Global Paradigms

Business Times - 31 Jan 2012 Economic nationalism is back This time round, it's bipartisan, with both the Democrats and Republicans standing up to China By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WE TAKE it for granted that the current political discourse in the US is dominated by the struggle for power between the Democrats and the Republicans, and the ideological clash between the 'liberals' and the 'conservatives' - and their many respective sub-groups and orientations. But a more traditional way of studying the major battles in American politics is to apply an ideological dichotomy that goes back to the founding of the republic and the great political divide between 'Jeffersonians' and 'Hamiltonians' - which seems to be more relevant than ever these days as the American political and economic systems are going through another historic transformation once again. The conflict between the Federalists who were led by Alexander Hamilton (who would become ...

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org) Source URL (retrieved on Jan 30, 2012): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/obama-vs-the-hawks-iran-6419 Obama vs. the Hawks on Iran | More [1] | January 30, 2012 Leon Hadar [2] The mainstream media is again reporting the conventional wisdom: A nuclear Iran would pose a direct threat to U.S. security interests and an “existential threat” to Israel, and anyone who opposes bombing Iran is an “appeaser” and “anti-Israeli.” This dominant narrative is also reinforcecd by the cast of a popular reality-television show, The Republican Presidential Debate. Not an episode goes by without Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum bashing President Obama as an enabler of a new Holocaust with Ahmadinejad as Hitler. But Obama has allowed his own policy opaqueness to enable the let’s-bomb-Iran crowd, who echo the lines written by the Likud government, to fill the void and dominate the discourse. Obama has asserted that a nuclear I...