Roundup: Media's Take

Richard Florida: The Opera House Effect

Richard Florida is Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, whose current client list can be found here....A new study, "The Phantom of the Opera: Cultural Amenities, Human Capital, and Regional Economic Growth," published in the journal Labour Economics, sheds additional light on this conundrum by examining the effect the location of 17th and 18th century German opera houses has on attracting talent and spurring economic growth in later periods.  

Thomas Sowell: Lessons of Electoral History?

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.It used to be common for people to urge us to learn “the lessons of history.” But history gets much less attention these days, and, if there are any lessons that we are offered, they are more likely to be the lessons from current polls or the lessons of political correctness.Even among those who still invoke the lessons of history, some read those lessons very differently than others.

Charles C. W. Cooke: What Would Palmerston Do?

Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate of National ReviewUpon receiving the news that the British embassy in Tehran had been stormed, its windows smashed, and the Union Jack ignominiously burned and replaced with an Iranian counterpart, a question popped into my mind: What would Lord Palmerston do?Henry John Temple — more commonly known to posterity as the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, or simply “Pam” — was notoriously intolerant of any action abroad that threatened British interests, or even individual British subjects. As both foreign secretary and prime minister, Palmerston readily eschewed diplomatic niceties, preferring, in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, “to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.”

Simon Johnson: Europe Could Learn From Korea's Experience

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, is co-founder of a leading economics blog, BaselineScenario.com, a professor at MIT Sloan, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers.On the surface, at least, the situation in the euro zone today and South Korea in the fall of 1997 look very different. Both are cases of severe economic crisis, to be sure. But the euro zone’s problems stem from high levels of government debt, while South Korea faced massive capital flight and a collapsing currency — and almost all of the debt was in the corporate sector.Nevertheless, the euro zone could learn from the experience of South Korea, which came through its crisis more quickly than anyone expected, combining sensible reforms with a rapid recovery. The key to the South Korean turnaround was a large depreciation of the currency, the won. A depreciation of the euro seems to be one likely way that the euro zone will turn the corner.

Gideon Rachman: Will Europe Relive 1930s Nightmare?

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times.Could things go bad again? I mean really bad – Great Depression bad, world war bad? The kind of cataclysmic event my generation has learned to think belongs only in the history books.There is certainly a sense of foreboding in Europe at the moment. Speaking in Berlin on Monday night, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, warned: “We are standing on the edge of a precipice.” President Sarkozy of France cautioned recently: “If the euro explodes, Europe would explode. It’s the guarantee of peace in a continent where there were terrible wars.”European politicians have often indulged in shroud-waving about the threat of war, to rally support for the beloved European project. In normal times, few Europeans take such talk seriously...

Tim Murphy: Newt Gingrich, Crackpot Historian

Tim Murphy writes for Mother Jones.There are no sex scenes in Newt Gingrich's latest novel, The Battle of the Crater. This is for the best. It's not because Gingrich is squeamish about the subject: In his 1995 beach read, 1945, the Germans invade Tennessee and a Nazi "kitten" seduces a White House aide. But a novel about a Civil War battle that turned into a racial massacre is a terribly awkward place for lovemaking, and, anyway, the former House speaker and current front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination has enough trouble getting his history right.

Charles Grant: Europe's Choice: Monnet vs de Gaulle

Charles Grant is director of the Centre for European Reform

Matthew Continetti: Anarchy in the U.S.A.

Matthew Continetti is opinion editor of The Weekly Standard....When the police officers and sanitation workers reclaimed Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street’s supporters cried, “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.” Whether the sympathizers or the critics really understand the idea and the method of the movement is a good question. The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism.It was February 25, 1825, and the U.S. Capitol was under occupation​—​sort of. Robert Owen, a successful Welsh businessman and socialist, wasn’t standing in the Rotunda holding up a placard. He was addressing a joint session of Congress from the dais of the House of Representatives. President James Monroe and president-elect John Quincy Adams were present for at least a portion of the speech. As Joshua Muravchik explains in Heaven on Earth, a history of socialism, the elected officials were mesmerized by Owen’s plans.

Rich Lowry: The Spirit of ’48

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.You could almost hear the hands rubbing together in glee within Pres. Barack Obama’s political shop at the failure of the congressional supercommittee. How the president’s politicos must welcome a new count in the indictment against the “do-nothing Congress.”The phrase famously originates from the 1948 presidential election when Harry Truman (who borrowed it from a reporter) used it to lambaste a just-elected Republican Congress and claw his way to an upset reelection victory. Hopeful Democrats think “Give ’em hell, Barry” can use the 1948 template to overcome his poor standing in the polls in another victory over another new, unpopular Republican Congress.That the Truman campaign is a template at all is a measure of Obama’s desperation, and of his definitive termination of the politics of hope and change. We associate 1948 with the smiling, triumphant Truman holding up a post-election copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the erroneous headline "Dewey defeats Truman." That’s because there are no compelling photos of the low demagoguery that fueled his reelection....

Stephen M. Walt: Requiem for the "Arab Spring?"

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University....[I]f the history of revolutions tells us anything, it is that rebuilding new political orders is a protracted, difficult, and unpredictable process, and having a few Mandelas around is no guarantee of success. Why? Because once the existing political order has collapsed, the stakes for key groups in society rise dramatically. The creation of new institutions -- in effect, the development of new rules for ordering political life -- inevitably creates new winners and losers. And everyone knows this. Not only does this situation encourage more and more groups to join the process of political struggle, but awareness that high stakes are involved also gives them incentives to use more extreme means, including violence....

Joe Nocera: Germany Cuts Off Its Nose

Joe Nocera is a columnist for the NYT.“Lords of Finance,” Liaquat Ahamed’s magisterial 2009 history of the events that led first to the Great Depression and then to the Second World War, is, necessarily, a book about policy mistakes. Central bankers and Treasury secretaries, presidents and prime ministers: all of them are locked into their own economic and political orthodoxies. Each is certain that his is the only sensible course of action. Crippled by their blinders, they consistently make economic choices that appear to us, nearly a century later, to be insane but to them seemed completely sensible.Perhaps the worst of the policy errors during the post-World War I period was the insistence of the Allies that Germany pay war reparations — reparations that went far beyond anything that the defeated Germans could afford. As the victors, the Allies felt that it was only fair for Germany to pay for the terrible war it had waged, and they didn’t much care about whether such payments would cripple the German economy.Which, of course, they did; by the early 1930s, the country was effectively bankrupt. And the Allies’ unrelenting demand for reparations bred immense resentment among the German people. There is not much doubt that this combination of public anger and economic distress helped facilitate the rise of Adolf Hitler....

Peter Beinart: Obama's Foreign Policy Doctrine Finally Emerges

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His next book, The Crisis of Zionism,  will be published by Times Books in April 2012.What does America’s disastrous bombing of Pakistani soldiers this week have to do with President Obama’s much-ballyhooed trip to East Asia last week? Between them, they suggest that the Obama administration may be, finally, edging toward a foreign-policy doctrine.

Fawaz A Gerges: The Irresistible Rise of the Muslim Brothers

Fawaz A Gerges is director of the Middle East Centre and professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is The Rise and Fall of al-Qaeda (OUP USA, £15.99).Since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in February, a political struggle has raged in Egypt along ideological, generational and class lines. The fall of the authoritarian wall, built more than half a century ago, has led to a reawakening, a revival of mass politics and social mobilisation. In this context, although initially welcomed as saviours, Egypt's military rulers have miscalculated monstrously by resisting the transition to civilian rule and tightening their grip on power. Tens of thousands of Egyptians have risen in revolt against the military council in recent days, sending a clear message about the changed mood and the psychology of the people. At the same time, after decades of being outlawed and persecuted, religious activists, or Islamists, have emerged above ground as a pivotal force, openly mobilising their old supporters, who number in the millions, and recruiting new members.

Eleanor Clift: President Obama Weighs Harry Truman Strategy for 2012 Reelection Campaign

Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek.The supercommittee was always a contrived solution to a contrived crisis, and President Obama was smart politically to stay away from it.The current morass is not like August, Obama pointed out, when a congressional impasse took the country to the brink of default. Congress has a year to shape the cuts that will otherwise kick in automatically, and polls suggest that voters are receptive to the president’s argument that Republicans are standing in the way of policies that could help jump-start the economy and create jobs.Much of Obama’s success will depend on his ability to frame the election-year debate in a way that keeps the moral high ground as he punches away at the “do-nothing” Congress. Harry Truman saved his presidency in 1948 by running against a Republican Congress with as much fervor as he did his GOP opponent. Truman said if you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat, a sentiment Obama is attempting to apply to today’s Congress....

Xie Tao: China or U.S. - Who Owns the "Pacific Century"?

Xie Tao writes for Worldcrunch.

Fabian Lindner: In Today's Debt Crisis, Germany is the US of 1931

Fabian Lindner is an economist working at the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation. He studied in Germany and France and holds master degrees in political science and economics. He also writes the blog Herdentrieb for the German weekly Die Zeit.

Holman W. Jenkins: If Only Obama Had Been Carter

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and writes editorials and the weekly Business World column.The good news is that growing economies can afford a great deal of government, if not quite as much as the Europeans and the U.S. have promised themselves.The bad news is that "policy error" are the saddest words in the language. These words, starting in the 1960s, came to dominate serious post mortems on the Great Depression of the 1930s, which blighted so many lives.Which brings us to President Obama. Has a president ever arrived freer to choose his own course, to devise his own response to the economic crisis that greeted him in office? Candidate Obama landed with no explicit ideological commitments (at least that he cared to share). He was an icon of something else altogether, and his followers were ready to follow wherever he led.Alas, a few days before his all-but-certain election, he glibly telegraphed what would prove the seminal mistake of his administration, telling Time magazine's Joe Klein that,right after fixing the financial crisis, "a new energy economy . . . That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office."

Barron Young Smith: Why the Romney Doctrine Won't Resemble the Bush Doctrine

Barron Young Smith is a former online editor of The New Republic.The Republican presidential primary has provided ample display of the party’s penchant for bellicosity in foreign affairs, and last night’s debate was no exception. It’s a posture that’s understandably gotten many liberals worried about a reprisal of the famously interventionist Bush Doctrine. “God help us if any of these jokers makes it into the White House,” wrote Fred Kaplan of Slate after watching the previous GOP’s national security debate.But maybe liberals shouldn’t fret so much. Yes, imagining any of the various Republican novelty candidates as the next commander-in-chief is a frightening prospect. But if we assume that the establishment candidate, Mitt Romney, wins the nomination, it seems unlikely that he’ll be inclined to reenact the presidency of George W. Bush. Indeed, if you take a close look at his foreign policy positions, you’ll find echoes of another Republican president, one who has lately become much more palatable to Democrats: Ronald Reagan.

Michael O'Hanlon and Paul Wolfowitz: Defining Victory in Afghanistan

Mr. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is co-author of its Afghanistan Index and author of The Wounded Giant: America's Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity (Penguin, 2011). Mr. Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former U.S. deputy secretary of defense.The American debate on Afghanistan seems to be framed by two diametrically opposed definitions of success. One says that we have effectively won the war already—that the death of Osama bin Laden and the increase in targeted drone attacks have achieved the goal of preventing transnational terrorists from once again using sanctuaries in Afghanistan to attack the United States. The other view holds that success is impossible—that the goal of a stable Afghan government in control of its own territory is beyond our reach.Both views lead to the same result: a premature abandonment of Afghanistan that could return it to the control of the Taliban and allow al Qaeda and other extremists to regain sanctuaries. Even targeted drone strikes would be much less effective without the human intelligence needed to support them.

Eric S. Margolis: Who Won the Iraq War?

Eric S. Margolis is the author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination?In October, 2002 I wrote in the first issue of The American Conservative an analysis of the impending Iraq War entitled “The Road to Folly.”I observed, “A war that fails to achieve clear political objectives is merely an exercise in violence and futility.” Having covered 14 conflicts as a war correspondent, I’ve seen a lot of violence and futility.The White House launched a thunderous, utterly shameless propaganda campaign about phony threats to America and the world from President Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And on cue, U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.In America, the “bodyguard of lies” that Churchill said accompanies every war swelled into an army of liars. The Bush administration’s neoconservatives played a leading role in engineering the Iraq conflict. Media acted as megaphones for the war party. Thanks to the drumbeat of lies and insinuations, over 80 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11…