Peter Beinart is editor in chief of Open Zion, a blog about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future at The Daily Beast. He is the author of The Crisis of Zionism (Times Books).

[W]hy did Romney issue [his] parade of idiocies? Because he’s trying to paint Obama as someone who won’t stand up for America....

Ambassador Dore Gold is a world renowned expert on Middle Eastern affairs.

While Israel is naturally focused on the implications of Iran completing its drive toward nuclear weapons, there is another case of one of its bitterest enemies, who tried to accomplish the same goal once before: Saddam Hussein of Iraq. As a result of the 2003 Iraq War, the U.S. Army captured thousands of hours of recordings of highly-classified meetings of the Iraqi leadership on the subject of how they viewed the purpose of nuclear weapons in the future, as well as how they envisioned their use in the context of a war against Israel.

The U.S. Army made the Iraqi tapes and documents available for analysts, who have begun to publish books and academic articles on their content. Last year, two analysts, Hal Brands and David Palkki, published a study they prepared on the Iraqi records for the U.S. National Defense University (NDU). What they found was that Saddam Hussein had personally spoken about the importance of nuclear weapons as a key component of Iraqi strategy from 1978 until the Israeli strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

Saddam's earlier obsession with nuclear weapons appears to have stopped for at least seven or eight years after the attack, according to the documents, until the late the 1980s when he began to speak about the subject again. For Brands and Palkki, the time Israel gained is a vindication of Prime Minister Menachem Begin's decision to strike Iraq.

So how did Saddam Hussein view the utility of nuclear weapons in a future conflict with Israel?..

Lt. Gen. Wallace C. "Chip” Gregson Jr., retired, is senior director of China and the Pacific at the Center for the National Interest. He served as commander US Marine Corps Forces Pacific, and as assistant secretary of defense for Asia-Pacific security affairs from 2009-2011.

Joseph A. Bosco served in the office of the secretary of Defense as China country desk officer and previously taught graduate seminars on China-US relations at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is now a national security consultant.

Some China scholars have begun to accuse Beijing of “salami tactics” in seeking to seize gradual control of the South China Sea. The term evokes disturbing echoes of Nazi Germany’s incremental aggression until it was ready for all-out war.

Applying World War II terminology to China’s current behavior may seem overblown, but it is apt. In fact, China’s actions also resemble those of another bad actor of that tragic period: Imperial Japan.

The emerging Japan of the 1920s and ’30s, like today’s China, was steeped in historic resentment of the West’s forcible imposition of commercial and cultural influence. Even as Western interaction hugely benefited Japan’s economy then and China’s now, both countries set about building military capabilities commensurate with their new economic prowess.

Naked military power was seen by Imperial Japan, as it is by the Communist Party in China, as necessary to defend and expand industrial achievements and economic influence against hostile Western nations, most notably the United States....

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor of Channel 4. She appearing at the Mountains to the Sea Festival at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, at noon next Sunday. Her book Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution has been longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

Peter Ferrara is Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is the author of America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (HarperCollins).

The writers are a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

...[T]he problem [with the New Deal] was that what most of the country thought of as the ceiling, the progressive faction continued to see as the floor. They talked of the New Deal’s “unfinished business” and kept on seeking a hero to take care of it, believing that history moves to the left and that progressive eras are followed by times of consolidation, which in turn are followed by times of still further action, in which the country will move left again. Lyndon Johnson tried to fulfill this hope, but his excesses set off a whole new dynamic, consisting of liberal overreach, a conservative backlash against it, and then a moment of more-or-less moderation — to be followed, once memories faded, by liberal excess again. This was back-and-forth alternation, instead of progress in a single direction interrupted with pauses. Johnson’s Great Society ran into a wall in the 1966 midterms, and then spawned a run of Republican presidents....

Clinton, after running as a moderate against the moderate George H. W. Bush, got carried away and tried to pass a health-care reform that spawned the Republican capture of Congress. Clinton then triangulated his way back to the center, permitting (or forcing) the younger George Bush to run as a compassionate conservative. After this, Obama won in a landslide after the fiscal implosion, made a swerve to the left sharper than Bill Clinton’s, and triggered the Tea Party’s rise. This led to the Democrats’ drubbing in the 2010 midterms, which progressives saw as racist, fascist, hateful, and simply vicious, but which was in fact completely predictable and similar to what had happened quite often before....

In 1933, government had to get bigger. Now it has to reform, devolve, cut back, and control itself, before it shoves us off the cliff into catastrophe. This is why “the new FDR” is now in such trouble — and why the search for the next one will end in more tears.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.

THE last time the United States held a presidential election amid the mass unemployment left in a financial crisis’s wake, the challenger offered only a partial glimpse of what he would actually do in office. Mostly, he played the opportunist, attacking the incumbent party for spending too much and helping too little, for being indifferent to human suffering and for failing to balance the budget, for overtaxing and undertaxing and everywhere in between. He claimed to be offering a bold contrast of visions, but mostly he just relied on the unemployment rate to do his work for him.

That challenger was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His 1932 convention speech — the first ever delivered by a nominee in person — was more detailed than the parade of generalities Mitt Romney offered last Thursday. But mostly it was a sprawl of unpersuasive economic analysis and highly convenient criticisms of the hapless Herbert Hoover. Hearing it or reading it, you would have known that F.D.R. intended to govern as some sort of liberal, as you would know from Romney’s speech that he intends to govern as a conservative. But you would be able to anticipate only the broadest outlines of the policy experimentation that ultimately defined the New Deal....