Roundup: Media's Take

Zachary Karabell: Deficits and the Chinese Challenge

[Mr. Karabell is the author of "Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It," just published by Simon & Schuster.] The dollar's sharp drop over the past few weeks has led to considerable anxiety about the status of the United States as the dominant force in the global economy. Closely related to this fear is constant worry about the rise of China and the evermore complicated relationship between Beijing and Washing

Bret Stephens: A Perfect Nobel Pick

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs, which runs every Tuesday in the U.S. and is also published in the European and Asian editions of the paper.] Pop quiz: What do Bertha von Suttner, Henri La Fontaine, Ludwig Quidde, Norman Angell, Arthur Henderson, Eisaku Sato, Alva Myrdal and Joseph Rotblat have in common? Answer: Barack Obama. If you're drawing blanks on most of these names, don't be hard on yourself: The

Jeremy Philips: The Internet is already our era's big disrupter (book review)

[Mr. Philips is executive vice president of News Corp., which owns Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.] In the Middle Ages, a simple military innovation helped to create an entirely new social structure. By introducing saddle stirrups made out of flexible leather rather than rigid metal, Charlemagne enabled mounted soldiers to keep their balance while moving freely—and to fight more formidably than their earthbound compatriots. To give these "knights&

JoongAng Daily Editorial: A historic textbook (with input from Korea, China and Japan)

Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada presented a plan to produce a history textbook written with the input of historians from Korea, China and Japan. The thinking is that crafting a joint history book could help resolve deep-rooted conflicts among the three countries. We sympathize with him and believe that it is necessary to publish joint history textbooks as a part of a concerted effort to help the three nations move past these issues and work together to create a new future-oriented form o

Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola: The Myth of "America"

[Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," (Haymarket Books, 2009), and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jason Coppola is the director and producer of the documentary film "Justify My War," which explores the rationalization of war in American culture, comparing the siege of Fallujah with the massacre

Roger Atwood: Taking Stock of Looting in Iraq

[Roger Atwood, a contributing editor at Archaeology magazine, is the author of “Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers and the Looting of the Ancient World.”] AS United States troops begin withdrawing from Iraq, we should take stock of the staggering damage that Iraq’s ancient archeological sites have suffered from looting over the last few years. After the 2003 invasion, swarms of looters dug huge pits and passages all over southern Iraq in search of cuneiform tablets and cylind

Azam Nizamuddin: Dispelling the Myths Behind Columbus

[Azam Nizamuddin is Adjunct Professor, Department of Theology at Loyola University of Chicago.] Ever since the election of Barack Hussain Obama as President, many myths have circulated as to his origins. While most reasonable observers have rejected the "birthers" phenomenon, some ideologically disposed people along with some Congressional leaders, have adopted some of this defamatory mythology. Mythologies about famous personalities are nothing new. In fact, mythologies o

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: George Shultz on the Drug War

[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.] When George P. Shultz took office as Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1982, his first trip out of the country was to Canada. His second was to Mexico. "Foreign policy starts with your neighborhood," he tol

Charles Krauthammer: On the loss of American hegemony

[Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in the Manhattan Institute's Wriston Lecture, delivered last week in New York] Henry Kissinger once noted that the only way to achieve peace is through hegemony or balance of power. Well, hegemony is out. As Obama said in his General Assembly address, "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." (The "can" in that declaration is priceless.) And if hegemony is out, so is balance of power:

Paul Krugman: Peter Temin corrects my history

An email regarding my post on goldbugism: Germany went off gold before the UK in 1931, in July and August, that is, before late September when the UK devalued. The story however is a bit complex because Germany went off gold by eliminating the free flow of gold. They kept the value of the mark steady all through the Nazi period (see Adam Tooze’s good book), but they controlled the flow o

Paul Krugman: Misguided Monetary Mentalities

One lesson from the Great Depression is that you should never underestimate the destructive power of bad ideas. And some of the bad ideas that helped cause the Depression have, alas, proved all too durable: in modified form, they continue to influence economic debate today. What ideas am I talking about? The economic historian Peter Temin has argued that a key cause of the Depression was what he calls the “gold-standard mentality.” By this he means not just belief in the sacred impo

Robert D. Kaplan: Time for Decisiveness on Afghanistan

[Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.] When it comes to foreign policy, Republicans and Democrats are each suspect in their own way. Republicans used to be the party of competence in world affairs. They lost that aura during President George W. Bush's first six years in office, when he mismanaged the wars both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. The Democrats, for their part, are ofte

Fred Hiatt: Obama Policies Risk Bolstering Tyrants

[Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post. He writes editorials for the page and a biweekly column that appears on Mondays.] "Our concern is that the Obama administration is perceived to be softening on human rights." If that comment came from a human rights lobbyist, you might not pay too much mind. But I heard it from Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian leader who is one of the world's foremost spokesmen for Islamic democracy -- and who is himself under t

Jonathan Movroydis: The Plan That Would Have Saved Healthcare

[Jonathan recently graduated from the University of California, Irvine. His research and writing interests include political ideology, religion, and their respective impact on domestic and world politics.] The latest AARP Bulletin features the debate between RN and the late Senator Edward Kennedy on their respective proposals for healthcare reform in the early Seventies. According to the bulletin’s editor Jim Toedtman, RN introduced a bold national plan that — if passed

WSJ Editorial: The Nobel Hope Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama yesterday was greeted with astonishment as much as any other emotion, even among many of his admirers. Our own reaction is bemusement at the Norwegian decision to offer what amounts to the world's first futures prize in diplomacy, with the Nobel Committee anticipating the heroic concessions that it believes Mr. Obama will make to secure treaties that will produce a new era of global serenity. Maybe he really is The One. M

Michael M. Phillips and Guy Chazan: An Award Often Tinged by Politics

19th century dynamite magnate Alfred Nobel envisioned the Peace Prize that bears his name as honoring those "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations." But the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, which Friday named President Barack Obama as the 2009 laureate, has throughout its history been captive to the politics of the time. In October 1989, for example, with China's Tiananmen Square uprising still fresh, the committee announced it was aw

Melvin A. Goodman: The Prospect of Change in US Relations With Russia, Iran and Afghanistan Alarms the Washington Post

[Melvin A. Goodman, Truthout's National Security and Intelligence columnist, is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His 42-year government career includes service with the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the US Army. His most recent book is "Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA."] The Washington Post is running scared these days with its editorial writ

Jerry Bowyer: Nobel's Stockholm Syndrome

[Jerry Bowyer is a radio and television talk show host.] It was because of a woman named Bertha Kinsky. She was a pacifist and a free-thinker (which means anti-religious). He fell in love with her, and they married, but she left him. He was wealthy, but not intellectually respected. He inherited his father's industrial business, which was, horror of horrors, an arms manufacturer. He was not a college graduate, but he learned chemistry anyway and developed dynamite, and became one of

Marty Peretz: The Douglas MacArthur Analogy Fits Neither Petraeus Nor McChrystal.

[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] Our culture lives virtually without its history, which makes it a very weird culture, indeed. In France, on sabbatical a few years back, I listened to a dinner conversation about Marshal Foch. Who? Marshal Foch. How did we come around to him? Someone at the table said she'd been born in Tarbes, a small town known primarily for its proximity to Lourdes. Another guest noted that Foch had been born there. And then followed a lo

Con Coughlin: In History Lies All the Secrets of Statecraft (review of the first official account of MI5)

[Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph and the author of "Khomeini's Ghost: Iran since 1979."] Espionage is not a subject that readily lends itself to public scrutiny. The guiding principle that has underpinned the response of successive British governments to requests for more information about the activities of Britain's intelligence services was best summed up by Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in the 1960s. Responding