Roundup: Media's Take

Hugo Restall: Hong Kong Was Better Under the British

Mr. Restall is the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Chas Freeman: The China Bluff

Chas Freeman, chairman of Projects International, is a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This article is adapted from remarks delivered at The Center for the National Interest on February 16, 2012.

James Traub: The End of American Intervention

James Traub is a columnist at foreignpolicy.com, a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and the author of The Freedom Agenda.

Daniel Byman: Iran's Ties to al-Qaeda Go Back Years

Daniel Byman is a professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and research director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism.

Derek Thompson: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of U.S. Whaling: An Innovation Story

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website.One hundred and fifty years ago, around the time Herman Melville was completing Moby Dick, whaling was a booming worldwide business and the United States was the global behemoth. In 1846, we owned 640 whaling ships, more than the rest of the world put together and tripled. At its height, the whaling industry contributed $10 million (in 1880 dollars) to GDP, enough to make it the fifth largest sector of the economy. Whales contributed oil for illuminants, ambergris for perfumes, and baleen, a bonelike substance extracted from the jaw, for umbrellas.Fifty years later, the industry was dead. Our active whaling fleet had fallen by 90 percent. The industry's real output had declined to 1816 levels, completing a century's symmetry of triumph and decline. What happened? And why does what happened still matter?...

Mustafa Barghouthi: Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine

Mustafa Barghouthi, a doctor and member of the Palestinian Parliament, is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party....Khader Adnan, a Palestinian held in an Israeli prison, pursued a different path. Despite his alleged affiliation with the militant group Islamic Jihad, he waged a peaceful hunger strike to shake loose the consciences of people in Israel and around the world. Mr. Adnan chose to go unfed for more than nine weeks and came close to death. He endured for 66 days before ending his hunger strike on Tuesday in exchange for an Israeli agreement to release him as early as April 17.Mr. Adnan has certainly achieved an individual victory. But it was also a broader triumph — unifying Palestinians and highlighting the power of nonviolent protest. Indeed, all Palestinians who seek an independent state and an end to the Israeli occupation would be wise to avoid violence and embrace the example of peaceful resistance....

Dana Milbank: Rick Santorum's Nazi Problem

Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.Rick Santorum sees Nazis everywhere: in the Middle East, in doctor’s offices and medical labs, in the Democratic Party, and now in the White House.The Republican presidential candidate told a group of supporters Sunday night that this year’s election was like the time between 1940 and 1941 when Americans didn’t act against Adolf Hitler because they thought he was “a nice guy” and not “near as bad as what we think.”...The obvious implication — later denied by the candidate — was that Santorum is some modern-day Churchill and President Obama is der Fuhrer. It was outrageous and yet, for Santorum, routine....In explaining why his remark over the weekend wasn’t linking Obama to Hitler, Santorum said that “the World War II metaphor is one I’ve used a hundred times.” This is not an exaggeration — and that’s Santorum’s problem....

Peter Beaumont: Libya Reveals Perils of Humanitarian War

Peter Beaumont is foreign affairs editor at the Observer. 

Ari Berman: How the Politics of the Super Rich Became American Politics

Ari Berman is a contributing writer for the Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute. His book, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics (Picador) is now out in paperback with a new afterword. Follow him on Twitter @AriBerman.At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

Fareed Zakaria: How History Lessons Could Deter Iranian Aggression

Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. We are hearing a new concept these days in discussions about Iran — the zone of immunity. The idea, often explained by Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, is that soon Iran will have enough nuclear capability that Israel would not be able to inflict a crippling blow to its program. In fact, while the specifics are fresh, this is not a new strategic concept at all. Nations have often believed that they face a closing window to act, and almost always such thinking has led to disaster. The most famous example, of course, was Germany’s decision to start what became World War I. The German General Staff believed that Russia — its archenemy — was rearming on a scale that would soon nullify Germany’s superior military strength.

Noam Chomsky: American Decline in Perspective, Part 2

To read Part 1, go here.Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Making the Future: Occupations, Intervention, Empire, and Resistance, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook.

Francis J. Gavin and James B. Steinberg: The Unknown Unknowns on Iran

Francis J. Gavin is director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas and the Tom Slick professor of international affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.James B. Steinberg is dean of Syracuse University's Maxwell School and university professor of social science, international affairs, and law. He served as deputy secretary of state to Secretary Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2011 and as deputy national security advisor to President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 2000.

Robert W. Merry: Obama and the War Decision

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy. Talk of war is in the air. And as tensions mount between the United States and Iran, it’s proper to assess the lessons of history as they relate to presidential war decisions. The first is that American presidents face no decision more politically dangerous than the choice to take the country into armed hostilities. It can bring glory to the White House occupant, but it can just as easily bring ignominy. Consider the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. All saw their political standing plummet amid war outcomes far different from what had been anticipated in the flush of excitement at war’s beginning. The same happened to George W. Bush, who managed to get through his 2004 reelection effort despite growing difficulties in Iraq. Four years later, however, the full extent of the Iraq mess was evident, and that contributed to the double whammy that befell Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Even Abraham Lincoln, generally considered by historians to be the greatest president, nearly came a cropper due to the carnage of war he had unleashed and which, right up until the fall of 1864, still looked like a hopeless stalemate.

Editorial in the WSJ: The Falklands Kerfuffle

To whom do the Falklands belong, originally speaking? So far as is known to history there were no native inhabitants when a Dutch sea captain named Sebald de Weert sighted the islands in 1600. Nor was there anyone to greet the Englishman John Strong when he became perhaps the first man to set foot there 90 years later. The islands' first settlement was French. Tiny British and Spanish settlements soon followed. As for Argentine claims, they rest mainly on a concession that a short-lived South American republic known as the United Provinces of the River Plate made to a Hamburg-born trader named Vernet. Yet Vernet first sought the permission of the British before establishing a little settlement on East Falkland, and he insisted that his interests in the island were commercial, despite efforts by Buenos Aires to appoint him governor and thereby establish a political claim. These little machinations ended when a British squadron landed on the islands in 1833 and raised the Union Jack. There it has flown for 179 unbroken years, minus an unpleasant 73-day exception in 1982. The population of the islands is British, English-speaking and loyal to the Crown. Penguins aside, they are the true and only natives, and their numbers have grown in recent years.

David Warren: The Paths to War with Iran

David Warren's column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays in the Ottawa Citizen....The question here is not, "Should Israel hit Iran?" Not even Washington has the power to constrain Israeli action, when the issue involves, for Israel, the prospect of another Holocaust. Moral posturing is, in this case, a waste of precious time.The great pacifist, Bertrand Russell, once gave his views on Russia acquiring nuclear weapons. This was an issue in 1948. There is controversy over the nuances of his lordship's argument, reported in the contemporary Daily Worker under the headline, "Earl Russell calls for atom war." He did not say that the United States should launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. He only said, that would be the unanswerable humanitarian argument.For all I happen to despise "Bertie" and most of what he stood for, he was a solid logician. He sketched out three possibilities, in what he considered to be the descending order of desirability. 1. West attacks a USSR still without nuclear arms, and wins easily. 2. West and USSR wait to have war until both have nuclear weapons, and West wins, after horrific destruction on both sides. 3. West lets USSR get and accumulate nuclear weapons, then submits ignominiously to Soviet-dictated peace.

Harold Meyerson: The GOP's Hart-Mondale Moment

Harold Meyerson writes a weekly political column for the Washington Post that appears on Wednesdays and contributes to the PostPartisan blogRepublicans have reached their 1984. I don’t mean this in the Orwellian sense, though Republicans have more than their share of Orwellian impulses. Rather, I mean that the kind of divisions that have characterized Democratic presidential primaries since the 1984 contest between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart have now popped up in GOP primaries as well: This year, Republicans are dividing along lines of class.According to data compiled by the Wall Street Journal, in all the states that have voted thus far, Mitt Romney has won 46 percent of the counties with incomes higher than the statewide median, and just 15 percent of those with incomes beneath the statewide median. Rick Santorum, by contrast, has won 39 percent of the counties with higher income, and 46 percent of those with lower income....

Thomas Sowell: The ‘Progressive’ Legacy ... In the Footsteps of TR and Wilson

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States, but his doctrine is by no means unique. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished 100 years ago. Many of the trends, problems, and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration. The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years...

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson: Romney is the Right Man for America. George Romney, that is

Jacob S. Hacker s the Stanley B. Resor professor of political science and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. Paul Pierson is the John Gross professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. They are the authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.The parallels between Mitt Romney and his father, George — both businessmen, both Republican governors of blue states, both presidential candidates — make for tantalizing psychological comparisons. Is the younger Romney less concerned about economic fairness than was his late father, who helped create Michigan’s first income tax and famously returned a big bonus when he was chief executive of American Motors? Does Mitt’s cautious style reflect the bitter experience of George, whose 1968 presidential run collapsed after he used the term “brainwashing” to explain his early support for the Vietnam War?

Noam Chomsky: American Decline in Perspective, Part 1

To read Part 2, go here.Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Making the Future: Occupations, Intervention, Empire, and Resistance, The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis, with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects, also available as an audiobook. Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated -- Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.  Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead.  Right now, in fact.

Nick Turse: 450 Bases and It’s Not Over Yet

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. This article is the sixth in his new series on the changing face of American empire, which is being underwritten by Lannan Foundation.  You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook.