Roundup: Historians' Take

Wada Haruki: Japan-North Korea Relations—A Dangerous Stalemate

Wada Haruki is Emeritus Professor of Tokyo University and author of Kin Nissei to Manshu Konichi Senso (Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian Anti-Japanese War, 1993), Chosen Senso zenshi (A Complete History of the Korean War, 2002), Kita Chosen – Yugekitai kokka no genzai (North Korea –Partisan State Today, 1998), Chosen yuji o nozomu no ka (Do we Want a Korean Emergency? 2002) and Dojidai hihan – Nicho kankei to rachi mondai (Critique of Our Own Times – Japan-North Korea Relations and the Abduction P

Martin Kramer: Obama's Middle East map in shreds

There is nothing at all surprising about Barack Obama's reluctance to embrace the surge for freedom in Iran. As I've shown, he received his primer on the Middle East from Rashid Khalidi, who facilitated Obama's formation as a Palestine-centric Third Worldist. In this view of things, only the situation of the Palestinians deserves to be described as"intolerable" —the word Obama used in Cairo—and action is promised only to them. Iranians are defrauded and assaulted

Jon Meacham: Theocracies Are Doomed. Thank God.

[Jon Meacham is the Editor of Newsweek. Meacham’s latest book, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography...He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book World...Meacham graduated from The McCallie School and from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree summa cum laude in English Literature.] For years A

Juan Cole: Crunch Time in Tehran

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Reformist presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said Saturday morning that the 4 pm GMT rally on Saturday against the alleged stealing of the presidential election in Iran would go ahead. This despite the threa

Tom Palaima: What ignorance has cost us

[Palaima (tpalaima@sbcglobal.net) is a professor of classics at the University of Texas. ] Ignorance is not always bliss. Just ask police Lt. Wayne DeMoss who was denied promotion recently for failing to recognize City Manager Marc Ott at the funeral of a former police captain. What do you think about that decision? I received a MacArthur Genius Award yet I routinely blank on the names of deans, provosts, colleagues and studen

Richard Seaford: What the ancient Greek anxiety about money has to tell us about our own economic predicaments

[Richard Seaford is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of _Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and tragedy in the developing city- state_, 1994, and of a commentary on Euripides' Bacchae, 1996.] What makes the ancient Greeks worth studying is that they are sufficiently like us to be comprehensible but sufficiently unlike us to be worth making the effort to understand. It may be a common theme among enthusiastic modern supporters of the Classics tha

Stephen Wertheim: Humanitarian Intervention is Politics

[Stephen Wertheim is managing editor emeritus of the Harvard International Review and a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in the history department at Columbia University.] Humanitarian interventionists have blood on their hands. Their impulse to “free a nation from the tyrant’s grip,” to pick professor-cum-politician Michael Ignatieff’s formulation, helped to permit the Iraq War. True, humanitarian interventionists were not the war’s architects. Some opposed it altogether. But they may have e

Alfred W. McCoy: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture

[Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books), which is also available in Italian and German translations. Later this year, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, a forthcomin

Martin Kramer: Obama and the Muslims

"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights, to punish the usurpers, and that I respect more than the Mamluks God, His Prophet, and the Quran." So spoke Bonaparte when he arrived in Egypt, in a proclamation of July 2, 1798. Substitute "Islam" for Egypt, "we Americans" for I, and "violent extremists" for the Mamluks, and you've got the core message of Preside

Edwin Black: Obama and the Israel Question—Many Now Queasy

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of Nazi Nexus, Banking on Baghdad and IBM and the Holocaust. He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com.] Many supporters of Barack Obama who are also supporters of Israel— from both the Jewish and Christian communities—are now wondering whether their faith in America’s charismatic new president was misplaced on this key issue. At the core of the queasiness is the Obama Administra

Omer M. Mozaffar: In the Shade of Napoleon and Malcolm X ... Making Sense of Obama’s “New Beginning” in Cairo

[Omer M. Mozaffar is an instructor in the Asian Classics Curriculum in the Graham School of the University of Chicago.] When Napoleon's forces arrived in Egypt in 1798 speaking of liberty, equality, and fraternity, many Muslims wondered if Napoleon had become a Muslim. Nevertheless, that moment - Napoleon's military and administrative conquest - marked the beginning of an era in which the Muslim communities of the world were declining: the Ottomans began their long descent; the Mugh

Victor Davis Hanson: The Age of Middle East Atonement

President Obama made an earnest effort — as is his way in matters of discord — to split the difference with the Islamic world. His speech essentially amounted to: “We did that, you did this, tit-for-tat, now we’re even, and can’t we all just get along?” He should be congratulated for expressing a desire for peace and for gently reminding the Muslim world of the way to reform, even if he did so while inflating Western sins. But the problem with such moral equivalence is that it equat

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Historically Challenged President

[Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. ] In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation. This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World

Jonathan Zimmerman: Judge Sotomayor, a mythic 'Hispanic'

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University and is the author of the just-published "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."] Here's a good argument for putting Sonia Sotomayor on the Supreme Court: She's knowledgeable, respected and deeply experienced. As a federal judge for nearly two decades, she's heard thousands of cases and written hundreds of opinions. And here's a lousy argument for confirming Sotom

Kevin Baker: Barack Hoover Obama ... The best and the brightest blow it again

Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama has proven to be every bit as charismatic and intelligent as his most ardent supporters could have hoped. At home or abroad, he invariably appears to be the only adult in the room, the first American president in at least forty years to convey any gravitas. Even the most liberal of voters are finding it hard to believe they managed to elect this man to be their president. It is impossible not to wish desperately for his success as he tr

Juan Cole: Stealing the Iranian election

Mir-Hosain Mousavi, who maintains he won last Friday's presidential election despite official assertions that he lost 2 to 1 to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is calling for another rally Thursday, this time in part to honor the persons killed by hardliners or security forces in the course of previous demonstrations.Mourning the martyr is as central to Iranian Shiite religious culture as it was to strains o

Martin Kramer: Iranian turmoil

[Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard.] My short assessment of the turmoil in Iran appears (with nine other expert assessments) at Middle East Str

Martin Kramer: How to prevent Hamas from claiming victory

[Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard.] Israel's war against Hamas, now in its third week, is probably closer to its end than to its beginning. Israel has said that the "operation"—there is an official aversion to the term "war"

Martin Kramer: Did Hamas really win in Gaza?

[Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard.] One way to approach this question is to ask whether Hamas has achieved the objectives for which it escalated the crisis, by its refusal to extend the cease-fire. Musa Abu Marzuq, number two in the Damascus o

Dominic Sandbrook: 30 years on from the Islamic revolution, can diplomacy win out?

[Dominic Sandbrook is the author, most recently, of "White Heat: a History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties".] On the first day of February 1979, an Air France plane landed at Tehran Airport. It was carrying an elderly Islamic cleric from Iran’s rural hinterland who had not been in his native land for 15 years. As he stepped down from the plane, dressed entirely in black, supported by a French flight officer, a thousand waiting admirers began to chant his name: Ruhollah