Roundup: Media's Take

John Bolton: America Needs A Reaganite Foreign Policy

John Bolton is former US Ambassador to the United Nations and foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign. Barack Obama has always been a comfort to European social democrats, given how similar their philosophies are, domestically and internationally. But in American terms, he is a radical president, and a failed one. A second term would be worse, as vividly evidenced in his famous ‘off microphone’ conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Obama pleaded for ‘space’ before the US election, after which he would have more ‘flexibility’ towards Russia. This spectacle of an American president negotiating on his own behalf rather than for his country is deeply troubling. Equally troubling is Obama’s failure to understand the vital nexus between an internationally strong America and sustained domestic prosperity. Global stability, a prerequisite for trade, investment, communications and travel, is hardly spontaneous. What stability we have depends on the visibility and strength of America and its alliance partners, especially NATO. But Obama has spurned prudent security policies, starting with national missile defence, the ostensible subject of his Medvedev conversation. Ronald Reagan, whose national security philosophy was ‘peace through strength’, rejuvenated national missile defence. In 2001, George W.

Efraim A. Cohen: Iraq Sanctions No Model for Iran

The writer is a former US diplomat. He was directly involved in enforcing UN sanctions against Iraq and in implementing the "Oil-for-Food" program. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained recently why the US refuses to set a deadline for Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program: "We’re convinced that we have more time…to do everything we can to bring Iran to a good-faith negotiation." Inherent in that statement is the assumption that vigorous sanctions belatedly adopted by the US and Europe may yet force Iran to change course.The UN’s efforts to alter Iraq’s actions have been cited as an example of a successful sanctions regime. Contrary to what some people now believe (or have forgotten), sanctions on Iraq were an abject failure. Let’s review what actually happened when the UN imposed that sanctions regime, and then apply those lessons to today’s situation.In August 1990, the Security Council imposed a near-total financial and trade embargo on Iraq. Eight months later, following the end of the Gulf War, the Security Council passed an even tougher resolution calling for the removal of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Martin Wolf: Lessons from History on Public Debt

Martin Wolf is a regular columnist for the Financial Times and hosts FT's Economics Forum. What happens if a large, high-income economy, burdened with high levels of debt and an overvalued, fixed exchange rate, attempts to lower the debt and regain competitiveness? This question is of current relevance, since this is the challenge confronting Italy and Spain. Yet, as a chapter in the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook demonstrates, a relevant historical experience exists: that of the UK between the two world wars. This proves that the interaction between attempts at "internal devaluations" and the dynamics of debt are potentially lethal. Moreover, the plight of Italy and Spain is, in many ways, worse than the UK’s was. The latter, after all, could go off the gold standard; exit from the eurozone is far harder. Again, the UK had a central bank able and willing to reduce interest rates. The European Central Bank may not be able and willing to do the same for Italy and Spain. The UK emerged from the first world war with public debt of 140 per cent of gross domestic product and prices more than double the prewar level.

John Arquilla: What the Vikings Can Teach Us About Terrorism

John Arquilla is professor and chair of the defense analysis department at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author, most recently, of Insurgents, Raiders and Bandits. What if all the reasons commonly given for the onset of the current age of terror are wrong? If violence against the innocent is not the product of religious fanaticism, reaction to corrupt governance, or a manifestation of the sheer hopelessness and rage that come with perpetual poverty, then what are the real causes? If the received wisdom about terrorism can be challenged, then there is an obligation to look more deeply into its origins. In the matter of faith-based zealotry, psychiatrist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman has profiled hundreds of jihadis affiliated with the al Qaeda movement, finding that religion is a lesser included factor in their recruitment. Indeed, a significant percentage of these militants undertook graduate studies -- such study itself a seeming contradiction of fundamentalism -- many outside the Muslim world. For example, 9/11 attack team leader Mohammed Atta studied architecture in Germany.

Hayat Alvi: The Taliban, Salafi Ideology ... Learning from history

Hayat Alvi, PhD, is an associate professor at the US Naval War College. October 7 marked the eleventh year of the Afghanistan war, and American casualties reached 2,000, while many more thousands of Afghans have been killed or maimed by conflict-related casualties as well as terrorist suicide attacks. As US and coalition forces prepare for the 2014 pullout, the International Crisis Group just released a report warning that the Afghan government could collapse, precipitating a civil war.Most likely that is what the Taliban and fellow insurgents are counting on, allowing history to repeat itself once again. If we were to pull one thread from today’s situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, we would see it woven into an ideological fabric that goes back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan era. Very little has changed in the militants’ worldview and strategies since the 1980s.

Clinton Yates: 'Columbusing' Black Washington

Clinton Yates is a D.C. native, Local News Editor for Express and a columnist for The Root DC. He was born at GWU hospital the week before Ronald Reagan ended up there for the wrong reasons. When he's not covering the city, pop culture or listening to music, he watches sports. A lot of them.More than 500 years ago, Christopher Columbus showed up on the shores of the Bahamas. For many years, the Italian explorer was credited with “discovering” the New World. It’s understood now that his arrival was more invasion than discovery. The fact that Columbus is celebrated as a hero is widely protested in many places on this day.  And that act of “nouveau-Columbusing” — showing up someplace and acting as if history started the moment you arrived as mentioned here — is directly germane to the discussion of gentrification in the District.

Robert Zoellick: The Currency of Power

Robert Zoellick, former World Bank president, is senior fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. This article is adapted from his Alastair Buchan Memorial Lecture at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Lawrence Korb: Return of the Neocons

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Katherine Ellison: The Steel Butterfly Still Soars

Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of “Imelda: Steel Butterfly of the Philippines.”LIKE a cockroach after a nuclear bomb, Imelda Marcos’s charm has survived what should have been a deadly blow. Back in 1986, a popular revolt ended her 20-year reign as the Philippines’ first lady. She fled to Hawaii with her husband, Ferdinand, leaving behind a grisly record of human rights abuses, corruption and, of course, more than 1,000 pairs of shoes.

Kevin Baker: How the G.O.P. Became the Anti-Urban Party

by Kevin Baker

Kevin Baker is the author of the “City of Fire” series of historical novels: “Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley” and “Strivers Row.” ...The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections. This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles. With the possible exception of Houston or maybe Omaha, it’s all but inconceivable that Mr. Romney will carry any of those cities. And that’s due in good part to the man Hoover defeated, more than 80 years ago.

Francisco Toro: How Hugo Chávez Became Irrelevant

Francisco Toro is a journalist, political scientist and blogger.AS Hugo Chávez, the icon of Latin America’s left, struggles to hang on to his job, it’s tempting to read tomorrow’s closely contested election in Venezuela as a possible signal of the region’s return to the right. That would be a mistake, because the question that’s been roiling Latin America for a dozen years isn’t “left or right?” but “which left?”Outsiders have often interpreted Latin America’s swing to the left over the last dozen years as a movement of leaders marching in ideological lock step. But within the region, the fault lines have always been clear.Radical revolutionary regimes in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua joined Cuba, the granddaddy of the far left, in a bloc determined to confront the capitalist world, even if that meant increasingly authoritarian government....

Martin Kettle: Miliband and Blair Have More in Common Than Those Stuck in the Past Can Allow

Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian. Most of us are marked in various ways by the politics of the era in which we first became involved. This is not the same as saying, hopefully, that nobody's political views ever change, although all of us can probably think of people we know whose political views have managed to get stuck depressingly early on in their lives, and have never altered. But, in the same way that Napoleon once said that to understand a country's foreign policy it is always useful to look first at the map, so in understanding a person's politics, it is always useful to know when they were born. That certainly went for Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday. Hobsbawm's lifelong Marxism was rooted in the way he became politically engaged in Berlin as Hitler came to power and the feelings he experienced in Popular Front France in the mid-1930s. Hobsbawm has been much censured for continuing to articulate why communists of his generation so often thought the way they did about the Soviet Union. But this only supports my point.

Karl Rove: Can We Believe the Presidential Polls?

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. 

Jonathan Martin: Mitt Romney's George W. Bush Problem

Jonathan Martin is a senior political reporter at POLITICO, where he covers national politics.It’s a matter of when, not if, President Barack Obama turns to Mitt Romney at the first face-off here Wednesday night and repeats some variation of the same line the president and his campaign have used all year: Mitt, electing you would mean a return to the same policies that got us into this financial mess in the first place. The attack is Obama’s carefully tested way of saying that Romney would represent a third term for George W. Bush and the 43rd president’s hands-off approach to taxes, spending and regulation that, in the incumbent’s words, “led to the crisis.” If not as directly, Obama is attempting to put a Bush mask on Romney in exactly the same fashion as he did with devastating success to John McCain four years ago. It’s not as blunt as FDR still running against Hooverism four years into the New Deal, but the bloody-shirt waving has served to remind voters of the recent Republican unpleasantness — and left conservatives confounded that their nominee not only hasn’t rebutted the charge but also isn’t attempting to turn the tables and run against both recent presidents...

Mattea Kramer: A Guide to the Presidential Debates You Won’t Hear

Mattea Kramer is senior research analyst at National Priorities Project and a TomDispatch regular. She is lead author of the new book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.Five big things will decide what this country looks like next year and in the 20 years to follow, but here’s a guarantee for you: you’re not going to hear about them in the upcoming presidential debates. Yes, there will be questions and answers focused on deficits, taxes, Medicare, the Pentagon, and education, to which you already more or less know the responses each candidate will offer.  What you won’t get from either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is a little genuine tough talk about the actual state of reality in these United States of ours.  And yet, on those five subjects, a little reality would go a long way, while too little reality (as in the debates to come) is a surefire recipe for American decline.

Peark K. Ford Dowe: A Struggle to Maintain Privilege

Pearl K. Ford Dowe is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Arkansas.The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute is consistent with previous research showing that white working-class Southerners with limited education feel that they are held back economically and socially, just as African-American Southerners are.But the potential for multiracial coalitions to address these issues is made less likely by the rightward drift of white Southerners and their aversion to potential African-American partners....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

Hastings Wyman: The South's Inescapable History

Hastings Wyman is the founding editor of Southern Political Report.Despite a generation of economic and social change, the South’s history is distinct from that of the rest of the country and helps explain why working-class whites in the South are significantly more conservative than those elsewhere.The South did not undergo the industrial revolution in the late 19th century, so immigrants who created a more liberal political environment elsewhere never arrived....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

Newton N. Minow: A Glimmer in the Vast Wasteland

Newton N. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1961 to 1963, is the author, with Craig L. LaMay, of “Inside the Presidential Debates: Their Improbable Past and Promising Future.”ON Wednesday night, President Obama and Mitt Romney will meet in Denver for our nation’s 28th televised presidential debate. The first was in 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in Chicago. After he was elected, Mr. Kennedy told me he would not have not have won without the four debates that year.The debates are an institution now, and among the most watched television events in America. They are one place in the modern campaign — perhaps the only place — where the voter is treated with respect. They are the one time when the major candidates appear together side by side under conditions they do not control. They are a relief from the nasty commercials that dominate the campaign, fed by donations that are effectively unlimited and anonymous. Broadcasters provide the television time for the debates, without commercials, as a rare public service....

Victor Kotsev: Syria between Hama 1982 and Lebanon

Victor Kotsev is a journalist and political analyst. 

John Arquilla: President Kennedy vs. the Mullahs

John Arquilla is professor and chair of the department of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author, most recently, of Insurgents, Raiders and Bandits.