Foreign Affairs
Over at RI Future, diarist PDM has posted a video that, I think, is intended to shock Americans into realizing what their country is becoming, or something like that. Here’s what I don’t understand. PDM, I believe, is a Ron Paul supporter. If a similar incident happened in say Sudan or Zimbabwe or Iran, but…
Moving beyond the world of over-reactions and political drama, has anyone actually read President Bush’s speech to the Israeli Knesset? …We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence, founded on the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” What…
Mark Steyn’s astute observation is applicable to much more than foreign affairs: Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It’s one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks are the end, talks without end. Because that’s what civilized nations like doing — chit-chatting,…
In Israel for the 60th anniversary celebration of its founding, President George W. Bush gave a speech in the Knesset, saying these words: Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along . . . We have heard this…
The United Nations was forced to temporarily suspend aid shipments to Myanmar because the ruling junta confiscated the intial materiel sent, saying that it preferred to distribute aid “with its own resources“. In order, presumably, to control exactly who receives the badly needed food and supplies. Because of unprecedented and unconscionable foot-dragging by Myanmar’s government,…
We’ve heard a lot from Democrats for, what, the last 8 or so years, about how the U.S. should listen more to the “international community.” Maybe we should (h/t): The information found in the computers of the deceased leader of the rebel Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), Raúl Reyes, was not manipulated by Colombian authorities,…
While many pundits still expect the U.S. to make a leftward move in November, it’s interesting to note that political ground continues to be gained by the right in some important Western European countries. The latest example being the local elections in Great Britain: Winning the London mayoral contest is expected to cap an historic…
Front-page headline in the Sunday Providence Journal: “U.S. slow to react to food crisis.” Page A13 detail (emphasis added): But administration officials and legislative aides acknowledge that they have only recently begun to focus on the severity of the problem, and humanitarian groups fear that assistance from the United States, which already supplies about half…
Trade isn’t a topic on which I can express all of the relevant arguments, but this suggestion from University of Maryland School of Business Professor Peter Morici sounds reasonable to me: China is the biggest problem. It subsidizes foreign purchases of its currency, the yuan, more than $460 billion a year, making Chinese products artificially…
Charles Krauthammer broached a chilling subject yesterday: The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitability going to break down. The inevitable has arrived. … The “international…