Roundup: Media's Take

Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier: Kennan Had a Vision. Things Aren't So Clear Now.

[Derek Chollet is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. James Goldgeier is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at George Washington University. They are co-authors of "America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11."] James Monroe had one, and so should we. That seems to be the theory behind the rampant and premature speculation among national security wonks about what kind of new doctrine President Obama or

Roger Pulvers: The self-serving memoirs of politicians

Japanese politicians are known for their perseverance and ingenuity, and the Diet may well be the last place in the country still offering lifetime employment. Ex-prime ministers effortlessly retain their seats and most of their influence. It's a phenomenon that politicians in other democracies can only look on with envy and awe. Now some Japanese leaders are bolstering their popularity, while augmenting their income, by publishing books. A book by ruling L

Brian Groom: Language a great leader makes

[Brian Groom is the FT’s comment and analysis editor.] Whatever happened to the art of political phrase-making? The leaders of the developed world were on show this week at the Group of Eight summit in Toyako, Japan. Faced with the triple challenge of a food, oil and financial crisis, their response was as tongue-tied as it was ineffectual. “We saw eye to eye,” was all Yasuo Fukuda, Japan’s prime minister, could muster as he sought to look positively at an outcome that

Tim Shipman: Barack Obama will chase John F Kennedy's mantle when he comes to Europe

[Tim Shipman is Washington Bureau Chief at the Sunday Telegraph.] The Democrat candidate has picked Germany, the country where the Iraq war most strained relations with America, for what is billed as a major address on transatlantic relations. That choice is also deliberately reminiscent of Kennedy's address in West Berlin during one of the bleakest periods of the Cold War in 1963, when he declared "Ich bin ein Berliner" - I am a Berliner. The

Michael Lind: Jesse Helms is not dead

Having devoted his career to shocking and outraging American liberals, the late North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms continues to provoke them from his grave. Progressive journals and blogs are full of Helms horror stories. How he tried to make Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun cry by singing "Dixie" in the Senate elevator. How he won reelection against a black opponent by means of an ad showing the hands of a white man who had allegedly lost a job because of affirmative action. How he neve

Guy Sorman: China's Next Revolution

[Mr. Sorman, a contributing editor at City Journal, is the author of 20 books on French politics and international affairs as well as “Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century” (Encounter Books, 2008).] The Chinese Communist leaders would like the rest of the world to believe that China is a unique historical and economic case. Are we to understand China based on some universal rules of human evolution? Or should we share a Sinocentric interpretation of ever

Ross Douthat: The GOP's Carter Moment

[Ross Douthat has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Policy Review, and Details. His latest writings can be found on the Ross Douthat blog.] Very broadly speaking, when you look at people who gravitate toward the two political parties, the GOP tends to be the party of economic optimists - people who are confident about their professional lives, their future prospects, and the country's economic health - and the Democratic P

Jonathan Alter: Ghosts of Politics Past ... Obama's Denver plan is a historic but risky gambit

[Jonathan Alter is a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine, where he has worked since 1983.] From the 1930s to the 1960s, hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of American homes contained two pictures: one of Jesus Christ, the other of Franklin D. Roosevelt. By the late 1960s, FDR's image was giving way to pictures of John F. Kennedy and, especially in African-American homes, of Martin Luther King Jr. Their images still often enjoy pride of place with Jesus.

Peter Dale Scott: Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle’s plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools. [1] Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, wh

Bruce Berkowitz : Maintaining The American Strategic Advantage

[Bruce Berkowitz is author of Strategic Advantage: Challengers, Competitors, and Threats to America's Future (Georgetown University Press, due out Sept. 1, 2008). He is also a contributing editor to FPRI's Orbis. ] Since the end of the Cold War, officials and scholars alike have searched for an adversary or problem with foreign origins to serve as an organizing concept for U.S. national security the way the Soviet threat did during the Cold War. Yet every

Dick Morris: Obama Fakes Right

The list of issues on which Barack Obama has flipped now that the primaries are over is long and growing rapidly. He says he believes in a Second Amendment right to bear arms. He now opposes late-term abortion. He suddenly is a devotee of using faith-based institutions to deliver public services. He now says that he won’t raise Social Security taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. In the primary, he said he’d eliminate the threshold

Daniel Henninger: Will Obama Let the Sunshine In?

How perfect it was that while running for president in 2008, the 40th anniversary of "1968," Barack Obama should denounce the 1960s. His candidacy and his times are bland compared to what was happening then, or so everyone thought. The year 1968 had a torrent of cataclysmic political events, each of which might have destabilized any other year. We just passed Robert Kennedy's assassination, and before that the Paris student riots in May 1968. Up next month, th

Edmund Blair: Iran’s military warnings ... what does history tell us?

It can be an unnerving experience wandering among the graves of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, just outside Tehran. Photographs of the dead from the 1980-88 war with Iraq, “martyrs” as they are called here, stare out in seemingly unending rows. Often horrifyingly young. Many tombs are tended as if the dead died yesterday. Flowers are fresh. Small Korans are tucked into neat glass cabinets that serve as headstones. For a nation which still weeps for Hussein, one of the 12 Shi’ite Ima

Robert Nedelkoff: Ich Bin Ein…..Halt!

I rather suspect Sen. Barack Obama is welcoming former Gov. Jesse Ventura’s reported plans to run against Al Franken and Sen. Norm Coleman for the latter’s seat. After all, once “The Mind” starts making the rounds of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, the attention of the American public will be diverted not only from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s latest faux pas regarding the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, but also from the latest example of Obama’s tendency to overreach himself in spectacular

Gregor Peter Schmitz: Obama hopes to go where JFK went before

[Dr. Gregor Peter Schmitz is director of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Transatlantic Office in Brussels.] Barack Obama wants to hold a keynote speech on transatlantic relations in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate during his visit later this month. Spiegel Online has learned that he plans to outline a new foreign policy that consults partners more, but also makes clear demands on Europe. When is he coming, who will he meet and, more importantly, what will he say? For d

Alex Spillius: Barack Obama should be wary of donning John F Kennedy's mantle

[Alex Spillius has written articles published in The Daily Telegraph (Washington Correspondent) and The Sunday Telegraph.] When John F Kennedy chose to accept the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1960 before a crowd of 50,000 at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, his brother Robert worried - needlessly, as it turned out - that he would not fill the seats. No such concerns exist for Barack Obama, who has announced he will be the first nominee since JFK, t

Bret Stephens: Obama's Nixon Reprise

[Bret Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.] Richard Nixon came to office with a rumored secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. Maybe Barack Obama's plan to end the war in Iraq is going to wind up being a secret, too. The presumptive Democratic nominee set off media firecrackers last week by hinting at further refinements to his strategy for withdrawal. Previous strategies include his January 2007 call for a complete withdrawal by March 2008

Kathy G.: The prosecution of George W. Bush for murder

[Kathy G. is a shrill feminist, bleeding heart liberal, hardcore policy wonk, political junkie, ardent cinephile, and lover of 19th century novels. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two loveable mutts, where she is attempting, amidst numerous diverting distractions, to complete a Ph.D. in the social sciences.] One of the most memorable cinematic experiences I've had in the past several was the brilliant neorealist Romanian drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The film tells

Laura Miller: The works that have influenced Obama illustrate that he would be the most literary president in recent memory -- and one likely to govern from the center

... If Obama is elected, he'll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory. Although his boyhood and youth in Hawaii and Indonesia were not especially bookish, Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. "I had tons of books," he told his biographer, David Mendell ("Obama: From Promise to Power"), about this tim

Alex Spillius: Barack Obama to emulate John F Kennedy with Democratic nomination acceptance speech

[Alex Spillius has written articles published in The Daily Telegraph (Washington Correspondent) and The Sunday Telegraph.] The Illinois senator's traditional, prime time end-of-convention speech is being switched to Invesco Field, the home of the Denver Broncos, from a smaller indoor sports arena hosting the rest of the Democratic national convention. It will be the first time in 48 years that a nominee from either major party has moved to a bigger venue.