Roundup: Media's Take

Ralph Peters: The bad-nukes myth

[Ralph Peters' new book is "Endless War."] Nuclear weapons are not evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button. Until yesterday's formal announcement of the administration's new Nuclear Posture Review, nukes also kept us safe from a range of threats short of a doomsday scenario: Our enemies risked going only so far. Nukes didn't prevent all wars -- but wars remained local.

Fred Kaplan: How revolutionary is Obama's nuclear posture?

[Fred Kaplan is a journalist and contributor to Slate magazine. His "War Stories" column covers international relations and US foreign policy.] The Pentagon released its Nuclear Posture Review today, and those seeking clarity from the major newspapers must have come away more confused than ever. The New York Times, in a front-page preview of the report headlined "Obama to Limit Scenarios to Use Nuclear Weapon," called the president's new strategy &qu

Michael Knox Beran: The Roots of Violence in Politics are on the Left

...[T]he debate over health care demonstrates that the United States enjoys a remarkably non-violent politics. Its citizens, conservative, liberal, and independent, settle their differences peaceably at the polls. If there were howls of protest when the most consequential legislation in a generation passed, there was scarcely any violence.... Violence was once the law of politics. In The Growth of Political Stability in England, J. H. Plumb observed that “conspiracy and rebellion, t

Thomas Sowell: Race and Politics

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world. You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stayed away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama

Malou Innocent: The Iraq War is Still a Massive Mistake

[Malou Innocent is a foreign-policy analyst at the Cato Institute.] There’s a growing narrative that Iraq’s solidifying democracy makes the seven years of US war and occupation a worthy enterprise. Some observers have even spun Iraq’s March 7 elections as proof that democracy promotion via military occupation can succeed. Don’t believe the hype. The Iraq war remains a mistake of mammoth proportions. And Iraq’s election represents a pyrrhic victory, as the economic, pol

Max Fisher: Why the Taliban's U.S. Consulate Bombing Could Backfire

[Max Fisher writes for the Atlantic Wire. He is the former producer of the Atlantic's Food Channel and has also written for The New Republic and Condé Nast Traveler.] The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed credit for a devastating attack on the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city of three million just miles from the Afghan border. Could the Taliban group, despite its aim to topple Pakistan and expel the U.S., unintentionally do what the last three U.S. presidents h

Tom McNichol: Papalgate: The Pope's Nixon Problem

The ever-widening scandal over Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of Church sex abuse cases has an eerily familiar ring: it's unfolding in much the same way that Watergate played out for Richard Nixon. Each day brings new revelations, to which the Pope and his supporters respond with carefully crafted explanations and pointed counterattacks. Is this Watergate with holy water? Here’s a look at some of the ways in which Pope Benedict XVI has found himself caught up in a scandal of Nixonian

Christopher Hitchens: Turkey Denies History

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.] April is the cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year

James Bissett: Croatia Should Apologize for World War II Genocide Before Joining the EU

[James Bissett is the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia (1990-92).] Croatia is nearing the finish line of a multiyear race to join the European Union. Its accession has been pushed along by traditional ally Germany, and by the United States, which has encouraged the EU’s southwest expansion to include all of the Balkans and even Turkey. Croatia has complied with most of the formal entry requirements and is expected to join in 2012. However, there is

Robert Lipsyte: Is Baseball a Fading Allegory for the Fading American Way of Life?

[Robert Lipsyte, Jock Culture correspondent for TomDispatch, is the author of a new young adult novel about baseball, Center Field.]Here in the first post-American century, sports fans, it’s a brand-new ballgame -- and I’m not sure how to watch it. In this open

David E. Hoffman: What Nixon Could Teach Obama About Nukes

[David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to the Washington Post and the author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.] Just one week into his presidency, on Jan. 27, 1969, Richard M. Nixon got an eye-opening briefing at the Pentagon on the nation's secret nuclear war plans -- the Single Integrated Operational Plan, as it was known then. "It didn't fill him with enthusiasm," Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor, sa

Steven J. Rosen: Obama’s Foolish Settlements Ultimatum

[Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum.] U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace

Mark Perry: Petraeus Wasn't the First General Critical of Israel

[Mark Perry's most recent book is Talking To Terrorists. He is also the author of Partners In Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace and Four Stars: The Inside Story of the Battle between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America's Civilian Leaders.]In early February of 2006, I submitted a book proposal about the wartime relationship between Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower to a group of New York publishers. I had worked on the proposal for nine mo

Tim Judah: Serbia’s Honest Apology

[Tim Judah is the Balkans correspondent for The Economist and the author of “The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.”] ON Tuesday, the Serbian Parliament passed a resolution condemning the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995, soon after Bosnian Serb forces conquered the town. The reactions to the resolution, however, have been shockingly churlish and cynical. Some, especially but not only Bosnian Muslims, h

Peggy Noonan: The Catholic Church's Catastrophe

[Peggy Noonan writes for the Wall Street Journal.] There is an interesting and very modern thing that often happens when individuals join and rise within mighty and venerable institutions. They come to think of the institution as invulnerable—to think that there is nothing they can do to really damage it, that the big, strong, proud establishment they're part of can take any amount of abuse, that it doesn't require from its members an attitude of protectiveness because it's so stron

Fred Schwarz: Tea Parties Old and New

[Fred Schwarz is a deputy managing editor of National Review.] The one-sentence version of the Boston Tea Party is that in December 1773, angry colonists dumped a load of tea into Boston Harbor because they didn’t want to pay the tax on it. That’s true as far as it goes, but the full story is a bit more complicated — and holds even more instructive parallels for the tea partiers of today. For one thing, the tea tax was not new in 1773. It had been in effect since 1767,

Daniel Henninger: Would the Founders Love ObamaCare?

[Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page] The left-wing critics are right: The rage is not about health care. They are also right that similar complaints about big government were heard during the New Deal and the Great Society, and the sky didn't fall. But what if this time the sky is falling—on them. What if after more than a century of growth in the national government, starting with the Progressive Era, the American

James Mann: Behold China: Repressive at Home, Aggressive Abroad, Driving Obama Nuts

[James Mann has written three books on America’s relationship with China. He is an author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.] ...China has gone through periods of internal crackdown in the past without concurrent changes in its foreign relations. This time, however, the tough line on domestic dissent has gone hand-in-hand with a distinct hardening of its positions on a series of international issues. At the U.N. Securit

Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels: China May Be More Open to Fundamental Political Reform than the U.S.

[Nicolas Berggruen is founder and president of Berggruen Holdings, an investment firm. Nathan Gardels is editor-in-chief of NPQ.] ...As they try to rebalance a relationship in which China still largely depends on American consumption of its exports and the United States largely relies on China’s purchase of U.S. Treasury debt, these tightly tethered partners in prosperity will only intensify their interaction in the coming decade. Inevitably, as the geo-civilizational plates push up

Hasan Suroor: The Myth of the U.K.-U.S. “Special” Relationship

[Hasan Suroor writes for The Hindu.] Perhaps some 60 years too late, as one commentator noted, but at last Westminster has got round to recognising the reality behind the myth of Britain's much-vaunted “special relationship” with America though even now it is not certain that the British government will bite the bullet. In arguably the most frank assessment of British-U.S. relations to come out of Westminster in a long time, an influential cross-party parliamentary comm