Global Paradigms

Business Times - 23 Jan 2009 The audacity of pragmatism Obama's inaugural address lacked flourish but revealed an important part of his nature SEVERAL veteran Washington hands who had been around when John F Kennedy delivered his inaugural address in 1961 ('Let the word go forth . . . that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans') and who have studied other famous addresses - Abraham Lincoln ('With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds . . .'), Franklin Delano Roosevelt ('So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . .') and Ronald Reagan ('Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.') - have been complaining of a certain let down after watching Barack Obama give his address. 'It was a downer,...

I agree with most of Meron Benvenisti's conclusions: Despite the revulsion from the operation, one cannot ignore the fact that Israel scored a victory and demonstrated the futility of continuing the Palestinian resistance. Now the Israelis will have to wrestle with the spoils of this victory, with millions of beaten and mourning Palestinians living under a totalitarian, discriminatory regime and with a world that does not reconcile itself to insane violence. A small minority of ashamed Israelis sadly contemplate that stage of the national movement, the one that at its inception embodied so many lofty ideals. A pyrrhic victory indeed.(read the rest )

Business Times - 21 Jan 2009 COMMENTARY New President and a New-New Deal Obama takes office and will bring a new approach to tackling economic issues By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE coming days, weeks, and months could prove to be the best of times, and the worst of times for US President Barack Hussein Obama. After being sworn-in today as the 44th president of the US and as the first African-American to occupy the highest political office in the land, this young, intelligent and charismatic man will enter the White House with a huge groundswell of support from the American public and enormous goodwill from people around the world, all of whom are wishing, hoping and praying that President Obama's 'audacity of hope' that had helped him overcome so many personal obstacles and setbacks in his life, will also help him set the United States on the road towards political, economic and civilisational renewal. Indeed, most Americans, including those who didn't vote ...

Business Times - 20 Jan 2009 Millions hope Barack Obama will change Washington's tone dramatically By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FROM the podium set up between the two grand staircases of the West Steps of the US Capitol, President Barack Hussein Obama will see at noon today (Wednesday, 1am, Singapore time) hundreds of thousands of people listening to his address, many of them applauding, cheering and crying. Before him will be Pennsylvania Avenue that connects the Capitol and the White House, the parade route that he will be travelling later; and the grand national monuments in this city - the Washington Monument, the obelisk for the first president, George Washington; and the memorials for two other great US presidents, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. President Obama will have a panoramic view of a beautiful city that for the next four years will be dominated by his policies as well as by his persona. Even if he fails to achieve any of his stated goals of reviving ...

Notorious(1946) Notorious (2009)

Business Times - 15 Jan 2009 Bush works on his legacy before the curtain falls By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN less than a week, US President George W Bush will be leaving the White House. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Mr Bush's presidency, it seems that 79 per cent of Americans would not miss him. The latest CNN poll found that only one-third of Americans want Mr Bush to play a post-presidency role in public life. Indeed, given the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, the costly and unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and his pure amateurism and incompetence, it is not surprising that most Americans seem to share negative attitudes towards the man who occupied the White House for the last eight years. At the same time, historians have been harsh in their grading the Bush administration, with some of them predicting that he would be considered one of the worst - if not the w...

You don't have to buy into nightmare scenario about the coming collapse of the USA that Russian analyst Igor Panarin has been promoting (Joel Garreau did a better job in partitioning America). But you have to take seriously historian Paul Kennedy's most recent revisiting of his declinism thesis. It makes a lot of sense to me (see for example here and here and here).

Business Times - 13 Jan 2009 Obama gets taste of business as usual Despite his efforts, it's unlikely that he'll be able to get an economic stimulus package approved before February By LEON HADAR AGAINST the backdrop of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, there was concern in Washington and Wall Street that with President George W Bush about to leave town and President-elect Barack H Obama not being here yet, the perception that 'no one was in charge' would take hold and would have a downbeat effect on the depressed financial markets. But once again, Mr Obama has dumbfounded the bearish sceptics through his success in filling the political vacuum during the Interregnum and thus demonstrating to policymakers and investors that while he is not yet occupying the White House and making decisions, he is still able to help set the economic policy agenda and shape national sentiment. In a series of media events, Mr Obama introduced the leading members of his ...

Business Times - 10 Jan 2009 Obamaland's policy wonk Influential intellectual entrepreneur Steve Clemons hopes the new president will 'erase the last eight years' of the Bush administration. By Leon Hadar SITTING in the office of Steven (Steve) Clemons at the New America Foundation, and waiting to interview one of the most hyperactive politicos in Washington, DC, I am stealing a brief glance at my countdown-to-inauguration-day-2009 digital watch I had received from a personal friend. It reads: 31 Days 08 Hrs 39 Min: 46 Sec. That is how they measure political time in Washington these days. We are in the middle of the interregnum, the period of time between the election of a new President of the United States and his inauguration. George W Bush the outgoing president remains in power, but as a lame duck - or, to be more precise, as a dead duck - while the inside-the-beltway crowd (as they call Washington insiders) together with the rest of the country - and the entire univers...

While Israeli officials have stressed that the Gaza operation would be different than the 2006 campaign against Hizbollah in Lebanon, an analysis by Haaretz ' top military correspondent raises doubts (in my mind) about whether the country's political and military leaders are pursuing a clear strategy: After one and a half weeks of fighting the operation is experiencing tension between the immediate goals and ultimate objectives . The immediate goals are destroying rocket launchers, killing fighters and arresting wanted men for interrogation and to swap for Gilad Shalit. The ultimate objectives are a lasting and stable cease-fire, and a long-term end to arms smuggling into Gaza. This tension includes the inherent differences among the three highest-ranking entities behind the operation : the political echelon, and within it the conflicts among the Olmert-Barak-Livni trio; Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi; and Southern Command head Yoav Galant. No subordinate rank is capable of pro...

I like their statement, especially since they quoted me.

In a recent piece I tried to lower the expectations of some of my friends in the reality-based community of foreign policy realists that a President Obama would place the Israel/Palestine issue on the top of his policy agenda. Some of these friends interpreted my analysis as an argument against possible U.S. efforts to play a more active diplomatic role in the dormant "peace process." But forecasting a rainy day doesn't mean that you are hoping for a bad weather. My geo-political forecast was based on the my reading of the current global balance of power and U.S. domestic politics. First, the combination of the mess in Iraq/Afghanistan and the entire collapse of the neoconservative agenda plus the economic crisis have diminished the power (which includes public support) of the U.S. to shape global events, including the Mideast. And the organized support for Israel in Washington has become a form of rent seeking in a sense of capturing monopoly privileges in determin...

( Happy 2009. Hope you like the new look. Also, I'm back doing some original stuff in addition to posting my published articles.

Business Times - 25 Dec 2008 OBAMA'S STIMULUS PACKAGE Big - and getting bigger and bigger Consensus seems to be that long-term consequences can wait; things need fixing now By LEON HADAR IN WASHINGTON BARACK OBAMA will be inaugurated as the next US President on Jan 20. Yet, if you happen to read the headlines in the major American newspapers or watch television news regularly, you would probably conclude that Mr Obama has been occupying the White House for quite a while, as he and his aides have been bombarding the media and the public through statements and leaks with their continuously changing programmes for fixing the American economy - which tend to be confused with the old and new plans proposed by the current president, George W Bush, for, well, fixing the American economy. The only thing one could be certain about these days is that this American economy is continuing to plunge just as both the departing and arriving presidents are adding billions - no, change that to '...

Posted on the World Policy Journal blog Leon Hadar: Obama the Mideast Peace-Maker? December 18th, 2008 Posted in Israel, Obama, U.S. Foreign Policy | Since the publication of my retrospective article on Israel in the fall 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal, a few colleagues have wondered if I considered revising my somewhat “pessimistic outlook” (the way one of my correspondents put it) about the chances of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian with Barack Obama in office. So have I changed my tune? First, what I was trying to do in my WPJ article was to highlight the gap between the high expectations that many of us seemed to share regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 1991 (the end of the Cold War, increasing globalization, etc.) with the depressing reality of today’s Holy Land—post-9/11, post-Iraq War, and amidst the present global economic crisis. If anything, my retrospective reflected my sense of realism about the ability and willingness on the part of Israel...

Business Times - 18 Dec 2008 From now, it may resort to other tools such as printing new money By LEON HADAR IN WASHINGTON PUNDITS have been using a variety of dramatic adjectives - 'rare', 'unprecedented', 'extraordinary', 'radical', 'historic' - to describe the Fed's decision on Tuesday to cut its target for the federal funds rate to a range of zero to 0.25 per cent - a record low - from one per cent. But in a way, in a year that has seen so many 'rare', 'unprecedented', 'extraordinary', 'radical', and 'historic' moves by the US federal government, including the partial and complete nationalisation of several banks and investment houses and the bailing out of many financial institutions, not to mention the long list of fiscal and monetary policies, the decision by the central bank to slash its benchmark interest rate close to zero was not only expected but somewhat anti-climactic, especially when one ...

Business Times - 17 Dec 2008 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN EARLY 2002, the then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was exploring ways to restart negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians that had broken down in the aftermath of the second Palestinian Intifadah (uprising). Mr Powell was arguing that a resolution of the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land could help lessen anti-Americanism in the Arab world and restore US power in the Middle East which had been challenged on 9/11. The notion that the road to a more stable and pro-Western Middle East leads through Jerusalem - the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - was very much the accepted wisdom among members of the foreign policy establishment in Washington as well the view of most of US allies who called on President George W Bush to embrace a more activist US diplomatic approach in the Middle East. But Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as well as the...

China Must Be Central to US Global Agenda by Leon T. Hadar Leon T. Hadar is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington This article appeared in the South China Morning Post on December 10, 2008 The major criticism that East Asian officials would make of the outgoing Bush administration's foreign policy would be Washington's focus on the geostrategic problems in the broader Middle East in the past eight years, and the resulting sidelining of China and most of East Asia on the US global agenda. This neglect of China needs to change. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent trips to South Asia (to try to defuse Indo-Pakistani tensions in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorism) and to the Middle East (to attempt to re-energise Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) have been highlighted in leading US newspapers. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's meetings in Beijing, as part of the ongoing Strategic Economic Dialogue, have, however, only...

Business Times - 12 Dec 2008 These days, with huge industry bailouts, it seems the US is following in the economic footsteps of Russia and China By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT DURING the height of the globalisation era of the 1990s, political economists Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, published The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World, a treatise on the relationship between the government and the marketplace which became an instant best-seller and was turned into a documentary. Taking the title from a 1922 speech by the founding father of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin - who used the phrase 'commanding heights' to refer to industries in an economy that effectively control and support the others, such as oil, railroads, banking and steel - the authors defined globalisation as a period in economic history when free markets predominate, and governments relinquish control over the 'commanding heigh...

Business Times - 10 Dec 2008 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT LEFT-wing activists in the Democratic Party have been critical of the US President-elect's choices for the national security and economic teams whose members would be in charge of managing the policies of the next administration, including the handling of the financial crisis and the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. After all, presidential candidate Obama ran on a platform of 'Change' during both the presidential primaries and the general election. One of the main reasons for his successful challenge during the Democratic primaries to the20candidacy of Senator Hillary Clinton, the darling of the Washington establishment and an earlier backer of the Iraq War, was Obama's consistent opposition to the military adventure in Mesopotamia. Yet, Obama ended up selecting Clinton as his Secretary of State while retaining Republican Robert Gates as Defense Secretary. Where is the promised Change in foreign polic...