of its political capital in the resetting of relations with Russia? Why is getting passage of New START seen as so critical to the president's foreign-policy legacy? Russia has a way of creeping back onto the agenda of American presidents. Bill Clinton was going to focus on the U.S. d

John Moran: Cuba Embarks on a New Revolution

[John Moran is an Irish Times journalist just returned from several weeks in Cuba.] Cubans have entered a period of dramatic change with enormous implications for economic, political and social aspects of their lives, perhaps not seen since the collapse of Cuba’s old sponsor, the USSR. With that cataclysmic break-up in the early 1990s, some 85 per cent of the Caribbean island’s income vanished, marking the start of a period of extreme hardship remembered bitterly as the

Lewis H. Lapham: Domesticated Deities

[Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne.]Glory is like a circle in the water,Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,

Selig S. Harrison and John H. Cushman: Drawing a Line in the Water

[Selig S. Harrison, the author of “Korean Endgame,” is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy. John H. Cushman, a retired Army lieutenant general, commanded the United States-South Korean First Corps Group from 1976 to 1978.] THE crisis in the Yellow Sea, which was set off by the North Korean shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last month, is probably mystifying to many Americans. Why did the North fire a deadly artillery barrage at a sparsel