Roundup: Media's Take

3 Experts Speak About Putin and Russia: 10 years of co-evolution

On August 9, 1999, President Boris Yeltsin named then-unknown Vladimir Putin as Russia’s acting PM. How has that decision changed the country and Putin himself? What were the grounds for it? Experts speak out. To answer these and other questions, RT interviewed three renowned political experts.Dmitry Oreshkin: political analyst, specialist in social geography and political forecasting, voted “Person of the Year” in 2001 by the influential Rambler.ru website.

Edward P. Djerejian: Damascus and the Road to Mideast Peace

[Mr. Djerejian, U.S. ambassador to Syria from 1988-91 and to Israel from 1993-94, is the author of “Danger and Opportunity—An American Ambassador’s Journey Through the Middle East” (Simon & Schuster, 2008). He is the founding director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.] Though in recent months some have derided the power of dialogue, the truth is that strategic engagement with our enemies remains absolutely essential for our national security. Talking

Carlos G. Aguilar: Peace Agreements and Democratization Processes in Central America

[Carlos Aguilar is a researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE), member of the Mesoamerican Secretariat of Grito de los Excluidos and of Grupo Pensamiento Crítico based in San José, Costa Rica, and contributor to the CIP Americas Program.] The changes that followed the Peace Agreements in Central America, particularly since the 90s when the "democratization process" began, went further than merely implementing regular elections. They sign

Joshua A. Tucker: What we still don't know about the Russian-Georgian War

[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.] Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Russian-Georgian War. Last summer, battles were fought, lives were lost, and land was destroyed. Yet one year out, what is most striking is how little the politics related to the war seem to have changed

Eric Gibson: Why Dictators Love Kitsch

[Mr. Gibson is the Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor. ] This week the world’s eyes were on the extraordinary photograph of former President Bill Clinton seated next to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il—an official picture taken at the end of talks that led to the freeing of two imprisoned American journalists. Mine, I confess, were elsewhere, continually diverted to the photo’s dramatic backdrop, an enormous mural of crashing seas and fluttering birds rendered in lurid gr

Arthur Levine: The Truman Commission Redux

[Arthur Levine is president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.] In his previous post, Jamie Merisotis makes a compelling case for the importance of seeing American higher education in the context of higher education worldwide, and for treating our system of higher education as an imperiled competitive advantage. As Jamie notes, U.S. educational attainment “has remained flat for 40 years” -- a fact all the more worrisome in light of rising college enro

Bill Mahr: New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing - in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because t

Stephen Lendman: Implications of the Honduran Coup

[Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.] There's no debate about the Honduran coup despite media efforts to distort it. It was made-in-the-USA like most others in the region over many decades. Since the late 19th century, America has directly meddled in Latin and Central American states well over 50 times, a record unmatched by any other nation, and abuses keep mounting. They involved invasions, bombings, occupations, assassinations, and

Elizabeth Pond: Germany's combat revival

[Elizabeth Pond is a Berlin-based author and journalist.] Today's Germans have not yet fully reconciled their post-Hitler conscience with the use of military force for anything beyond narrow homeland defense. But Berlin has just tiptoed over another red line, in the Hindu Kush mountains. To be sure, Germany's recent first use of heavy weapons and tank-like vehicles in a two-week offensive against insurgents will hardly satisfy the American hope for more German combat ac

Uzi Silber on Israel: What's in a (Country's) Name?

[Uzi Silber writes the 'Jew's Muse' column in Ha'aretz. His work also appears in The Forward, Jerusalem Post, and The New York Times.] ‘What’s in a name?’ was the rhetorical question Juliet posed to her lover Romeo. The implied answer? Why, nothing of course. But insofar as national identity in the Middle East is concerned, name is everything, especially for the State of Israel, whose official style should be modified with a single word as profound as it is modest.

Hugo Restall: China's Public Enemy

[Mr. Restall is the editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.] R ebiya Kadeer is undergoing a Chinese version of George Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate.” Separatist, extremist, terrorist—China’s state-run media has pulled out the rhetorical big guns to put her beyond the pale of civilized society. By condemning her as the mastermind of last month’s riots that killed 197 people in the northwest region of Xinjiang, Beijing ha

Ashraf Ghani: Afghanistan Needs New Leadership

[Mr. Ghani is a presidential candidate in Afghanistan.] Afghanistan’s upcoming presidential election represents a critical test for our young democracy. It is a referendum on the lawlessness of the current regime and the future stability of our country. Over the past five years President Hamid Karzai has turned Afghanistan into one of the world’s most failed and corrupt states. Instead of leading our country toward democracy, he has formed alliances with criminals. He

Sen. Dick Lugar: The Housewife That Changed The World

[Dick Lugar is ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ] Corazon Aquino changed the world in ways that people of far greater power and military might have rarely been able to do. She was a spiritually rich and devoted wife of Philippine politician Benigno Aquino. She was, by her own admission, a housewife and mother when her husband was imprisoned by President Ferdinand Marcos, and then exiled to the United States. Upon his return to Manila in August,

Jon Swain and Michael Gillard: Is Somalia the new Afghanistan?

[Jon Swain and Michael Gillard are British journalists.] Loading ammunition into the magazine of his AK-47 assault rifle, the young suicide bomber looked straight into the camera. “Jihad is real,” he said. “There’s no way you can understand the sweetness of jihad until you come to jihad.” His accomplice joined in, his face hidden by a scarf. “How dare you sit at home and look on the TV and see Muslims getting killed ... Those who are in Europe and America, get out of t

Ted C. Sorensen: The Obama-Kennedy Nuclear Policy

[Ted C. Sorensen, former Special Counsel and Adviser to President John F. Kennedy and a widely published author on the presidency and foreign affairs.] The death of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, still unfairly blamed even in his obituaries for Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam, ironically removes from the current national dialogue on President Obama's nuclear weapons policy a champion of John F. Kennedy's original dream of a nuclear weapons-free world. Let us

Con Coughlin: Clinton Caused Problems in North Korea

[Con Coughlin is a British expert on international terrorism and the Middle East.] The image of two American women weeping with relief, after being spared 12 years of hard labour in North Korea, led to a tempting conclusion: that even in the darkest recesses of the world's most reviled regimes, the Obama effect is starting to take hold. From the moment he came to office just over six months ago, the new US president has sought to undertake a fundamental rebranding of America's inter

Anthony Paul: What's new in Af-Pak? History you haven't read

[Anthony Paul is a freelance journalist.] The more things change on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the more they seem to stay the same … the same as in the 1870s. The latest news from Waziristan — the reputed death by U.S. drone strike of Baitullah Mehsud, West Asia’s Public Enemy No. 2 — doesn’t generate as much optimism as, perhaps, it should. Those Anglo-Saxons active earlier in the region, British colonial forces, killed many Mehsuds over the years, b

John Feffer: Our Suicide Bombers

[John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and writes its regular World Beat column. His past essays, including those for Tomdispatch.com, can be read at his website. Kathryn Zickuhr contributed research assistance to this article.] The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he

John B. Judis: Will Obama be brought low by the same forces that irreparably damaged Clinton and Carter?

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] The Obama administration is increasingly being compared to the Carter and Clinton administrations--and the comparisons are not meant to be favorable. Both of those earlier administrations stumbled seriously during their first two years, with dire consequences for their legislative agenda and for their party. I expect, and hope, that Barack Obam

Susan Jakes: China Behind the Headlines--Xu Zhiyong

A few days ago China Beat suggested readings about the disappearance of legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong in Beijing. China Beat contributor Susan Jakes, who has known Xu since 2004, contributed the following comment. Earlier this year, a graduate of his country's most prestigious law school with an impressive record of public service, a comfortable academic post at a major university, and a political office he'd won in a trailblazing election summarized his life's mission for