Roundup: Media's Take

David Hayes: Britain and Europe: Living Together, Apart

David Hayes was Deputy Editor of openDemocracy from 2003–12. He writes each month for Inside Story.“Ni avec toi, ni sans toi.” If Britain’s long and often tortuous relationship with the European Union could be summed up in a single phrase, the epigraph of Francois Truffaut’s film La Femme d’à Côté is a good candidate. Across seven decades, the two sides have been enveloped in fluctuating tides – of politics and history, of interest and emotion, of loyalty and ideology, of reason and longing – without ever settling into a definitive resolution. “Neither with you, nor without you,” indeed.

Richard Parker: The GOP's Lone Star Blues

Richard Parker writes for McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. ...Democrats are champing at the bit to turn Texas blue. “People are now looking at Texas and saying: ‘That’s where we need to make our next investment. That’s where the next opportunity lies,’ ” one Democratic state senator told Politico. There’s even optimistic chatter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s capturing the state in 2016 if she runs for president.... Texas was reliably Democratic for more than a century, from Reconstruction through the Lyndon B. Johnson years. Johnson ably — albeit cynically and sometimes illegally — harnessed the Hispanic vote to keep his more reactionary opponents off balance in primaries. But the liberal 1960s drove white conservatives into what was once a minuscule Republican Party. With the help of Rust Belt migrants in the 1970s, Republican strength grew under John G. Tower, Bill Clements and the elder George Bush....  

Alex Seitz-Wald: Would Lincoln Use Drones?

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter.With the nation deep in the throes of Hollywood-induced Lincoln-philia, Washington Examiner editor Mark Tapscott asked Friday what the revered president might do about one of the thorniest political questions of 2013: “Would Lincoln have droned Robert E. Lee?” His answer — an imagined conversation between Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that has the 16th president remarking “OMG” and “sheesh” — is dumb, but the question and answer are more interesting that Tapscott gives them credit.Lincoln is rightly held up as the paragon of the American presidency, so it makes sense that people would ask how he would handle a tough moral question like the use of unmanned killer drones, which has compelling arguments both for and against. WWLD? We consulted experts and the historical record to find out. The answer may surprise you.

Ellen J. Staurowsky: U.S. Office for Civil Rights Asked to Ban American Indian Mascots in Michigan Public Schools

Dr. Ellen J. Staurowsky is presently a professor in the Department of Sport Management in the Goodwin College of Professional Studies at Drexel University.

Todd Miller: The Constitution-Free Zone of our Northern Border

Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-Mexican border issues for more than 10 years. He has worked on both sides of the border for BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He now writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog “Border Wars,” among other places. He is at work on his first book, Border Patrol Nation, for the Open Media Series of City Lights Books.Originally posted on TomDispatch.com

Barbara J. Miner: The Meaning of Choice

Barbara J. Miner is a Milwaukee-based journalist who has covered education for more than 20 years. She is author of the newly released book Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City (New York: New Press)....Before the mid-1990s, the term “failing schools” was all but nonexistent. It certainly, for instance, was not applied to Jim Crow-era segregated black schools in the South that could not even afford desks.What’s more, the first use of vouchers was not by poor black parents but by whites hoping to escape desegregation. From 1959 until 1964, when federal courts intervened, officials closed all the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia rather than comply with orders to desegregate. White parents took advantage of publicly funded vouchers to attend a newly created private, whites-only academy.Such an association between vouchers and white supremacy is not useful to today’s voucher advocates. Instead, vouchers have been repackaged as a way to improve academic achievement and to expand parent “choice.” But after more than 20 years, one of the clearest lessons from Milwaukee is that vouchers, above all, are a way to funnel public tax dollars out of public schools and into private schools. Vouchers, at their core, are an abandonment of public education....

Max Fisher: The Cannibals of North Korea

Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger.There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open. Some of them had wandered in from the countryside to places like Chongjin, an industrial town on the coast, where they lived on streets and in railroad stations. It wasn’t unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.“Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to the reporter Barbara Demick for her book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” Fear of cannibalism, like the famine supposedly driving it, spread. People avoided the meat in streetside soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.The panic, Demick concludes, may have exceeded the actual threat. “It does not seem,” she writes, “that the practice was widespread.” But it does appear to have happened....

Yoon Young-kwan: Asia Feels Like Pre-War Europe

Yoon Young-kwan, South Korea’s foreign minister in 2003-4, is professor of international relations at Seoul National University. Whether east Asia’s politicians and pundits like it or not, the region’s current international relations are more akin to 19th-century European balance-of-power politics than to the stable Europe of today. Witness east Asia’s rising nationalism, territorial disputes and lack of effective institutional mechanisms for security co-operation. While economic interdependence among China, Japan, South Korea and the members of the Association of South-east Asian Nations continues to deepen, their diplomatic relations are as burdened by rivalry and mistrust as relations among European countries were in the decades prior to the First World War. A common characteristic is a power shift. Back then, Great Britain’s relative power was in decline, while Germany’s had been rising since unification in 1871. Similarly, at least in terms of economic capability, the United States and Japan seem to have begun a process of decline relative to China. Major power shifts define eras in which key political leaders are likely to make serious foreign-policy mistakes. Poor management of international relations at such critical junctures has often led to major wars...

Dominique Moïsi: François Hollande ... A French Harry Truman?

Dominique Moïsi is a senior adviser at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales and a visiting professor at King’s College London. Will military intervention in Mali reveal the real François Hollande? If the country is returning by default – in light of US reticence – to the position of the west’s gendarme in francophone Africa, will its president finally appear presidential in the eyes of French citizens? Early success in Mali is elevating his standing. This week, a BVA poll shows his approval rating rising from 40 per cent to 44 per cent. Other western powers, as well as African forces, have followed, making France look like a modern global leader. Yet this enthusiasm may prove shortlived. Before long, we may return to a situation in which the French elite, watching the plunge in Mr Hollande’s popularity since he was elected last May, ask themselves seriously whether their country is becoming like the US, ungovernable as a result of its deepening divisions. Mr Hollande, attempting to be a man for all seasons, appears to fall between two stools.

David Ignatius: Eisenhower 1956 May Tell Us More About Hagel 2013

David Ignatius is published twice weekly by The Daily Star. Chuck Hagel means it when he describes himself as an "Eisenhower Republican." He kept a bust of President Dwight Eisenhower in his Senate office for a dozen years, and has a portrait of Ike on the wall of his current office at Georgetown University. But the most compelling evidence of Hagel’s fascination is that he purchased three-dozen copies of an Eisenhower biography and gave copies to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to the book’s author, David Nichols. The book that so interested Hagel, "Eisenhower 1956," examines one of the most delicate and dangerous moments of Ike’s presidency.

John Arquilla: Want To Understand Obama’s Foreign Policy? Read Hegel, not Hagel

John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military, and co-editor of Afghan Endgames: Strategy and Policy Choices for America's Longest War. The centuries-long dispute over whether and how much the United States should intervene in world affairs may at last be headed toward a resolution. A prominent early view, held by many of the founding fathers and aptly summarized by John Quincy Adams, enjoined Americans not to "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." In the 1930s, the "America First" political movement clearly grew from this perspective.

Evan Thomas: Looking To Ike As Obama's Second Term Begins

Evan Thomas is the author of the just-published Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World. I have been talking to historians about another two-term president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. We think of Ike as a great military man, but as president he used his understanding of the military to rein it in. Obama is said to be looking for a low-key way of managing America's global role while minding Ike's credo that true national security begins at home with a sound economy, shored up by a careful balance of resources and commitment. How did Eisenhower do it? Once Ike extricated the United States from the Korean War in 1953, he managed to cut the defense budget over his two terms by about a quarter, from about 70% of the federal budget to 60%. (Today, defense is about 20% of federal spending.) Aware from reading Clausewitz and his own experience that small wars have a way of becoming big wars, Eisenhower was determined to keep the United States out of any war. He resisted the temptation to send ground troops into Vietnam after the French military collapsed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

Kevin Rudd: East Asia ... A Maritime Balkans of the 21st Century?

Kevin Rudd is the former prime minister and foreign minister of Australia. These are no ordinary times in East Asia. With tensions rising from conflicting territorial claims in the East China and South China seas, the region increasingly resembles a 21st-century maritime redux of the Balkans a century ago -- a tinderbox on water. Nationalist sentiment is surging across the region, reducing the domestic political space for less confrontational approaches. Relations between China and Japan have now fallen to their lowest ebb since diplomatic normalization in 1972, significantly reducing bilateral trade and investment volumes and causing regional governments to monitor developments with growing alarm. Relations between China and Vietnam, and between China and the Philippines, have also deteriorated significantly, while key regional institutions such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have become increasingly polarized. In security terms, the region is more brittle than at any time since the fall of Saigon in 1975. In Beijing, current problems with Tokyo, Hanoi, and Manila are top of mind. They dominate both the official media and the social media, and the latter have become particularly vitriolic. They also dominate discussions between Chinese officials and foreign visitors.

Ann Jones: Counting Down to 2014 in Afghanistan

Ann Jones is the author of Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan (Metropolitan 2006) and more recently War Is Not Over When It’s Over (Metropolitan 2010).  She wants to acknowledge the courage and determination of all her friends in Afghanistan, especially the women, and the men who stand beside them.

Aaron Blake: Why Winning Back the House is a Tough Task for Democrats

Aaron Blake covers national politics at the Washington Post, where he writes regularly for “The Fix,” the Post’s top political blog. A Minnesota native and summa cum laude graduate of the University of Minnesota, Aaron has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal asked his fellow Republicans to shift their focus outside of Washington, D.C.  in his speech Thursday night at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting.Doing so might cheer them up a little....“The Republicans will have an advantage in partisanship in districts for a long time. That, I think, is indisputable,” said Rob Richie, the executive director of the electoral reform group Fair Vote. Of the Democrats, he said, “I think that they’re probably settling in for a long stay in the minority, unless it’s a really big year.”...

James Joyner: Obama Doctrine, Reagan Doctrine

James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council and a contributing expert at Wikistrat.

Charles Moore: David Cameron Can Prove De Gaulle Was Right About Britain All Along

Charles Moore was editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1995 to 2003. Since David Cameron has had to postpone his speech on Europe because of the terrible events in Algeria, I propose that he now keeps us waiting just a little longer. He should deliver it on January 29. Then it will be 50 years to the day since General de Gaulle, the president of France, vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community. It would be a fitting moment to mark a new course. De Gaulle understood Britain better than most of our own leaders. A week earlier in 1963, he had signed the Élysée Treaty, enshrining friendship with France’s former deadly enemy, Germany. He knew that Britain would never engage in the sort of full-hearted partnership that he had just forged. Britain would not fully sacrifice her independence to create a new European political entity. He was right. Our entry into Europe, and the referendum in 1975 about whether to stay in, would only be won, pro-European British leaders believed, if the loss of sovereignty could be played down. “Europe” was sold on its alleged practical advantages.

Tariq Ramadan: French Colonialism Rides Again

Tariq Ramadan is professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar. He is the author of Islam and the Arab Awakening.

John Barrasso: Chuck Hagel's Unsettling History

Dr. Barrasso is a Republican senator from Wyoming.

E.J. Dionne: Reversing Reagan ... Obama Seeks To Roll Back His Predecessor’s Gains

E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column for The Post.