Global Paradigms

my stuff on the topic on The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/george-bush-was-wrong-wro_b_818757.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/not-all-is-well-in-americ_b_816125.html

Business Times - 09 Feb 2011 Egypt's fate yet to be sealed By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IT may be too early to conclude whether the protests in Egypt will amount to a revolution. And it remains to be seen if the 2011 Egyptian Revolution will go the way of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that led to the collapse of the pro-American Shah and to the rise of the Ayatollah's theocracy. Iran then challenged the balance of power in the Middle East and that led to major political and economic developments, including the Iran-Iraq War and a global oil crisis. Perhaps Egypt's continuing political unrest will eventually fizzle out and the demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo will only bring about marginal reforms in the country's political and economic system. Such an outcome will allow the military-based regime that has controlled that country since 1952 when a revolution did result in the downfall of the then British-backed monarchy - sans the 83-year-old Hosni Mubarak...

Business Times - 03 Feb 2011 PERSPECTIVE Obama's Sputnik spin is way off orbit By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WHO could fault US President Barack Obama when he used his State of the Union Address last week as an opportunity to call for American economic renewal and for investing in scientific research technological development as well as in the reform of the education system and the rebuilding of the country's infrastructure? After all, he proposed these and other ideas as part of a strategy aimed at unleashing another wave of American innovation and meeting the competitive challenges of globalisation in the 21st century. And Mr Obama should be applauded for challenging the Americans, who are recovering from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, to look towards a better future by setting these ambitious goals that involve cooperation between government and business in investment in clean energy technology and biomedical research and in trying to open n...

Business Times - 01 Feb 2011 THE BOTTOM LINE Another crack in American hegemony EVEN if Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak succeeds in clinging to power, that is not going to change the writing on the wall - and on Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia. Thanks to these networking services, the whole world now knows the days of Middle East autocrats - allied with the US and open to some sort of co-existence with Israel - may be numbered. In fact, the entire American hegemonic project in the Middle East may be coming unstuck. Since 1945 - and, in particular, after the end of the Cold War - successive US administrations have been trying to establish American hegemony in the region, including through two major military interventions, strategic alliances with Israel, Turkey and Arab states with ties with Israel, led by Egypt. But whether it comes to promoting its values or to securing strategic interests, US clout in the Middle East is shrinking now to its lowest point: the Israeli-Palestine 'p...

Business Times - 27 Jan 2011 America's new 'Sputnik moment' Obama calls for unleashing of another wave of innovation for economic renewal and to meet globalisation challenges By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE results of a poll of American opinion that was published on the eve of Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington found that a large majority of Americans regard China and the other rising economic powers of Asia as the most important challenge facing the US in coming years. In fact, according to the nationwide poll by the Pew Research Center, 47 per cent of Americans see China - incorrectly - as the world's leading economic power. Addressing the US Congress and the American people on Tuesday night, President Barack Obama tried to respond to these rising concerns that the US is losing its global economic competitive edge to China, India and other emerging markets. 'This is our generation's Sputnik moment,' President Obama declared du...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/return-to-haifa-whose-nar_b_811179.html Return to Haifa: Whose Narrative Is It Anyway? It sometimes gets confusing in the global village, where technology, finance, cross-cultural interactions, and expanding ethnic diasporas are tearing apart the relationship between borders and making multiple identities possible. Hence, Ang Lee is a Taiwanese artist who directs American films, but he is also an American film director of Chinese movies. As a member of the Sinosphere, enlarged by fifty million overseas Chinese, Ang is not only a creative individual who makes our world more interesting and prosperous. He also helps to bridge between nations and cultures and to produce a Sino-American synergy that is more conducive to peace than a contingency of Chinese and U.S. diplomats. So how about the following bi- or tri-national cultural synergy? How about an Arab-language novella by a Palestinian author who was affiliated with a Palestinian guerrilla gro...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/when-obama-meets-hu-norma_b_810027.html Leon T. Hadar Journalist and foreign affairs analyst Posted: January 17, 2011 05:36 PM When Obama Meets Hu: "Normalizing" Sino-American Relationship? President Barack Obama will be hosting Hu Jintao, President of China, on January 19 as part of a visit that will be complete with a State arrival ceremony, a joint press conference, and a glitzy State dinner. In addition to highlighting the importance of the relationship between the world's two largest economic powers that have become so central to growth of the global economy and the stability of the international system, President Hu's meetings with President Obama will provide an opportunity to press the reset button on the Sino-American ties. The relationship has been straining since President Obama's visit to China in November 2009: the tensions during the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and in the aftermath of Obama...

Jan 23 2011 - Cameri Theatre Production of RETURN TO HAIFA at Theatre J, Washington DC Adapted by Boaz Gaon from the novella by Ghassan Kanafani, directed by Sinai Peter. This heart-rending saga tells the story of Sa'id and Saffiyah, who return to the home they fled and learn the fate of the baby they left behind in 1948. Now a young soldier, Dov meets his birth parents while cleaving to the Holocaust survivors who raised him. Performed in Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles. Panel Discussion Follows Performance Moderated by Ron Kampeas (Washington, D.C. bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Yaniv Sagee (Israel Representative from Givat Haviva, advancing Jewish-Arab relations in Israel) Paul Scham (Visiting Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park) Leon Hadar (Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, author of Quagmire: America in the Middle East) Performance at 3:00 p.m., discussion at 4:30 p.m. Purchase tickets online at: www.theatrej.or...

Business Times - 18 Jan 2011 Will Hu's visit make a difference? Each leader needs to come out of it showing that the US-China relationship advances his own nation's economic interests By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT PRESIDENT Barack Obama will host China's President Hu Jintao tomorrow, as part of a state visit that will be complete with an arrival ceremony, a joint press conference - with the two leaders appearing side-by- side - and even a glitzy state dinner to which anybody who is somebody hopes to be invited. (The dinner's guest list has yet to be released.) The last state visit by a Chinese leader to Washington was in 1997, when Bill Clinton hosted Jiang Zemin. President Obama extended the invitation to President Hu during the G-20 summit in Toronto last June, perhaps in the hope that in addition to highlighting the importance of the relationship between the world's two largest economic powers that have become so central to the stability of the internati...

Business Times - 15 Jan 2011 When the Cuckoo has no nest The effort to protect the rights of the mentally ill has reached a point where an attempt to cure a problem ends up creating unintended costly consequences By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN 2007, Georgia's Valdosta State University (VSU) expelled a student for posting a Microsoft Paint collage in Facebook mocking a parking garage that the school president had referred to as part of his 'legacy'. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit organisation dedicated to protecting the rights of students and faculty, VSU claimed that the collage's reference to the 'President Zacari Memorial Parking Garage', was an actionable threat upon the president's life. The student, a decorated medical technician and a Buddhist, was expelled via a note slipped under his room door. I recalled these and other incidents detailed by FIRE that involve the expulsion of students ac...

Business Times - 12 Jan 2011 Can Obama repeat Clinton's success? He faces heavy odds as global and national economic environment now is very different from the prosperous 1990s By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AMERICAN business leaders and centrist Democratic Party figures have been applauding US President Barack Obama's appointment of banking executive William Daley as the new White House chief of staff and of economist Gene Sperling as the new director of National Economic Council. Both Mr Daley, an executive at JPMorgan Chase, and Mr Sperling, an adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, had served in the administration of former president Bill Clinton, and are expected to assist the Obama administration in pursuing a more pro-business strategy aimed at accelerating the sluggish economic recovery, and in the process, help Mr Obama win re-election. Hailed by critic Indeed, the appointment of Mr Daley, a secretary of commerce under Mr Clinton who had been a central...

Business Times - 06 Jan 2011 Will US Fed change direction soon? Pressure from the new Congress and the changing composition of the Fed could put paid to loose monetary policy By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE Republican electoral wins in last year's midterm congressional elections and the new appointments to the US Federal Reserve's policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee - coupled with signs of accelerated economic recovery - have ignited speculation that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke will be forced to reassess the central bank's loose monetary policy. It is being said that he will bring to an end its earlier decision to purchase billions more in Treasury bonds - otherwise known as quantitative easing (QE). In a way, in response to the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, the Federal Reserve has been pursuing what some consider to be the most relaxed monetary policy in its history. In fact, the Fed is currently managing a balance sheet in ex...

http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1206545.html Longer version http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/israel-needs-to-adjust-to_b_803789.html and http://www.amconmag.com/blog/israels-post-american-future/ A New Alliance for Israel By Leon Hadar “We cannot exist alone.” Israel’s national security axiom was acknowledged by President Shimon Peres during an address in November. “For our existence we need the friendship of the United States of America,” he stressed, adding: “It doesn't sound easy, but this is the truth.” It’s not easy for a client-state to admit that its own survival depends on a global patron. It’s even more challenging for leaders of a dependent state to recognize that the great power they are relying on is entering into an imperial twilight time. Inertia and wishful thinking explains why elites the empire’s capital and the provinces continue to share in the misconception about the hegemon’s ability to exert global influence But after a prolonged “recognitio...

Business Times - 28 Dec 2010 Can Obama prove to be the Comeback Kid? It all depends on the pace of economic recovery and how fast unemployment rate drops By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AFTER US President Barack Obama and the Democrats had taken a 'shellacking' in the midterm congressional and gubernatorial elections in November, and the White House occupant's approval rating dipped to under-50 per cent, the media were starting to portray Mr Obama as a 'has been', a one-term failed president a la Jimmy Carter. It was nice knowing you, Barack. Well, that was three or four weeks ago. Bye, bye the Old Narrative. And hello the new one: Obama, the Comeback Kid. Indeed, Mr Obama seemed to have had a very successful December: Congress approved a spending and tax cut bill that amounted to a new economic stimulus package, and notwithstanding some Republican opposition, US lawmakers voted to repeal a controversial 'don't ask, don't tell' policy regardin...

Business Times - 24 Dec 2010 Asian immigrants in US making a difference By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT NEW demographic data recently released by the US Census Bureau, based on a sample taken between 2005 and 2009 (aka the American Community Survey), points out that America's younger population is becoming more 'diverse', which is the politically correct way to say that it's becoming less white. Hence about 48 per cent of the newborns in the US last year were members of minority groups, compared with only 20 per cent of those over 65. That means that, unlike many European societies where low birth-rates and political opposition to immigration make it more likely that their population will not only shrink but will also become older, the new waves of legal and illegal immigration into the US will ensure that the country's population will continue growing and getting younger. That is certainly good news as far as America's demographic trends is concerned. Bu...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/china-wants-power-and-res_b_797297.html?view=screen Leon T. Hadar Journalist and foreign affairs analyst Posted: December 15, 2010 04:15 PM China Wants Power and Respect Now that it is in the process of emerging as a leading economic power, some politicians and pundits are warning that not unlike the Soviet Union in its heyday, China is becoming a champion of a universal ideology that aims at supplanting the western political and economic model represented by the US. Intertwining with legitimate concerns as well as with plain scare mongering about China's growing economic and military power, the tendency among these observers is to assume that China is exporting its political-economic model worldwide as part of a strategy to win international legitimacy for its stands. That several governments have joined China in boycotting the ceremony in Oslo in which Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was supposedl...