Global Paradigms

Business Times - 21 Feb 2012 The reality of America's global power No great power can retain military superiority with weakening economic superstructure By LEON HADAR  WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AS a life-long hypochondriac, I was laughing out loud when reading the tragic-comic inscription on the tombstone located in the cemetery in Key West, Florida: 'I Told You I Was Sick!' I could imagine the poor guy confronting family and friends and insisting to no avail that what he had was more than just the common cold or the seasonal flu. 'You are not sick,' is the kind of reassuring message that Robert Kagan is sending to the nation's foreign policy hypochondriacs aka 'declinists' in his new non-fiction book The World America Made, contending that America is in tip-top military and economic health and ready to take care of the rest of the world. He recalls that the same kind of hypochondriacs had complained that America was really, really in decline in the after...

Business Times - 18 Feb 2012 China can help speed up US economic growth But economic, geo-strategic components in the complex Sino-American relationship are tangled By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IT is not surprising that China bashing is being embraced by US politicians campaigning for votes in this election year dominated by nationalist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiments. Indeed, when you are targeting the financially distressed American electorate, angry that their well-paid manufacturing jobs are allegedly being stolen by scheming foreigners, one effective way to win votes is by stirring up resentment against China's prosperity - seen by many Americans as an outcome of a well-coordinated strategy aimed at destroying the American economy. That may explain why Michigan Republican Senate candidate Peter Hoekstra decided to launch his campaign against incumbent Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow on Super Bowl Sunday by running a television ad which introduces a young...

Business Times - 15 Feb 2012 Obama's budget: it's about politics, not economics By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE way to examine US President Barack Obama's proposed budget for the government's fiscal year of 2013 is by recognising that its main goal - perhaps the only one - is to ensure that Mr Obama remains in the White House in 2013. Indeed, notwithstanding all the admirable plans for stimulating the US economy and narrowing the growing social-economic gap that were included in the president's budget proposal, the chances that the Republican-dominated Congress would embrace them before the November election are very low. For Republicans, the idea that the federal government should pursue another fiscal stimulus programme or use its power to increase the tax burden on the wealthy in order to help the middle class and the poor are antithetical to their free-market agenda. Promoting the main themes of his budget proposal (AKA election campaign themes), Mr O...

Business Times - 14 Feb 2012 Republicans won't beat Obama by alienating white middle-class voters By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT ONE of Mitt Romney's electoral assets as a Republican presidential candidates has been what could be described as the 'nostalgia factor'. A tall and fit white man, with broad shoulders and a strong jaw, exuding energy and optimism, the former Massachusetts governor reminds many white Americans of the baby boomer generation of America's post-1945 Golden Age, when political leaders and business executives who looked like Romney ruled America - and the world. It was time of prosperity and you even didn't have to lock the door when you left home - a reflection of strong social solidarity. Indeed, Romney, former house speaker Newt Gingrich and the other Republicans seem to relish in this Politics of Nostalgia, suggesting that they could revive the spirit of the good old days of the 1950s, make America militarily and economically str...

Business Times - 10 Feb 2012 Silver lining in an Iran-Israel war? A short-term military conflict could well turn out to be the catalyst for long-term stability, cooperation and peace By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT NOTWITHSTANDING the never-ending stream of all those based-on-reliable-intelligence-sources analyses, it is doubtful whether these same analysts would be willing to bet whatever is left of their 401K retirement accounts on their predictions that Israel will - or will not - attack Iranian nuclear sites this year. And while research institutions have conducted interesting exercises to try to figure out the military, diplomatic and economic repercussions of a confrontation between Israel and Iran, the dictum that no military plan survives the contact with the enemy applies also here - in addition to the unintended consequences, blowbacks and the proverbial 'black swans' that are bound to show up even in the unlikely scenario under which Israel achieves all or mos...

Business Times - 07 Feb 2012 New job numbers could be a political 'game changer' By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WHILE addressing new economic numbers showing 243,000 new American jobs in January - including 50,000 manufacturing jobs - US President Barack Obama seemed to be going out of his way to contain the expected enthusiasm manifested on the same day in the rising Dow. The new numbers showed that the 'the economy is growing stronger' but there remained 'still far too many Americans that need a job', Mr Obama told an audience in Virginia on Friday. But if Mr Obama sounded a somewhat restrained note in public there is no doubt that he and his economic and political aides were in a good mood in private last week. Currently at 8.3 per cent, the unemployment rate is in its lowest level since Mr Obama has entered office. That unemployment has been falling consistently for several months may not a sign that the economic recovery is finally taking off. But i...

Business Times - 02 Feb 2012 Florida voters bring Gingrich back to earth Former House speaker's grandiose planetary vision fails to find much of an audience there By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WELL, it seems that Republicans in Florida have not warmed up to Newt Gingrich's plan to establish an American colony on the moon during the next eight years and turn it into America's 51st state. The former speaker of the House of Representatives had hoped to exploit the political momentum generated by his earlier victory in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, and was trying to woo Floridians who work in the space industry in the state by pledging that 13,000 Americans would be living on the moon by the end of his second term as president. And, as president, he would grant them statehood. But notwithstanding his grandiose planetary vision, Mr Gingrich was back on earth on Tuesday, after voters denied him victory in the Republican presidential primary in th...

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...

Business Times - 26 Jan 2012 US is back as a global power, says Obama He also calls on wealthy Americans like Romney to pay more in taxes By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT ON THE same day that leading Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released his tax returns which showed that he paid less in taxes than top wage earners, US President Barack Obama launched his populist re-election campaign during his State of the Union Address. Among other things, President Obama called on wealthy Americans like Mr Romney to pay more in taxes and pledged to come to the aid of many middle-class Americans who, unlike Mr Romney, live from pay cheque to pay cheque. Mr Romney's tax returns showed he paid a lower effective tax rate than wage-earners on his US$42.5 million (in combined 2010 and 2011) income from investment profits, dividends, and interest. President Obama's nationally televised address before Congress that marked the start of his campaign highlighted a vision of govern...

Business Times - 25 Jan 2012 Republican race gets wide open and more divisive It's possible the nominee to challenge Obama won't be decided till Republican convention By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FORMER Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has lost his earlier designation as his party's presumptive presidential nominee after his electoral defeat in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina on Saturday. His margin of defeat of about 14 per cent against Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was quite devastating for him and came at the end of a week during which the former business executive seemed to be losing his political momentum. First came the news that after a recount of the votes in the first Republican presidential contest this year, the caucuses in Iowa, Republican officials reversed their earlier estimate - that Mr Romney had come in first - and announced that former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had won that ra...

Business Times - 18 Jan 2012 Romney faces new mood in his party Republicans seem to be more attracted to his rivals' economic and foreign policy agenda By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE leading presidential candidates of the political party are blasting Wall Street private equity executives as 'vultures' who are destroying the livelihood of economically distressed blue-collar workers. 'They're just vultures,' one of this party's presidential aspirants declared recently, as he was describing what those greedy venture capitalists do for living. 'They're vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that and they save the skeleton,' he concluded. His remarks would have been applauded even by Comrade Lenin. And in the presidential primary of the above-mentioned political party, a leading anti-war activist who has been calling for the wit...

Business Times - 12 Jan 2012 Are GOP squabbles helping Obama? Republican candidates are fighting on social-cultural issues when the economy is on top of most American voters' agenda By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WHILE the Republican presidential candidates in the United States have been blasting one another, things seem to be looking better than expected for President Barack Obama in recent days. Last week's jobs report indicated that unemployment had dropped to 8.5 per cent in December, its lowest in three years. Nothing to celebrate about, but then any sign of improvement in the labour market may hint that the economic recovery is gaining momentum, raising the chances Mr Obama could be re-elected in November despite an expected strong challenge from the Republican candidate. More importantly, the results of Tuesday's Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire suggest that it could take a long time for the party to select the man who will face Mr Obama. Ther...

Business Times - 10 Jan 2012 Another war that nobody wants But things can go wrong, and unexpected provocations and miscalculations may lead to West's confrontation with Iran By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT REPORTS that members of the European Union (EU) were planning to impose an embargo on Iranian oil as part of a US-led strategy to force Teheran to end its alleged nuclear military programme should not have come as a major surprise. Iran has been developing surface-to-surface missiles with a maximum range of 2,000km, that equipped with nuclear weapons could put France and its European partners - as well as Israel and US bases in the Middle East - within its range. Or to put it differently, if Iran with nukes is indeed a strategic threat, it is the Europeans more than the Americans who should be worried about it. Some Europeans were hoping to pursue once again their all-too-familiar approach of free riding on US military power - counting on the United States and/or Israel t...