Roundup: Media's Take

Thomas Sowell: Resenting Achievement More than Wealth

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] While ugly racial or ethnic conflicts can seldom be explained by rational economic or other self-interest, they have been too common to be just inexplicable oddities — whether in America or in other countries around the world, and whether today or in centuries past. Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings. Resentments of achievements ar

Nicholas Schmidle: The Divide Between Old and New Jihadists in Pakistan

[Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan.] Corpses have been showing up on roadsides in North and South Waziristan for years. Some of the time they are headless; almost all of the time they display a note alleging that the deceased was a spy. Khalid Khawaja’s death was no different, except that he never hid the fact that he had once worked for Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, th

Bret Stephens: The NPT Illusion

[Bret Stephens writes for the Wall Street Journal.] ... The case for the NPT is that it has slowed nuclear proliferation by offering a grand bargain between the world's nuclear haves and have-nots. The haves promise to work toward the elimination of their arsenals via arms-control treaties; the have-nots get access to civilian nuclear technology while promising not to build weapons of their own.... There's a reason the NPT has failed the administration. It enshrines a s

Michael Anton: Iran and the Costs of Containment

[Michael Anton is policy director of Keep America Safe and served on the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration.] ‘Even as momentum for Iran sanctions grows, containment seems only viable option,” reads a Washington Post headline from April 22. Leaving aside for the moment the dubious character of the first half of that assertion, is it really true that containment is now the “only” option? It is certainly true that nearly everyone in W

Robert Lowry Clinton: Judicial Supremacy and the Constitution

[Robert Lowry Clinton is professor and chair of Political Science at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He was a James Madison Fellow at Princeton University in 2007–2008, and is the author of Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review and God and Man in the Law.] Many Americans are puzzled and angry about the judicial assault on religion, morality, and common sense that has been going on for the past few decades. People wonder, for example, how the First Amendment (which guarant

Michael Barone: Obama, Brown, and the ‘Third Way’

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.] Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls today than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labour party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday. All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once

Camillo “Mac” Bica: Atrocity and War

[Camillo “Mac” Bica, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a former Marine Corps Officer, Vietnam Veteran, and the Coordinator of the Long Island Chapter of Veterans for Peace.] Most learn about war by watching a Hollywood production or by reading a memoir, novel or historical account. In many if not most cases, the goal of the filmmaker or the author is to encourage people to see their movie, to buy their book, or more diabolically

Meenakshi Ganguly: Sri Lanka's War: Time for Accountability

[Meenakshi Ganguly is the South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.] Sri Lanka’s authorities have failed seriously to investigate the allegations of abuses committed during the first months of 2009 - the endgame of the twenty-six-year internal armed conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). An approach based on semi-private polite persuasion, often referred to as the “Asian way of diplomacy”, has been unable to convince President Mahinda Rajapaksa and the Colomb

Guy Lodge: A Hung Parliament Will Provoke a Constitutional Crisis over England

[Guy Lodge is Associate Director at ippr and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University.] Why has no one noticed that a hung parliament would trigger a constitutional crisis in England? This election was supposed to be about the parties plans’ to tackle Britain’s monster deficit. Now all the talk is of a hung parliament. Speculation about the range of possible post-election political configurations is gripping Westmins

Maidhc Ó Cathail: Israel's Nuclear Espionage Didn't End After It Got the Bomb

[Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer. His work has been published by Al Jazeera Magazine, Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, Khaleej Times, Palestine Chronicle and many other publications.] Citing the possibility of a terrorist organization getting hold of a nuclear weapon as the greatest threat to U.S. security, Barack Obama persuaded 46 other countries at the recent Nuclear Security Summit to agree to secure the world’s loose nuclear material. Those leaders who came to Washington mi

K.R. Bolton: The Neo-Trotskyist Foundations of U.S. Foreign Policy

[K.R. Bolton is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, and an assistant editor of the peer reviewed journal Ab Aeterno.] America has been the center of ‘world revolution’ since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to shape the post-war world in a single image of liberal-democracy. The policy has been one of internationalism, and the Bush description of it as a ‘new world order’ in launching the war on Iraq is the latest name. While conservatives bothered m

Michael Shermer: Humans Have Never Had It So Good

[Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American, is an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University and the author of "The Mind of the Market."] It is fashionable among environmentalists today to paint a gloomy portrait of our future. Although there are many environmental issues yet to be solved, too many species endangered, more pollution than most of us would like and far too many people still going hungry each day, l

Paul Krugman: Drilling, Disaster, Denial

[Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a columnist for the New York Times.] It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn’t have drilled the Deepwater Horizon well in the first place. Yet for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a st

Michael Anton: Iran and the Costs of Containment

[Michael Anton is policy director of Keep America Safe and served on the National Security Council staff during the George W. Bush administration.] “Even as momentum for Iran sanctions grows, containment seems only viable option,” reads a Washington Post headline from April 22. Leaving aside for the moment the dubious character of the first half of that assertion, is it really true that containment is now the “only” option? It is certainly true that nearly everyone in W

Philip Klein: Will Petraeus Be Like Ike?

[Philip Klein is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent.] In the early stages of implementing the surge strategy in Iraq, United States military commanders started to detect that the new plan was working, but the signs of progress were overshadowed as casualties mounted while American soldiers fought to secure the cities. During a meeting around this time, a senior officer put his arm around Gen. David Petraeus, then leading the war effort in Iraq, and advis

Alan Beattie: Lessons for the Greek crisis from Philip II of Spain

[Alan Beattie is the world trade editor of the Financial Times.] If you want to go back to the roots of Greece’s financial crisis, you could always start with Philip II of Spain. Born in 1527; acceded to the Spanish throne in 1556; defaulted on the national debt in 1557, 1560, 1575 and 1596; died in 1598. Now there’s a sovereign who knew how to renounce sovereign debt. Philip would leave an Argentine finance minister standing. The path of default he laid down has seen

Bruce Anderson: David Cameron could be Britain's de Gaulle

[Bruce Anderson is a columnist at the Independent.] It is the most fascinating, unpredictable and nerve-racking election of all time, and Thursday will not conclude the drama. It will merely be the end of the first act. The campaign has had two surprising aspects. The first was the Liberal upsurge. The second, the Labour Party's self-control. That is almost at breaking point. Just away from the microphones and cameras, the tensions are cracking. As soon as Big Ben starts to strike 1

Peggy Noonan: The Big Alienation Between the Government and the People

[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.] We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street's money with it, and the government can't really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political caree

David Brooks: Energy Innovation is the Transcontinental Railroad of Today

[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.] In 1860, Samuel Curtis, a Republican congressman of Iowa, sponsored a bill to create a transcontinental railroad. The debate over that public-private partnership was long and messy. Democrats said the proposal was unconstitutional. Others rightly argued that it meant huge giveaways to the rich. Skip to next paragraph But the railroad effort, backed by Abraham Lincoln, swept forward. “Nations are never station

Adam Minter: China Rules the World at Expo 2010

[Adam Minter is an American writer in Shanghai.] At precisely 9 AM on May Day, hundreds of new turnstiles will begin to spin along the banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River, giving way to more than half a million visitors as they inaugurate the opening of Expo 2010, the most expensive and well-attended World's Fair in history. To American ears, the concept of a World's Fair sounds archaic, and when applied to Shanghai, a contemporary symbol of all that is new, vibrant, and even threat