Obama’s Europe Neglect Could Bring Bush Nostalgia
My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, "Europe's Obama Fatigue," is online. Despite George W. Bush's defiant "you're with us or you're against us" public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe. [...] It would ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 30, 2009 06:10
A Case for Humility in Afghanistan?
Stephen Coll, president of the New America Foundation, has an article in Foreign Policy making the case for more humble objectives in Afghanistan. In the article he criticizes both the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U. S. forces in Afghanistan: To succeed, counterinsurgency approaches require deep, supple, and adaptive understanding of local conditions. And yet, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 18, 2009 10:50
Why We Drive on the Right – And Others Don’t
Monday, Samoa will switch to driving on the left side of the road in order to benefit from cheap used cars from Australia and New Zealand. This gave Time's Randy James to explain, "Why Don't We All Drive on the Same Side of the Road?" It's especially odd that two-thirds of the world drives on the right, since most of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 4, 2009 08:15
Lockerbie Bomber Released
As has been anticipated, the man who murdered 270 people by bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, has been given a compassionate release from prison so that he may spend his dying days with his family. [caption id="attachment_40972" align="aligncenter" width="550" caption="Abdel Basset al-Megrahi (L) walks up the stairs to a waiting jet at Glasgow airport August 20, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 20, 2009 12:35
Health Reform: What Liberals Want
Kevin Drum seconds Alex Massie that a British-style nationalized health system is not a politically feasible option in the United States. Indeed, even Democrats don't want that: [W]ith the exception of a few outliers, the liberal community really, truly doesn't want a fully government owned and operated healthcare system like the NHS. We want a government-funded healthcare system like Medicare or ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 12, 2009 10:36
Planning: USA vs. China
Matt Yglesias notes that Shanghai has a long-term plan for expanding their subway system and laments that we're not so forward thinking here in America. What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 10, 2009 12:48
You Know You Got it When You’re Going Insane
Norm Geras (who just celebrated his 6th blogging anniversary) points us to this hilariously annoying SPIEGEL interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson: SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let's talk about the future of journalism. Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don't use the word journalism. SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 28, 2009 12:07
Unforced
This morning in the Washington Post Stephen Stromberg echoes a point I made over at my place yesterday about President Obama's flat joke about the purchase of Alaska, made during his Moscow visit: But Obama probably also shouldn’t have said this. The president joked to a group of Russian businessmen about how Czar Alexander II gave America “a pretty good deal ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 9, 2009 10:06
Obama in Russia: Good Start or False Start?
Yesterday Presidents Obama and Medvedev called for sharp reductions in the numbers of nuclear weapons in each of their countries arsenals: July 6 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev called for a reduction of their nuclear arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads and between 500 and 1,100 delivery vehicles, according to a “joint understanding” ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 7, 2009 09:14
Is the World Smiling Back?
Over the weekend North Korea fired a volley of short range missiles into the Sea of Japan in defiance of UNSC resolutions, heightening tensions between North Korea and its neighbors, South Korea and Japan. The Guardian Council has certified the election results in Iran and President Ahmadinejad and the “hardliners” that he represents seem even more firmly in control ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 6, 2009 10:24
Making Germany Happy
Yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to an article in Der Spiegel complaining about “Obama's mistakes”: Just as the US public initially rallied behind the war President Bush -- even to the point of re-electing him -- Americans have now thrown their support behind the debt president Obama. The mistakes of the Bush administration are now widely accepted. The mistakes of the Obama ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 28, 2009 13:30
The Limits of Realism in the Russo-American Relationship
This morning there's an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by three leading Russian intellectuals, urging the Obama Administration not to allow a return to realism in foreign policy between the United States and Russia to become a rubric under which “American experts serve as the "conservators" of Russian authoritarian traditionalism”: MOSCOW -- As intellectuals and liberal Russians, we have read ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 9, 2009 09:23
Human Development Map is Bunk
Andrew Gelman looks inside the methodology used to construct the widely-circulated "Human Development Index" map and concludes that it's bunk. It turns out that the "index" considers only three elements: Life expectancy at birth, adult literacy and education, and a variant of GDP per capita. It seems that the first two of these are so uniform across the 50 states as ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 21, 2009 09:52
Responding to North Korea
North Korea has moved what they have called a satellite launch vehicle and Japan, South Korea, and the United States believe is a long-range missile into position for launching as early as next week. Japan has announced its intention of shooting the missile down should it near Japanese territory. Japan, South Korea, and the United States are putting ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 26, 2009 13:59
Merging NATO and the EU
Paul Hockenos, editor of Internationale Politik-Global Edition, argues in an intriguing Spiegel piece that the United States should rethink its relationship with NATO and instead focus on the EU. In my New Atlanticist piece "Should Obama Abandon NATO for the EU?," I argue against his false dilemma and point out reasons why it benefits the United States to work with both ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 11, 2009 08:02
