Global Paradigms

As he was drowning politically and personally in scandals that would lead eventually to a humiliating resignation from office, in June 1974 President Richard Nixon took a triumphant seven-day trip to four Arab states and Israel, where, as Time put it, “the huzzas and the hosannas fell like sweet rain.” The magazine suggested that, “coming out of the parched Watergate wasteland of Washington, the praise and the cheers of multitudes were welcome indeed, particularly since each stop, each spectacle, was beamed in living color back to the living rooms of the U.S.” Following on the flight-route of another unpopular and disgraced Republican White House occupant, President George W. Bush decided that since it was raining in the Midwest, in the form of his falling approval ratings, it was time to seek the sunshine of the Middle East, hoping that the television images of his five-day excursion to the region would help salvage his personal and political legacy in the Midwest and the rest of the ...

Please see my recent movie review ("Smart People" and "Redbelt")

The International Affairs Forum published several commentaries on the situation in the Middle East including yours truly. Also checkout my deep thoughts on appeasement and tea, cyclones and sympathy.

Let's liberate Burma American-Jews and Israel Robert Kagan's brain Obama.

Business Times - 13 May 2008 Primaries have highlighted many issues that Republicans will try to use against Obama By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT A NOTE to all you political junkies out there: You thought that the presidential primaries were a lot of fun and you seemed to be enjoying the many televised debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and having great time watching all the nasty campaign commercials on television and YouTube ('It's 3:00am . . .'). And now that we are reaching the finish of the Hillary-Obama race, you feel a certain let-down, a post-primaries depression. Well, not to worry, folks! The Main Event - Barack Obama vs John McCain is about to start, and it would make the primaries look like a campaign for the student government in first grade. Indeed, we still have to endure a few more Democratic primaries this month, but we can already get a sense of the shape of things to come. After a Hamas spokesman suggested that his group 'loves...

Read my review of The Visitor on Takimag.com and my post and post on @TAC.

Business Times - 08 May 2008 Democratic presidential endgame is in sight After a rock-solid victory in the North Carolina primary, Obama looks set to win By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT SENATOR Barack Obama, the frontrunner in the Democratic race for party's presidential nomination, is back in business, and after a rock-solid victory in the North Carolina primary and a narrow loss in Indiana, he could be on his way to winning the Big Prize. 'Tonight we stand less than 200 delegates away from winning the Democratic nomination for President of the United States,' Mr Obama told his supporters in North Carolina, promising to lead the Democrats towards victory against presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the general election on November. During several weeks of gruelling election campaigning, Mr Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, had suffered major electoral set-backs and public relations fiascos, and seemed to be ...

Business Times - 06 May 2008 Global economics hogs US election campaign Clinton, Obama now portray themselves as protectionists and China bashers By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE recognition that American businesses had cut fewer jobs (20,000) than expected (about 90,000) in April and the perception that the US central bank seemed to be containing the threat of a financial meltdown may have helped boost the sense of mild optimism among investors in recent days. Indeed, there seems to be a feeling in the financial community that things are starting to get better and that, perhaps, the financial crisis is coming to an end. That sentiment has been reflected in the somewhat bullish mood in the stock markets and in growing expectations on Wall Street that the value of the various financial products will start climbing up soon. At the same time, officials in the Bush Administration and Republican lawmakers are hoping, wishing and praying that the US$117 billion in federal tax rebat...

Two of my recent post on @TAC Mouse Defeat McCain and Media Unaccmplished.

May 1, 2008 Need a (Nuclear) Umbrella? Call Hillary by Leon Hadar One of the central tenets of the US containment strategy during the Cold War was the belief in Moscow as well as in the capitals of America's allies across the Atlantic and the Pacific that in a crisis with the Communist powers, Americans would risk New York, Chicago and Los Angeles for London and Bonn, Tokyo and Seoul. Indeed, US strategy of "extended deterrence" – encapsulated in the metaphor of a "nuclear umbrella" – worked since the Soviet Union was presented with a credible threat of two-front war if they decided to launch nuclear attacks against America's allies whose security was considered to be a core US national interest. The extension of America's nuclear umbrella into Western Europe and East Asia became an integral part of formal agreements with the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Japan and South Korea that had been approved by Congress following an e...

A reminder

I attended an interesting discussion on U.S. relationship with Russia and China that was held by the National Interest magazine on Thursday, during which Harry Harding raised an important point (and this is not a direct quote): American officials, lawmakers and pundits tend to portary U.S. policy moves towards China (and other powers) as responses to Chinese (and other powers’) policies. Hence, the focus of foreign policy debates in Washington is on why China is doing this or that, say, why are the Chinese saving too much and not spending enough, as opposed to why America is doing this or that, say, why are Americans spending too much and not saving enough. We supposedly react to their actions. Harding insisted that at the end of the day, U.S. foreign policy is determined by the way that we define it. That definition explains why we feel the need to respond (or not to respond) to what the Chinese (and other powers) are doing. (read the rest here and more here. )

The May-November Surprise(s) Posted on April 23rd, 2008 by Leon Hadar Some of my friends in the reality-based community who have been celebrating the alleged (read the rest)

Business Times - 24 Apr 2008 When will the US presidential race really begin? By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT SENATOR Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania - a crucial 'swing' state in the general presidential election - on Tuesday. Apparently, the margin of victory over her rival, Senator Barack Obama, about 10 per cent, is a number that seemed to have played well in the media-driven game of expectations. Indeed, most pundits had argued on the eve of the primary that Mrs Clinton would need to win by more than 8 per cent in order to gain the momentum she needed in order to continue in her fight for her party's presidential nomination. And she did very well among important demographic groups: women, blue collar workers, Catholics, Jews and older voters. Mrs Clinton achieved her victory in Pennsylvania after facing a younger and more charismatic figure who had enough resources to outspend her during the month-long campaign in a sta...

I’m not sure what to make of Hillary’s victory in Pennsylvania. We’ll probably have to wait for the reactions from those superdelegates. Unless the Democrats want to commit electoral suicide, they need to conclude this race sooner than later. In any case, some of the results of the exit polls on CNN and CNBC suggest that Iraq didn’t seem to play a major issue in the campaign. But Simon Jenkins in a report from Washington in the Briish Guardian provides a very original commentary on the impact of the Iraq War, etc. on the election campaign, arguing that the War is the conceptural framework for this presidential race: Americans still do not travel abroad, and rely on television news for their knowledge of foreign places, which they continue to regard with bizarre suspicion. Hence a world view is lumped in with defence and security in a collective paranoia. And a candidate’s stance on foreign policy is a proxy for his or her character. (read the rest)

Next Year in Jerusalem? Monday, April 21st in Election, Politics by Leon Hadar Bill Kristol is trying to convice the readers of the New York Times on Monday that unlike the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, John McCain “might be called a Zionist,” adding that in this election campaign there is “a clear choice of worldviews here — and not just for Jews, but for all Americans.” (read the rest)

Business Times - 22 Apr 2008 In search of the Next Big Foreign Policy Idea Will a tripolar global system emerge if the US were to lose its global hegemonic position? By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT HISTORIAN Paul Kennedy's 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000' (New York: Random House, 1987), which was published during the final years of the Cold War, succeeded in doing to geo-politics what Mao's Little Red Book had done to the thoughts of the communist Chinese leader. It helped popularise the somewhat esoteric topic of discussion in stuffy gentlemen's clubs in Victorian London or Bismarck's Berlin and turned it into a trendy topic of conversation among more diverse American and international audiences. Rising to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, the heavy 'Rise and Fall' (close to 700 pages) became a book that members of the cool chattering class were required to read (or at ...

Business Times - 18 Apr 2008 Lost opportunities caused by Iraq war The rising war expenditure and its impact on the US economy is coming under scrutiny By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT GROVER Norquist, who heads the Americans for Tax Reform organisation, is an influential Washington activist who promotes the agenda of fiscal conservatives. These folks believe that the US federal government should cut its spending and reduce the tax burden on the American people. Thus, he recently told the New York Times that he decided to jump aboard the team of presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain. Mr McCain 'won, and he's the tax cutter, so I am with him', he explained. But when the Times reporter noted that much of the increase in government spending by the Bush administration has been a result of the rising costs of the war in Iraq, Mr Norquist was quick to dismiss the notion that there was any direct link between the war in Iraq and the economic prob...

According to the Jerusalem Post report on Wednesday’s televised debate, the two Democratic presidential candidates are now committed not only to use U.S. military in retaliation against a possible Iranian nuclear attack on Israel but are also ready to extend the U.S. nuclear umbrella to Israel and the entire Middle East: (read the rest) Follow-up on the topic here.

Do you want to know why “Iraqi Units Flee Post, Despite American’s Plea” as the New York Times reported on Wednesday?