Roundup: Media's Take

Andrew Cline: Twenty Years Ago, America Stood for Freedom

[Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.] Among the many thousands who attempted to escape the prison known as East Berlin was a man named Wolfgang Engels, who in 1963 stole a tank and drove it into the wall. Engels' assault on the imposing barrier splitting his city came just two years after the Soviets and their East German allies built it. Among the soldiers who erected the barbed wire fencing was Wolfgang Engels. It didn't take long

Toby Harnden: Not enough about him? Barack Obama skips Berlin Wall ceremonies

[Toby Harnden is the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC.] There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”. The White House has cited a packed schedule, though looking at it he had nothing much on yest

Marty Peretz: What Obama Doesn't Get About Tyrants

[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down. The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Commercializing the Fall of the Wall

Modern-day American border guard Shawn Carter works for the Chicago Transit Authority. His first morning of work at the Western Brown Line El station, a few days before the November 9 anniversary of the so-called Western defeat of Communism, he was shocked to find a massive intact section of the Berlin Wall five yards from his post. "I'd never seen it before!" he said, excited. The descriptive literature closest to his seat detailed shootings and escape attempts and Ronald

William Fisher: Is a Redo of Post-9/11 Paranoia the Best We Can Do?

[William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Fisher also served in the international affairs area during the Kennedy administration. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.] The USA Patriot Act, rushed into law by a panicky US Congress in the afte

Peter Foster: From Berlin to Copenhagen

[Peter Foster's association with the Financial Post goes back 25 years. He is the author of eight books, and winner of the National Business Book award and numerous magazine awards.] T his week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the U.S. Congress that inaction on climate change amounted to a new “Berlin Wall” of “short- sighted self-interest.” Ms. Merkel’s claim was upside down. There is indeed a new threat to freedom in the offing, but it is the Green W

Nile Gardiner: Berlin: Four Key Reasons why the President stayed away

[Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.] Barack Obama was quick off the mark last year in heading for Berlin during his election campaign, when he was cheered by a crowd of 200,000 adoring Germans. Yet as president of the United States he has decided to stay away from Berlin as the city commemorates the 20th anni

NY Post Editorial: Obama's Berlin Wall blunder

World leaders past and present will be in Berlin today for the 20th an niversary of the fall of communist repression's most visible symbol: the 112-mile concrete wall that split the city for more than a quarter-century. Conspicuously absent: the president of the United States, Barack Obama. Obama's folks say he's too busy to accept German President Angela Merkel's invitation to attend today's festivities It's pathetic that Obama won't be there -- and telli

Interview with Gordon Goldstein conducted by Gregor Peter Schmitz: 'Obama Is Absolutely Right to Re-evaluate Afghanistan Strategy'

[Gregor Peter Schmitz is a writer for Der Spiegel]Gordon Goldstein's book on the lessons of the Vietnam War is required reading in the Obama White House. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Goldstein talks about why Obama should think long and hard about sending more troops to Afghanistan and not rush into the kinds of decisions that Vietnam-era politicians now regret.SPIEGEL ONLINE: President Barack Obama asked his national security team to read yo

Michael Crowley: The Reinvention of Robert Gates

[Michael Crowley is Senior Editor for TNR] One afternoon in October, a blue and white jumbo jet flew high above the Pacific Ocean, approaching the international dateline. On board was the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who was on an around-the-world trip that would end with a summit of NATO defense ministers, where the topic of the day would be Afghanistan. Gates was flying on what is often called “the Doomsday Plane,” a specially outfitted 747 that looks like a bulkier Air For

Joshua A. Tucker: How the EU has inadvertently become the best democracy promotion organization the world has ever known

[Joshua A. Tucker is Associate Professor of Politics at New York University, a National Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a co-author of the political science and policy blog The Monkey Cage.]Monday marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is worth pausing to recall just how momentous, and unanticipated, this event and those that followed were. My students today have no memory of the cold war; to them, Prague and Budapest, j

Toby Harnden: Bloodless President Barack Obama makes Americans wistful for George W Bush

[Based in Washington DC, Toby has spent more than six years covering US politics, reporting from all 50 states. He was shortlisted for the 2008 UK Press Gazette’s Digital Journalist of the Year Award. During the election campaign, Barack Obama's cool detachment was a winning quality, the "No Drama Obama" a welcome contrast with the "Mr Angry" John McCain, never mind the hot-headed "I'm the decider" President George W Bush. A year into his p

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: Chavez's Next Target: El Salvador

[Mary Anastasia O'Grady is a member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and editor of the "Americas," a weekly column that appears every Monday in the Journal and deals with politics, economics and business in Latin America and Canada.] Fidel Castro learned a lot from Chilean President Salvador Allende's failed power grab in 1973. And he used the lessons of that bitter defeat to coach Venezuela's Hugo Chávez to dictatorship under the guise of democracy more than 25

Paul Krugman: Paranoia Strikes Deep (on the GOP and the 'irrational right')

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied. The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Re

Ross Douthat: Life After the End of History

[Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008).] For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies:

Fred Barnes: Major Congressional Reforms Demand Bipartisan Support

[Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a commentator on Fox News Channel.] For decades, a rule of thumb in Washington has said that there should be popular support and a bipartisan majority before approving an initiative that significantly affects tens of millions of Americans. Health-care reform—ObamaCare—has neither, yet Democrats want to impose it anyway. If they succeed, the consequences could be devastating for the country and probably for the president and

Con Coughlin: Barack Obama must stop dithering – or Afghanistan will be his Vietnam

[Con Coughlin is an expert on international terrorism and the Middle East; with the benefit of 25 years in foreign journalism, he deftly scrutinises world affairs.] In my experience, you generally know the game is up when the United Nations orders its employees to start packing their bags and head for the nearest functioning airport. In any conflict, it falls to the UN to occupy the moral high ground and concentrate its efforts on alleviating the suffering of the victims of war, rat

John J. Pitney: Presidential Leadership, Then and Now

[John J. Pitney, Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. He writes and teaches about elections, political parties, Congress, and the presidency, and has taught a course about President Nixon.] This past week saw the 40th anniversary of the “Silent Majority” speech — a reminder that RN had a couple of advantages that President Obama lacks. The first, as a commenter on an earlier post shrewdly suggested, is that RN had a captive aud

Rick Rozoff: Kosovo: Marking Ten Years Of Worldwide Wars

[Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list.] It has been said that proverbs are the wisdom of nations and one of the most common is that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. Former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton is to arrive in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, on Sunday, November 1 accordin

Robert L. Borosage: Obama's First Year: It Ain't No Crystal Staircase

[Robert Borosage is co-director of the Campaign For America's Future, and he has written on political, economic, and national security issues for publications including The New York Times and The Nation.] Barack Obama is a leader of great capacities and great contradictions. Perhaps the measure of his capacities is the magnitude of his contractions. He is a man of exceptional grace. But the grace misleads; this is a politician of intense ambition, discipline and grit. He understands