Roundup: Media's Take

Leon Hadar: America's Long-Delayed Pacific Century

Leon Hadar, a Washington-based journalist and global affairs analyst, is the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).When President Bill Clinton was hosting the Leaders Summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Seattle in 1993, the Middle East started to feel like old news. Resisting pressure to oust Saddam Hussein and to launch new military campaigns in the Middle East, Clinton promoted a trade-liberalization agenda in East Asia and tried to transform APEC from a "talking shop" into a pillar of an Asia-centric foreign policy.But when President Barack Obama hosted the leaders of the APEC forum in Honolulu, Hawaii, close to two decades after the Seattle Summit, it felt like a diplomatic Groundhog Day, with U.S. officials insisting once again that the time has come to shift American global priorities from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, proclaiming the Obama administration’s vision of “America’s Pacific Century.”That Obama, born and raised in Hawaii, America’s self-described “first Pacific president,” is hosting the APEC leaders meeting in one of America’s territorial possessions in the Pacific was meant to symbolize these changing U.S. priorities.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Is Newt Gingrich Following In Nixon's Footsteps?

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.Can a new "Newt" emerge to win the Republican nomination? In an ingenious  columnin the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus speculates that Gingrich may be following in Richard M. Nixon's path. Just as Nixon transformed himself into a moderate candidate in 1968, so Gingrich is now refraining from partisanship. He's being nice to his fellow candidates in the debates. He shakes his head over the bad feelings in Congress.Garry Wills diagnosed this phenomenon in his book Nixon Agonistes. He called it "compensatory counterstress." What he meant by that is that the temptation for rival politicians is to say almost the same thing towards the end of a race for the presidency. Wills was referring to the general election, not the primary. But Gingrich seems to be accelerating the model as he tries to tamp down his more ebullient pronouncements. In Confessions of a Conservative, Wills concluded that "the candidates middle in toward each other so energetically that they tend to pass each other and fall, rhetorically, into the opposite camp." They want to capture the "indeterminate middle"—what we could today call "independent voters."

Frank Rich: How Obama's Presidency Mirrors JFK's

Frank Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as Writer-at-Large, writing monthly on politics and culture, and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. He is also a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.

John DeVore: Newt Gingrich Is an Author of Alternative Histories. What If He Wrote an Alternative History of Himself?

John DeVore is a writer living in New York City.

The U.S. and Israel Haven't Learned Their History Lessons -- the Palestinians and Abbas Have

Rabbi Michael M. Cohen is the author of “Einstein’s Rabbi: A Tale of Science and the Soul” and works for the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies.Edmund Burke famously said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” The Arab-Israeli conflict, steeped in history, is a case in point. A major piece of US Middle East policy presents a clear example of history being forgotten, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statehood bid at the United Nations serves as an example of history being remembered.

Yan Xuetong: How China Can Defeat America

Yan Xuetong, the author of “Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power,” is a professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University. This essay was translated by Zhaowen Wu and David Liu from the Chinese. WITH China’s growing influence over the global economy, and its increasing ability to project military power, competition between the United States and China is inevitable. Leaders of both countries assert optimistically that the competition can be managed without clashes that threaten the global order.Most academic analysts are not so sanguine. If history is any guide, China’s rise does indeed pose a challenge to America. Rising powers seek to gain more authority in the global system, and declining powers rarely go down without a fight. And given the differences between the Chinese and American political systems, pessimists might believe that there is an even higher likelihood of war.

Alexei Monsarrat: Italy Must Defy its Fractious History to Save Europe

Alexei Monsarrat is the director of the Global Business and Economics programme at the Atlantic Council.Italy has a nearly 3,000-year history of violent and costly attempts at cohesion. Now, its people must take unity to a totally new level, coming together over painful reforms that will make or break the world's eighth-largest economy — and the euro currency that holds much of Europe together.The November 12 resignation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi gives the country the opportunity to defy its history. The designated premier, Mario Monti, is a respected, Yale-educated economist whose support for substantial reforms is an encouraging sign after 17 years of chaotic rule under Berlusconi. But a daunting number of things will need to go right — and quickly — for Professor Monti to save the country.First, a new Italian government must instill confidence within bond markets that it can actually meet its debt payments. Italy needs over $400 billion (Dh1.46 trillion) in external financing next year alone to cover its projected spending. By comparison, Greece's much smaller economy has a projected budget shortfall of about $20 billion....

A.O. Scott: Film Is Dead? What Else Is New?

A.O. Scott is a film critic for the NYT.A few weeks ago I traveled to a college on Long Island to give a lecture — in other words, to stand up in front of a room full of people, ramble for a few minutes about movies and movie criticism, and then spend the rest of the hour answering questions. It was the middle of the day, and the audience was composed, in what looked like roughly equal numbers, of undergraduates and older students enrolled in continuing education courses. Half of the people were 25 and under, the other half 65 and over, leaving me smack in the generational middle and, as it happened, bouncing vertiginously, from one question to the next, between the future and the past....

Anthony Shadid: There’s a Slim Hope in History for Arab Christians

Anthony Shadid is the Beirut bureau chief of The New York Times. ...Worries about the fate of Christians in the Middle East are often thrust uncomfortably into the conflict between the West and the Muslim world; in the American presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich regularly warns of an “anti-Christian Spring,” as he did in a Republican debate last weekend.But focusing on that conflict, and the bigotries that beset it, misses the nuances of what Christians represent to the region, and the lessons that their history in other times of tumult might offer the future. In the 19th century, they ushered in a renaissance of Arab culture. Just generations ago, they helped articulate the ideologies that seized the Arab world’s imagination. The fate of Arab Christians today will help define the unresolved struggle within the Arab world about its own identity — how universal, fair, just and equal its societies turn out to be.“There is a part of Islam in every Arab Christian,” Ghassan Tueni, a journalist, diplomat and intellectual, once told me in Beirut. His suggestion for Christians’ survival was simple, that both they and Muslims imagine an identity that they could somehow share.

Waleed Ibrahim: Did U.S. Bring Democracy? Iraqis Have Doubts

Waleed Ibrahim is a correspondent at Reuters.Sitting in a barber shop in Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City slum, three friends agreed after a long and hard argument that U.S. forces brought democracy to Iraq.

Heather Gautney: Occupy Wall Street and the History of Force

Heather Gautney, PhD, is an assistant professor of sociology at Fordham University and author of Protest and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era (Palgrave Macmillan).Over the past few weeks, increasingly irritated and trigger-happy local officials have received glimpses of “people power” as they’ve amped up efforts to clear Occupy camps around the country, including New York’s Zuccotti Park on Monday night. But if history tells us anything, it’s that unwieldy, nonviolent and relatively modest movements can actually take down giants—and that implements of force are no match for the collective will of the people.Such acts of police aggression are fast becoming the shame of our nation. Intended to deter, they actually amplify the Occupy movement’s narrative of fighting domination and corruption....

Ramesh Ponnuru: Republicans Lose Way by Misreading Bush History

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review.In 2006 and 2008, voters inflicted on Republicans the worst back-to-back electoral drubbing any party has received since the Great Depression, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt all but destroyed the Party of Hoover. Republicans quickly reached a consensus about why they lost so badly: They had failed to be sufficiently Republican.This consensus still moves the party -- and since it is false, it moves them to make mistakes.“We lost our way” was the cliche that expressed the Republican theory. “I believe we did not just lose our majority, we lost our way,” said Congressman Mike Pence, of Indiana, as he ran to replace the House Republican leadership after the 2006 elections. “In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education by nearly 100 percent, created the largest new entitlement in 40 years, and pursued spending policies that created record deficits, national debt and rampant earmark spending.”

Richard N. Haass: Re-Orienting America's Foreign Policy

Richard N. Haass, formerly Director of Policy Planning in the US State Department, is President of The Council on Foreign Relations.Some 40 years ago, when I entered Oxford University as a graduate student, I declared my interest in the Middle East. I was told that this part of the world came under the rubric of “Oriental Studies,” and that I would be assigned an appropriate professor. But when I arrived for my first meeting at the professor’s office, his bookshelves were lined with volumes bearing Chinese characters. He was a specialist in what was, at least for me at the time, the wrong Orient.Something akin to this mistake has befallen American foreign policy. The United States has become preoccupied with the Middle East – in certain ways, the wrong Orient – and has not paid adequate attention to East Asia and the Pacific, where much of the twenty-first century’s history will be written.The good news is that this focus is shifting. Indeed, a quiet transformation is taking place in American foreign policy, one that is as significant as it is overdue. The US has rediscovered Asia...

Tariq Alhomayed: The Syrian Army: Will History Repeat Itself?

The writer is Editor-in-Chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article was first published on Nov. 14, 2011

Tiffany Jones Miller: Progressivism, Race, and the Training Wheels of Freedom

Tiffany Jones Miller is an associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas.

Michael Lind: America Needs More Powerful Bureaucrats

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."Following the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, President Barack Obama appointed a little-known civil servant to become its public face. Displaying a genius for publicity, including self-promotion, the American infrastructure czar became one of the most visible figures in American public life.Working tirelessly to rebut claims that the stimulus was nothing but a boondoggle, he made the otherwise boring subject of public investment in roads, bridges, parks and harbors glamorous in a way it had not been since the days of the WPA. From the beginning the infrastructure chief generated as much controversy as praise.

Aaron David Miller: Arab Spring, American Winter

Aaron David Miller, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served as a Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the author of Can America Have Another Great President? to be published in 2012.

Peter Beinart: Obama Steals Clinton’s 1994 Playbook With Daley Demotion

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.Ever since the GOP won the House of Representatives a year ago, one historical analogy has fixated the media: Bill Clinton’s response to the Republican revolution of 1994. Time and again, pundits have asked: Will Barack Obama triangulate, as Clinton allegedly did, or will he tack left, thus reaffirming his desire to be the transformational liberal that Clinton never was?

Wayne Federman: What Reagan Did for Hollywood

Wayne Federman is an actor, comedian, and writer known for his roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Step Brothers, 50 First Dates, and various television shows including Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, X-Files, and The League. He was the head monologue writer for NBC's Late Night Night with Jimmy Fallon. Tonight, the Motion Picture Association of America will honor the film career of Ronald Reagan with a tribute in Washington, D.C. The participating film studios include Paramount, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers. Ironically it was these exact studios (plus MGM and Columbia) who, 51 years earlier, were engaged in a contentious high-stakes negotiation with Ronald Reagan. The outcome of that bitter 1960 showdown altered the economic fortunes of tens of thousands of film actors.

Harold Bloom: Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?

Harold Bloom is a professor of English at Yale, who is at work on a play, “To You Whoever You Are: A Pageant Celebrating Walt Whitman.” THIS fall, we behold omens that will darken a year hence in the final phase of President Obama’s campaign for a second term. His likely opponent, the Mormon Mitt Romney, will be a pioneer figure whatever the outcome, since no previous member of that very American church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has ever secured a major-party nomination. Even should Mr. Obama triumph, a crucial precedent will have been established.Mr. Romney, earnest and staid, who is deep within the labyrinthine Mormon hierarchy, is directly descended from an early follower of the founding prophet Joseph Smith, whose highly original revelation was as much a departure from historical Christianity as Islam was and is. But then, so in fact are most manifestations of what is now called religion in the United States, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God Pentecostalists and even our mainline Protestant denominations.