Roundup: Media's Take

Jim Leach: Can We Restore Compromise and Civility to Politics?

[Jim Leach, a former 15-term Republican member of Congress, is chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Leach was recently honored with the Search for Common Ground's "Common Ground Award" for outstanding accomplishments in conflict resolution, negotiation, community, and peace-building.] As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I have been crisscrossing the country speaking on the subject of civility and its centrality to American histor

George F. Will: Could there be a Tet Offensive in Afghanistan?

[George F. Will is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing about foreign and domestic politics and policy.] Once when the French statesman Duc de Richelieu (1766-1822) was planning a military campaign, an officer placed a finger on a map, saying: "We shall cross the river at this point." Richelieu replied: "Excellent, sir, but your finger is not a bridge." The difference between planning and accomplishing in war is on many minds as the Obama

Yevgeny Bazhanov: Assange and the Anarchist War Against the U.S.

[Yevgeny Bazhanov is vice chancellor of research and international relations at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.] In the late 1960s, I attended a university in Singapore. My dormitory roommate was a 19-year-old American student. He hung pictures of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong on the wall and spent days on end writing a treatise about when and how the “rotten capitalist system” in the United States would be overthrown. In the 1970s, I worked as the So

Tim Rutten: Iraq's war on Christians

[Tim Rutten is an American journalist who has been writing for the Los Angeles Times since the 1970s.] As much of the world once more prepares to celebrate the birth of Christ, it is a melancholy fact that many of the most ancient churches established in his name are being pushed to the brink of oblivion across the region where their faith was born. The culprits are Salafist Islam's increasingly virulent intolerance, the West's convenient indifference and, in the case o

Jonathan Alter: Holbrooke: An American in Full

[Jonathan Alter is columnist for Newsweek and author of "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope."] The tributes to Richard Holbrooke now pouring in are out of proportion to the various positions he held over the years as an assistant secretary and ambassador. They are more befitting a cabinet officer or even head of state than a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, arguably the most grueling and thankless job in the whole government

Derek Chollet: Holbrooke: A Historian at Heart

[Derek Chollet is principal deputy director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff.] Richard Holbrooke will always be remembered as his generation's premier diplomat and statesman -- a doer. But he also was a person who had a keen sense of the past and the role memory plays in defining today's world -- he was a historian at heart. Holbrooke loved history. He loved books and arguments, stories and sweeping narratives. In that sense he shares so much with the his

David Rothkopf: On the Death of a Wise Man

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.] There will be a thousand eulogies for Richard Holbrooke. Heads of state and foreign ministers, journalists, and chief executives, movie stars and Foreign Service officers will remember him vividly even if they only knew him briefly. They will remember him that way because Richard Holbrooke was one of those great and complex characters who filled up every

Michael Hirsh: Holbrooke: An Appreciation

[Michael Hirsh is chief correspondent for National Journal.] Right up until the end, he was the old Dick Holbrooke, touchy and vain about his reputation, acutely aware of what the media were saying about him. In an interview with me on December 3, shortly before he fell ill, Holbrooke insisted that his tense relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai had never really gone off the rails, although virtually every pundit in Washington was writing that it had. "I was not the p

Ray D. Madoff: Give Up on the Estate Tax

[Ray D. Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, is the author of “Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead.”] ...[The estate] tax, first enacted in 1916, was never intended to be simply a device for raising revenue. Rather, it was meant to address the phenomenon of a small number of Americans controlling large amounts of the country’s wealth — which was considered a national problem. As Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have concentrat

Kori N. Schake: Bob Gates Is Obama's Machiavelli (In a Good Way)

[Kori N. Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She blogs regularly for Shadow Government on Foreign Policy.] When Napoleon marched his army into Berlin in 1806, he took his generals to the tomb of Frederick the Great, saying "hats off, gentlemen; if he were alive we wouldn't be here." The same could be said of the Obama administration's policy on Afghanistan: without Defense Sec. Robert Gates, we would not be here. Over the weekend, the Obama

Bret Stephens: Europe Needs a Tea Party

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Once upon a not-very-long-ago time, Europe was the land of the future. In 2005, American trendspotter Jeremy Rifkin published "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream." The same year, Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid came out with "The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy.&q

Gideon Rachman: America should give Assange a medal

[Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times.] After two weeks of WikiLeaking, many Americans want to see Julian Assange locked up. Instead, they should give the man a medal. Of course, it is embarrassing and awkward to have all these secret diplomatic cables published. Mr Assange certainly seems to be no fan of the US. Nonetheless, he and WikiLeaks have done America a massive favour, by inadvertently debunking decades-old conspiracy theories about its

Per Wirtén: So terrorism has just come to Sweden? Get real

[Per Wirtén writes for several Swedish newspapers, and co-founded the progressive political magazine Arena.] On Saturday, an Iraqi-born Swede, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, from the small provincial town of Tranås, travelled to Stockholm to spread death among the houses there. For the next 24 hours we all thought the same thing: suppose he hadn't fumbled with his tailpipe bombs. Suppose all six he was wearing had exploded, not just one. In public comments and in private conversation

Hans Rosling: 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes [video, 4 minutes 48 seconds]

[Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinsk

Robert L. Borosage: The Great Tax Reform Mirage

[Robert L. Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future. The organizations were launched by 100 prominent Americans to develop the policies, message and issue campaigns to help forge an enduring majority for progressive change in America.] David Brooks is always a good marker of establishment conventional wisdom. Today, in a

Richard Reeves: It’s Morning in China

[Richard Reeves writes for Truthdig.] PALO ALTO, Calif.—In 1982, Richard Nixon told me he thought that by the middle of this century the world would be dominated by Asians, primarily Chinese. He reminisced about a conversation with China’s leader, Mao Zedong, in which Mao said 300 million Chinese would be willing to die for that goal—and 300 million Americans would not. Nixon was a gifted global analyst and a racist. During a two-hour conversation, he said a confrontati

Joel Wit: Time to Get Serious About North Korea

[Joel Wit is a visiting fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the founder of its North Korea website, 38North.] As James Steinberg, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, leaves for Beijing this week to discuss North Korea's most recent provocation, it is tempting to describe his trip using time-worn quotations from two well-known foreign-policy experts: Yogi Berra (it's "déjà vu all over again") and Albert Einstein (t

Anne Applebaum: In Britain, Outrage Without a Thoughtful Outlet

[Anne Applebaum writes a column for the WaPo.] In the photograph that appeared the following day, her mouth was open, her eyes were wide, and she seemed to be shouting as her car window shattered. But those who know her insist that the Duchess of Cornwall - Camilla Parker Bowles, wife of Prince Charles - was not frightened by the demonstrators who attacked her car during a demonstration-turned-riot in London late last week: She was angry.... Still, this kind of violence

David Brooks: Ben Franklin’s Nation

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] ...American culture was built on the notion of bourgeois dignity. We’ve always been lacking in aristocratic grace and we’ve never had much proletarian consciousness, but America did produce Ben Franklin, one of the original spokesmen of middle-class values. It did produce Horatio Alger, who told stories about poor boys and girls who rose to middle-class respectability. It does produce a nonstop flow of self-help leaders, from Dale Carnegie

Bruce Fein: Slouching Towards Tyranny

[Bruce Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General and General Counsel to the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan and author of the book, American Empire: Before the Fall.] The state of civil liberties and national security in the United States is alarming. In the American Empire, the former are routinely crippled or lacerated in the false name of the latter. Trust in government plunges. Dangers are magnified manifold to wound constitutionally venera