Roundup: Media's Take

David C. Kang: Korea's New Cold War

[David C. Kang is professor of international relations and business and director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California. His latest book is East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (Columbia University Press, 2010).] The South Korean military held two exercises using live ammunition in late December as a show of force and resolve in response to North Korea’s shelling of Yeonpyeong island in November. Tensions have been high on

Gideon Rachman: Think Again ... American Decline

[Gideon Rachman is chief foreign-affairs commentator for the Financial Times and author of Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety.] "We've Heard All This About American Decline Before." This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and com

Walter F. Mondale: Resolved: Fix the Filibuster

[Walter F. Mondale, the 42nd vice president, was a Democratic senator from Minnesota from 1964 to 1976.] WE all have hopes for the New Year. Here’s one of mine: filibuster reform. It was around this time 36 years ago — during a different recession — that I was part of a bipartisan effort to reform Senate Rule 22, the cloture rule. At the time, 67 votes were needed to cut off debate and thus end a filibuster, and nothing was getting done. After long negotiations, a compromise lowered

Daniel Henninger: Popes, Atheists and Freedom

[Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.] This being the season of hope, Islamic extremists of course have been engaged in their annual tradition of blowing up Christian churches. An attack by a radical Muslim sect on two churches in northern Nigeria killed six people on Christmas Eve. On the Philippines' Jolo Island, home to al Qaeda-linked terrorists, a chapel bombing during Christmas Mass injured 11. One of the cent

Stephen Kinzer: End human rights imperialism now

[Stephen Kinzer is a veteran foreign correspondent and the author of Bitter Fruit and Overthrow, among other works. His newest book is Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future.] For those of us who used to consider ourselves part of the human rights movement but have lost the faith, the most intriguing piece of news in 2010 was the appointment of an eminent foreign policy mandarin, James Hoge, as board chairman of Human Rights Watch. Hoge has a huge task, and not simpl

Martin Kettle: What Harold Macmillan could teach David Cameron

[Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian.] It must be a close-run thing whether David Cameron retains a distinct political memory of Harold Macmillan. The prime minister was an undergraduate when his veteran predecessor died 24 years ago this week at the age of 92. More pertinently, Cameron was only 13 when, in the summer of 1980, the long retired Macmillan – Conservative prime minister from 1957-63 – sent the remarkable 11-page private warning to Margaret Thatcher abou

John Kampfner: Who will fight Europe's last dictator?

[John Kampfner is chief executive ofIndex on Censorship and author of'Freedom for Sale'.] On the morning after elections were rigged in Europe's last dictatorship and KGB thugs beat up and arrested presidential candidates, the home page of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website led with a tribute to Brian Hanrahan and a warning about the weather. Hanrahan was an excellent journalist and lovely man. Snow was certainly causing havoc at our hapless airports. But the f

Karl Rove: Gitmo Is Not a Recruiting Tool for Terrorists

[Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.] In his Dec. 22 news conference, President Barack Obama claimed that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility was "probably the No. 1 recruitment tool" for al Qaeda and its affiliates. This is an escalation: Earlier this year he merely called it "a tremendous recruiting tool" for Islamic terrorists. But the president is wrong to assign such importance to Gitmo

Parag Khanna: Future shock? Welcome to the new Middle Ages

[The writer is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (Random House, 2011).] Imagine a world with a strong China reshaping Asia; India confidently extending its reach from Africa to Indonesia; Islam spreading its influence; a Europe replete with crises of legitimacy; sovereign city-states holding wealth and driving innovation; and private mercenary armies, religious radicals

Vladimir Ryzhkov: Russia ... The World's Largest Dying Power

[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] As 2010 and the first decade of the 21st century wind to a close, the dominant social, political and economic trends of the year raise serious doubts about Russia’s future survival as a sovereign country. Chinese analysts, who have been closely observing Russia for the past 20 years, perhaps put it best: Russia is the world’s largest dying power. If Russia conti

Fouad Ajami: Obama's Presidency Joins the Fray

[Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007.] In May of this year, President Obama brought together a group of presidential historians for what was supposed to be the first of many meetings. By available accounts, he was curious about the rise of the tea party, curious as to whether there had been precedents for th

Jacob Mchangama and Aaron Rhodes: The Totalitarian EU

[Mr. Mchangama is director of legal affairs at the Danish think tank CEPOS and lectures international human rights law at the University of Copenhagen. Mr. Rhodes is an international human rights advocate and visiting lecturer at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg.] The European Commission this week wisely rejected a proposal to criminalize the denial of Stalin's atrocities. This is a good occasion to re-examine the logic of banning any form of revisionism, including Holocaust denia

Rupert Cornwell: The march of American conservatism

[Rupert Cornwell writes for The Independent.] Christmas came early this year for America's conservatives, and I'm not talking about the midterm "shellacking" suffered by Barack Obama's Democrats. The instrument of their joy was something that's been around ever since the Founding Fathers wrote the constitution: the census. Individual elections come and go; you win some, you lose some. But the long-term conclusions to be drawn from the latest 2010 census – the

Pearl Duncan: Google Goes Shopping for High-Tech Corridors Over/Under NY

[Pearl Duncan covered Newport-Bermuda Yacht Races, Miami-Montego Bay Yacht Races, Caribbean Ocean Racing Circuit (CORC) Races and others, for Sailing, Sail, and Yacht Racing/Cruising Magazines. Now she writes about historic New York and New Yorkers.] ...Google purchased a piece of gold in New York. It bought a building that sits on the high-tech corridor under New York’s streets. It bought a piece of New York’s historical high-tech highway, near the modern high speed, fast-trading s

Michael Lind: Yes, Julian Assange Actually is a Criminal

[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."] In my previous column for Salon, I cited the infatuation of many on the left with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks as evidence of a disturbingly casual approach to the rule of law among Americans of all political persuasions, along with the U.S. policy of targeted assassinations, p

Fyodor Lukyanov: Kremlin's Imperial Ambitions Ended in 2010

[Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.] Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there will certainly be plenty of analyses about what that meant and where the country stands two decades later. But one of the most important results became apparent in 2010: Russia made a psychological break with its past and its former status as an empire. Former Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin — and until recently Pre

Max Blumenthal: The Great Islamophobic Crusade

[Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, the Nation, the Huffington Post, the Independent Film Channel, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and other publications.]Nine years after 9/11, hysteria about Muslims in American life has gripped the country. With it has gone an outburst of ar

Rebecca Solnit: Iceberg Economies and Shadow Selves

[Rebecca Solnit hangs out with climate-change activists, homeless advocates, booksellers, civil libertarians, anti-war veterans, moms, urbanists, Zen monks, and investigative journalists and she sure didn't write this piece for the money.]After the Macondo well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, it was easy enough (on your choice of screen) to see a flaming oil platform, the very sea itself set afire with huge plumes of black smoke rising, and the dark smear of what would become five

Robert Scheer: Speaking Ill of ‘the Best and the Brightest’

[Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig.] One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility. Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke mar

Rick Perlstein: What Haley Barbour's Amnesia Tells Us

[Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus"] "January 7, 1970, dawned clear and bitterly cold, a cold that rarely comes to Mississippi. It was 16 degrees on South Main Street, the trees along the older avenues were seared and deathly, and the water in the potholes of the roads in the Negro section was frozen solid. All ov