Roundup: Media's Take

Jonathan Schell: From Hiroshima to Fukushima

[Jonathan Schell is the Doris Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, an analysis of people power, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.] ...Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s fifty-four nuclear power reactors were shut down. At this writing, three of them have lost coolant

Alexis Madrigal: The Electric Taxi Company You Could Have Called in 1900

[Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.] On August 31, 1894, two young men rolled their new electric car onto what passed for a road in Philadelphia. It would have been hot and sticky outside, a Friday at the end of a long summer that had seen an intense heat wave suffocate the city for most of July. Piles of manure would have dotted the stones. excerpt_atlantic.jpgAs the t

Joshua Hammer: Germany's Bomb Problem

[Joshua Hammer is a writer based in Berlin.] Deep in a pine forest in the German state of Brandenburg, 30 miles south of Berlin, a team of explosives experts gathers around a large rusted cylinder half-buried in the earth. “You’re looking at a French-made, 220-millimeter artillery shell,” says Ralf Kirschnick, a German army veteran who served in Bosnia, Croatia, and Somalia in the 1990s. “The fuse is highly unstable,” he says calmly. “The slightest movement could set it off.”

David Brooks: The Ike Phase

[David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the NYT.] On Jan. 20, 1961, John Kennedy delivered his rousing Inaugural Address. But this speech was preceded, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution has reminded us, by an equally important speech: Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address. Kennedy’s speech was an idealistic call to action. Eisenhower’s speech was a calm warning against hubris. Kennedy celebrated courage; Eisenhower celebrated prudence. Kennedy asked the co

John Kerry: The moral imperative of a no-fly zone

[John Kerry is a senator for Massachusetts, former Democratic party presidential candidate and chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee.] Leaders around the world are vigorously debating the advisability of establishing a no-fly zone to stop the violence unfolding in Libya. Some cite Bosnia, where Nato took too long to protect civilian populations in the mid 1990s, as a reason to act. Others remember Rwanda, where President Bill Clinton later expressed regret for not actin

Pepe Escobar: Is Egypt the Future IndoTurkeZil?

[Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.]Three mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the twenty-first century before dying and being embalmed.That much is settle

Paul Mattick: Capitalism's Dismal Future

[Paul Mattick is chair of the department of philosophy at Adelphi University and former editor of the International Journal of Political Economy. This essay is adapted from his book Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism, published this month by the University of Chicago Press.] ...A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns

Robin Simcox: David Cameron’s Bad History

[Robin Simcox is a research fellow at the Centre for Social Cohesion in London.] "I am not a naïve neoconservative who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet,” said British prime minister David Cameron last month. Like most of Europe’s political class, Cameron has a long track record of criticizing neoconservatism. What makes Cameron’s latest criticism noteworthy, however, is that it came at the culmination of the most neoconservative month o

Carl Gershman: The Fourth Wave in the Middle East

[Carl Gershman is president of the National Endowment for Democracy. This article was adapted from a lecture given at New York University on March 1, 2011.] Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that all the great events of the past 700 years—from the Crusades and English wars that decimated the nobles, to the discovery of firearms and the art of printing, to the rise of Protestantism and the discovery of America—had the ineluctable effect of advancing the principle of equality. Politica

Charles Duelfer: America Has Beaten Qaddafi Before

[Charles Duelfer worked in politico-military affairs at the State Department and was the special advisor to the director of central intelligence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He is the author of Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.] As the world debates how best to stop the slaughter in Libya, it's worth remembering that the United States has successfully countered Muammar al-Qaddafi's military before. Qaddafi has a track record of misadventures extendi

David Rothkopf: The Lessons of Japan's Disaster and the Losses It Did and Did Not Produce

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] The images from Japan are both horrifying and irresistibly compelling. Tragedy unfolds in instants. Lives are swept away, fortunes dashed. Black waves sweep ocean-going freighters down city streets. Power plants explode. Entire cities are seemingly wiped off the map.... Perhaps 10,000 lives were lost in this disaster. That is harrowing. But

Jackson Diehl: Will Gaddafi Reverse the Tide of the Arab Spring?

[Jackson Diehl is the deputy editorial page editor of the WaPo.] Ever since Tunisian fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself ablaze 86 days ago, the Arab uprising has been a mutating virus. That is why Moammar Gaddafi — who has set Libya ablaze — has become so important. By now it’s almost hard to remember, but Bouazizi at first inspired not popular protests but copycat self- immolations in Algeria and Egypt. Then the contagion altered: A mass secular movemen

William Tucker: Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl

[Mr. Tucker is author of "Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey" (Bartleby Press, 2010).] Even while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe. Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a longti

Dana Milbank: Rep. King's Red Scare

[Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for the WaPo.] Peter King staged his investigation into the loyalty of Muslim Americans in an appropriate place: a hearing room once used by the House Un-American Activities Committee.... The New York Republican was eager to avoid the Red Scare taint, and he allowed the 84-year-old dean of the House, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan, to open the session with wisdom learned during his time as a chairman. “I kept a picture of Joe McCar

Robert J. Samuelson: The Global Food Crunch

[Robert J. Samuelson is a columnist for the WaPo.] Here’s a question about the Mideast turmoil for future historians: How much did food inflation contribute? We know some basic facts. Middle East countries import 50 percent or more of their wheat, a staple food for many. Beginning in mid-2010, world grain prices exploded. At $8.56 a bushel in February, wheat prices had doubled in eight months. Despite massive subsidies, some higher prices filtered through to consumers. Did that crea

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Fiddling While Libya Burns

[Anne-Marie Slaughter is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.] PRESIDENT Obama says the noose is tightening around Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. In fact, it is tightening around the Libyan rebels, as Colonel Qaddafi makes the most of the world’s dithering and steadily retakes rebel-held towns. The United States and Europe are temporizing on a no-flight zone while the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Gulf Cooperation Council and now the Arab League ha

Ross Douthat: Iraq Then, Libya Now

[Ross Douthat is a columnist for the NYT.] Five years ago, in the darkest days of insurgent violence and Sunni-Shia strife, it seemed as if the Iraq war would shadow American foreign policy for decades, frightening a generation’s worth of statesmen away from using military force. Where there had once been a “Vietnam syndrome,” now there would be an “Iraq syndrome,” inspiring harrowing flashbacks to Baghdad and Falluja in any American politician contemplating an intervention overseas.

Guobin Yang: China’s Gradual Revolution

[Guobin Yang, an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures at Barnard, is the author of “The Power of the Internet in China.”] ABOUT a week after Egyptian protesters forced out President Hosni Mubarak, anonymous calls demanding a similar revolution in China appeared on Web sites hosted outside of China. The unnamed activists asked people to gather every Sunday at designated spots in 13 Chinese cities. The Chinese government responded swiftly, rounding up

Paddy Ashdown: It is time for Europe to back a no-fly zone in Libya

[The writer was high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2002 and 2006.] Commenting on Libya the other day, former British prime minister John Major said “Events alter opinions.” He was right and he should know. At the start of the Bosnian war, very few were calling for military intervention (and the Major government was strenuously resisting it). By the end of the war, almost no one wasn’t. What changed the situation was events – and specifically Srebreni

Nicolas Pelham: The Battle for Libya

[Nicolas Pelham is a senior consultant, based in Jerusalem, for the International Crisis Group. He is the author of A New Muslim Order: The Shia and the Middle East Sectarian Crisis. (April 2011)] ...After the successive attempted coups in the 1970s, Colonel Qaddafi sent the army into Chad, and in the rout that followed, thousands—senior officers among them—were abandoned and, according to still seething soldiers, disowned. Another purge followed in 1993 after generals from the Warf