Roundup: Media's Take

Barbara Kay: Obama’s Carter-esque foreign policy deployed to Egypt

[Barbara Kay is a columnist with the National Post.] In November, 1979, Richard V. Allen, Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy advisor, commended a just-published magazine article to his boss’s attention. “What you gave me to read was extraordinary!” Reagan told Allen. “Who is this guy Jeane Kirkpatrick?” The “guy,” a political science professor at Georgetown University and a Democrat of the muscularly anti-Communist school, went on to become president Reagan’s ambassador to

Ian Johnson: Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood

[Ian Johnson is a former Beijing bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. His latest book is A Mosque in Munich. (September 2010).] As US-backed strongmen around North Africa and the Middle East are being toppled or shaken by popular protests, Washington is grappling with a crucial foreign-policy issue: how to deal with the powerful but opaque Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, the Brotherhood has taken an increasingly forceful part in the protests, issuing a statement Thursday calling

Philip Hamburger: Are Health-Care Waivers Unconstitutional?

[Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.] The constitutional dispute over the health-care law has thus far centered on the lawfulness of the statute itself — most dramatically when, last week in Florida, a federal judge held the act to be void. Waiting in the wings, however, is another constitutional question, one concerning not the statute, but waivers from it.... As it happens, waivers have a history. In the Middle A

Michael Lind: How Reaganism Actually Started with Carter

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] The hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth has produced disagreement over his policies among conservatives and liberals, but agreement on one point: Reagan's presidency marked the end of one era in American politics and the beginning of a new one. An epochal shift inde

Eugene Robinson: The GOP's Selective Memory on Ronald Reagan

[Eugene Robinson is a columnist for the WaPo.] As we mark the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth, one of our major political parties has become imbued with the Gipper's political philosophy and governing style. I mean the Democrats, of course. The Republican Party tries to claim the Reagan mantle but has moved so far to the right that it now inhabits its own parallel universe. On the planet that today's GOP leaders call home, Reagan would qualify as one of those big-g

Fawaz A. Gerges: The Arab World's Berlin Wall Moment

[Fawaz A. Gerges is the director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. He is author of the forthcoming book, “Obama and the Middle East: Continuity and Change.”] As mass protests rock Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, and Jordan, the omnipotence of the Mukhabarat, or security-controlled state, appears to be crumbling. In particular, the inability of President Hosni Mubarak’s much-feared security apparatus to suppress swelling protesters and retain the status quo

Laurence H. Tribe: On Health Care, Justice Will Prevail

[Laurence H. Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of “The Invisible Constitution.”] THE lawsuits challenging the individual mandate in the health care law, including one in which a federal district judge last week called the law unconstitutional, will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court, and pundits are already making bets on how the justices will vote. But the predictions of a partisan 5-4 split rest on a misunderstanding of the court and the

Editorial in the Financial Times: A European date with Arab history

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote the poet William Wordsworth of the French Revolution. Of course, he had the events of 1789 in mind – the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of the absolute monarchy, the demolition of feudal institutions, the declaration of the rights of man – rather than what followed: the Terror of 1793-94 and a Europe laid waste by Napoleon’s wars of imperial conquest. Still, if Wordsworth were writing today, he would surely celebrate the political awakening

Harris Mylonas and Wilder Bullard: This is no 1989 moment for the Arab world

[Harris Mylonas is assistant professor of political science and international affairs. Wilder Bullard is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the George Washington University.] Analogies will be drawn in the coming weeks between the recent popular uprisings, most notably in Egypt, and the events beginning in 1989 and continuing into the early 1990s that brought democracy to much of the former Eastern bloc. In what is known as the third wave of democratisation (the first being in

Romesh Ratnesar: The U.S. and Mubarak: What Would Reagan Do?

[Ratnesar, a TIME contributing editor-at-large, is a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War.] "You will be visiting Berlin at a time of ferment," Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to his boss, Ronald Reagan, on May 11, 1987. The confidential memo was included in the briefing materials given to Reagan before a trip to Europe, which would include a speech

Shirin Sadeghi: Farewell Friday: Tahrir Square Has Spoken

[Shirin Sadeghi is an Iranian-American writer and Middle East expert. She formerly worked as a journalist for the BBC World Service and Al Jazeera English. She is also a columnist for Pakistan Today, Pakistan's national daily newspaper.] Yet another Anglo-American-backed dictator is set to fall from grace. The Shah of Iran, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein -- they all refused to concede defeat. And they all fell down. Hosni Mubarak will, too, if he doesn't review his hist

Andrew C. McCarthy: Don’t Count on Egypt’s Army

[Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.] ‘My name is Khalid Islambouli,” the assassin thundered. “I have slain Pharaoh, and I do not fear death!” This was at an annual state parade in Cairo on October 6, 1981. Islambouli, swelling with a delirious pride, had just strafed the reviewing stand with bullets, killing Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and hurtling his nat

Andrew Cohen: The Mikkanen Nomination and the White Man

[Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.] According to the latest census figures, Oklahoma continues to have the second-largest Native American population in the country (next to Alaska). The reasons for this are as clear as they are old. The "Trail of Tears" -- the forced deportation of tens of thousands of native peoples from the southeastern states

Ben Heineman Jr.: The Future of Egypt and the Riddles of History

[Ben Heineman Jr. has held top positions in government, law and business. He is the author of High Performance with High Integrity.] "History is being made." So say the people, the commentators, and the policy makers in Egypt and around the globe. But, of course, "history" itself is no clear guide, and indeed offers many imperfect analogies for consideration as presidents and people--participants and observers--seek their bearings. Afte

Michael Kinsley: Obama Channeling Reagan? Let's Hope Not

[Michael Kinsley, a former editorial page editor of The Times, writes a column for Politico.] Time magazine's cover this week features a Photoshopped picture of Ronald Reagan with his arm around President Obama. The cover story purports to answer the question of why Obama is channeling Reagan, a question no one was asking until Time brought it up. It's a standard newsmagazine technique to add a "why" to the thesis of a story. It makes it seem deeper, even while skipping ov

Fred Thompson: What Set Reagan Apart

[Fred Thompson, who represented Tennessee in the U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2003, is an actor, lawyer, and political commentator.] ...As president, Obama has to weigh the realpolitik consequences of undermining Hosni Mubarak’s regime. But he also has a duty to act as the world’s most powerful spokesman for freedom and democracy. Balancing these incongruous responsibilities is part of the job. Some presidents do it well; some do not. Ronald Reagan did it very well. What’s

Fareed Zakaria: Egypt's Real Parallel to Iran's Revolution

[Fareed Zakaria writes a columnist for the WaPo.] A specter is haunting the West. In 1979, the United States watched a street revolution in the Middle East and saw its stalwart ally, Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi, ousted, only to be replaced by a theocratic Islamic Republic. Now, watching another street revolution in another Middle Eastern country, many people seem spooked by this memory. Fears of an Islamic takeover are not limited to Glenn Beck, with his predictions that the fall of H

Reuel Marc Gerecht: How Democracy Became Halal

[Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former Middle Eastern specialist in the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Wave: Man, God and the Ballot Box in the Middle East.”] IN the Western study of medieval Islamic history, the institution of iqta — land grants from the sovereign to his soldiers — once loomed large, because scholars searched for reasons behind the Muslim failure to develop feudalism,

Fred Hiatt: Obama needs a freedom agenda he can believe in

[Fred Hiatt is the editorial page editor of The Post.] If the Obama administration had been following all along what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described as its policy here Saturday, U.S. officials might know more about the leaders of the extraordinary demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Instead, when it came to nurturing civil society in Egypt the past two years, Clinton's State Department deferred to President Hosni Mubarak. If he didn't want State

Mary O'Grady: Will Cuba Be the Next Egypt?

[Mary Anastasia O'Grady is a member of the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal and writes editorial columns on Latin America, trade and international economics.] Developments in Egypt over the last two weeks brought Cuba to my mind. Why does a similar rebellion against five decades of repression there still appear to be a far-off dream? Part of the answer is in the relationship between the Castro brothers—Fidel and Raúl—and the generals. The rest is explained by the regime's