Roundup: Media's Take

Lee Ruddin: Blair, Cameron and the True Dynamics of the UK-U.S. “Special Relationship”

Lee Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.It has recently been reported that David Cameron declined to take a phone call from Barack Obama because he was finishing a game of tennis. The claim is made by Charlie Brooks, an old school chum of Cameron’s from Eton, who allegedly visited the Prime Minister’s (PM’s) official residence in Chequers – racket to hand – and was busy playing a tie-break, third set when the President called. Downing Street, not surprisingly, has been quick to deny the Racing Post’s report and questioned Mr. Brooks’ recollection of events, insisting that while records show the pair had indeed played a game in August 2010, no phone call was logged from the Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) during match play.

Kenneth M. Pollack: Reading Machiavelli in Iraq

Kenneth M. Pollack is a contributing editor to The National Interest and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. 

John B. Judis: Romney Plays Reagan — And Does Well Enough

John B. Judis has been writing for The New Republic since 1984 and has been a senior editor since 1994.I prepared for writing about the third debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney by reading about North Korea, Iran, Syria, the European Union, Mexico, Cuba, you name it -- well every place except Mali -- but I could have better spent my afternoon reading a novel or taking a walk. The candidates spent almost no time debating the substance of foreign policy. When they could, they detoured into domestic policy. 
I know I am supposed to say who won the debate, but I don’t think this was a conventional contest. Both candidates wanted to accomplish certain things; and they pretty much succeeded. And that goes for Romney, too, who many commentators think lost the debate.Since the summer, Romney has been trying to play Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election between Reagan and Carter. If you close your eyes and listen to Romney telling Obama, “Attacking me is not an agenda,” you’ll hear the voice of Ronald Reagan in 1980 responding to Carter’s repeated criticisms. I would bet that Romney has listened repeatedly to that debate and attempted to emulate Reagan’s avuncular, reassuring, self-confident, witty style. Romney even made several awkward attempts at humor during this debate.

Bret Stephens: Iran's Unrequited War

Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs. On Wednesday an Iranian-American named Manssor Arbabsiar pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring with Iranian military officials to blow up a restaurant in Washington, D.C. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration and Iran had secretly agreed "in principle" to hold direct talks after the election, a disclosure to which the White House responded with a lawyerly denial. And so it goes with U.S. policy toward Iran. They are at war with us. We seek bilateral negotiations and confidence-building measures with them. That is a point that—as I write this column ahead of the final presidential debate—I hope to hear Mitt Romney hammer home when the subject of Iran inevitably comes up. Barack Obama told "60 Minutes" last month that "if Gov. Romney is suggesting we should start another war, he should say so." Sorry, Mr. President: When it comes to Iran, the mullahs started that war a long time ago. Wishing facts away doesn't change them. Here's a list of the American victims of Iranian aggression...

Daoud Kuttab: Israel and Palestine after Oslo Accords

Daoud Kuttab, former professor of journalism at Princeton University, is general manager of the Community Media Network in Amman.On Sept. 13, 1993, Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas met on the South Lawn of the White House to sign the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles, or the Oslo Accords. PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin then sealed the agreement with an historic handshake. The Oslo Accords – the result of secret talks that had been encouraged by the Norwegian government and conducted in the country’s capital – called for a five-year transitional period during which Israeli forces would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and unspecified areas of the West Bank, and the establishment of a Palestinian Authority. Letters of recognition between the PLO and Israel accompanied the agreement. The ultimate aim, though never explicitly stated, was to create a Palestinian state roughly within the 1967 borders. But the goals laid out in the Oslo Accords remain unfulfilled. In fact, the agreement is unlikely to survive 89-year-old Peres and 77-year-old Abbas, who are now presidents of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, respectively. Several factors contributed to the deterioration of prospects for lasting peace...

Jeb Bush and Frank Calzon: Castro, the Missile Crisis and Lessons for Obama

Jeb Bush is the former governor of Florida. Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C. Fifty years ago, the world was on the brink of Armageddon. The Russians had secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, aiming them at Washington and other American cities. Confronting the Soviet Union at the United Nations, the United States displayed photographic evidence and demanded the missiles be removed. On Oct. 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Navy to blockade Cuba. Six days later Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev ordered the missiles dismantled. How did that crisis develop? What lessons were learned that might be applied in these still-perilous times? The first lesson actually stems from Kennedy’s first meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. Recently elected, Kennedy, 45, was young, dashing and charismatic. Khrushchev, 68, was a committed Communist who had been trained by Stalin, one of history’s most brutal tyrants. Sometime during the meeting Khrushchev concluded Kennedy was a light-weight and could be pushed around...  

Michael Barone: Will Obama Be Another Woodrow Wilson?

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. How will this election be seen in history? Obviously, it depends on who wins. If Barack Obama is defeated, the irresistible comparison will be to Jimmy Carter. A president was rejected for a second term after pursuing big-government programs amid high energy prices and attacks on America in the Middle East. Actually, that’s not entirely fair to Carter. His budget deficits were minuscule next to Obama’s, and in response to the Soviet attack on Afghanistan he began the defense buildup that Ronald Reagan accelerated. Carter supported airline deregulation, which made air travel widely accessible, as well as rail and trucking deregulation, which squeezed billions from the cost of goods and services.

Edward Luce: Shadow of 9/11 Towers Over the US Election

Edward Luce is the Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times, London. We are in the closing days of the third US presidential election since September 11 2001. Yet the shadow cast by the Twin Towers attacks has barely receded. In the final debate on Monday night, the killing of the US ambassador in the Libyan city of Benghazi is likely to be the most bitter point of contention between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Christopher Stevens and three others died on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. Mr Romney has been trying to make capital out of it ever since. On Monday night Mr Romney will get what further help, or rope, he needs from Bob Schieffer, the CBS moderator. Mr Schieffer has allocated two-thirds of the debate to the Middle East. Of his six topics, two are devoted to "the new face of terrorism in the Middle East", which means Benghazi. Libya may thus get as much time as "The rise of China" and "America’s role in the world" put together.

Josh Garrett-Davis: The Lost World of George McGovern

Josh Garrett-Davis is the author of “Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains.”GEORGE S. McGOVERN is, in some sense, the reason I exist. My parents met as radical community organizers in their early 20s, an idealistic honey-haired student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a scraggly wannabe farm boy from Brown University, knocking on doors for the now defunct Acorn.It’s a typical 1975 story, except that they were pounding the pavement in Sioux Falls, S.D., a provincial little city at the edge of the upper Midwest and the Great Plains. Stranger still, they stayed in the state — my dad for nearly 40 years, my mom for 15.

Daniel Ellsberg: Progressives: In Swing States, Vote for Obama

Daniel Ellsberg is a former State and Defense Department official who has been arrested for acts of non-violent civil disobedience over eighty times, initially for copying and releasing the top secret Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in prison.  Living in a non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President Obama.It is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.An activist colleague recently said to me: “I hear you’re supporting Obama.”I was startled, and took offense.  “Supporting Obama?  Me?!”“I lose no opportunity publicly,” I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who’s decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who’s launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. “Would you call that support?”

Susan Eisenhower: What Drives Mitt Romney?

Susan Eisenhower is President of the Eisenhower Group, Inc, which provides strategic counsel on political, business and public affairs projects....In answering a question about the former president of your own political party, most of us might have expected that any criticism from Romney would, at the very least, have come with a qualifier. He could have easily said: “Although the Bush deficits were far too high, the president was dealing with a national emergency—September 11.” This would have been smart since Romney also challenged Bush’s record on China, another sensitive matter.Romney owes the GOP nomination – in large measure – to the Bush family. As pillars of the current Republican establishment, they still wield enormous power. The Bush family could have demurred and refused to endorse anyone, making it probable that a more extreme candidate would have gotten the nomination and lost the general election. This would have left the window wide open for a Jeb Bush nomination in 2016. After all, if Romney wins this November, Jeb will be sidelined in 2016.

Dilip Hiro: How the U.S. and Pakistan Became the Dysfunctional Nuclear Family of International Relations

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of 33 books, the most recent being Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven and London).  To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hiro discusses the embattled Pakistan-U.S. relationship, click here or download it to your iPod here.The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and resentful of each other with every passing month, Washington and Islamabad are still locked in an awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture, neither can afford to let go of.

John Gray: Why Europe is Floundering

John Gray is the author of False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism, and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and The Death of Utopia.

Ezra Klein: George W. Bush Haunts Mitt Romney

Ezra Klein is a columnist and blogger at The Washington Post and a policy analyst for MSNBC. 

Heather Hurlburt: Cuban Missile Crisis ... Are We Safer Now Than We Were 50 Years Ago?

Heather Hurlburt is executive director of the National Security Network in Washington, DC.

John Steele Gordon: A Short History of Presidential Debates

Mr. Gordon is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins, 2004).Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the history of presidential debates, given their recent importance, is how short that history is. Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln had a famous series of debates. But that was in 1858, when both were candidates for the Senate from Illinois. They did not debate when they ran for president two years later. In 1940, Republican Wendell Wilkie challenged Franklin Roosevelt to debate, but FDR, who had no wish to give his opponent any more exposure than necessary, declined. There were debates between Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver when they were both candidates for the Democratic nomination in 1956, but Stevenson did not debate President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall. Not until Sept. 26, 1960, did a presidential debate take place, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the first of four debates that year. The audience was huge, about 70 million out of a U.S. population of 180 million. The issues discussed, including the so-called missile gap (with the Soviets) and the islands of Quemoy and Matsu (in the Strait of Taiwan), are now obscure at best. What is remembered is the personal appearance of the two candidates...

Paul R Pillar: Replaying Afghanistan in Syria

Paul R Pillar is a former senior CIA counterterrorist officer and now professor at Georgetown University. 

Martin Sieff: From Kennan to Trotsky ... How the U.S. Became A Superpower of the Left

Martin Sieff is Chief Global Analyst for The Globalist and the author of the upcoming Cycles of Change: The Patterns of U.S. Politics from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. Russia and China today both enjoy the same grand-strategic advantage against the United States that the United States enjoyed through the 44 years of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was then the superpower of the left, as the left had been globally understood since the French Revolution. It was the state committed to the promotion of revolutionary change across the world. The United States, by contrast, was the superpower of the right. It was committed to the maintenance of stability and continuity in government systems around the world. The United States won the Cold War. The craving for stability, peace, and continuity among governments and populations alike proved infinitely stronger than the fleeting flashes of revolutionary fervor. The Soviet Union eventually became physically exhausted and globally isolated by its ideological commitment to revolutionary change. Today, however, the roles of the two great powers have been reversed...

Rupert Cornwell: The Mason-Dixon Line Is Showing Its Age

Rupert Cornwell writes for The Independent. One way and another, surveyors have left their mark on American history. George Washington started his career as one. Then came Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two from Britain who in the 1760s used their skills to settle a boundary dispute between the then colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Whether or not the word "Dixie" derives from Jeremiah's surname is unclear. (According to another theory, it originates with the "Dix" on the back of $10 bills in New Orleans.) But the physical line he helped to demarcate, and its later unofficial extension west along the Ohio river, came to symbolise the great divide between the North and the South, between the slave and non-slave states that fought the American Civil War. Even now, along today's Maryland/Pennsylvania line, you can still see some of the old mile markers of the Mason-Dixon line, great 500lb slabs of limestone shipped from England. But no longer does this 233-mile border symbolise America's ancestral cultural divide. That line is sliding gently but inexorably southwards, testament to a shift in US society that could play a critical role in this year's election. In fact, the unofficial western extension still holds good; the mighty Ohio remains a North/South frontier.

Jeremiah Goulka: Of Republicans and Race Cards

Jeremiah Goulka writes about American politics and culture, focusing on security, race, and the Republican Party.  A TomDispatch regular, his work has been published in the American Prospect, Salon, and elsewhere. He was formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a recovery worker in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.  He lives in Washington, D.C.  You can follow him on Twitter @jeremiahgoulka or contact him through his website jeremiahgoulka.com.Democrats are frustrated: Why can’t Republican voters see that Republicans pass voter ID laws to suppress voting, not fraud?