Roundup: Media's Take

Norman Ornstein: What Obama Can Learn From Truman

[U]nlike Truman, Obama has constantly sought common ground with Congress. While that strategy averted a descent into national default, it has not been met with an olive branch on the other side. Obama’s embrace of the “Gang of Six” debt reduction proposal in the Senate, a call for substantial changes in core entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, along with major tax reform and more revenues, was not greeted with applause by most Republicans. Instead, it only reinforced Republicans’ ideological partisanship. Speaker of the House John Boehner rejected any attempt at a “Grand Bargain”, because his caucus would not countenance a deal that included any revenues at all. The message was clear: anything that Obama is for, Republicans will be instantly against. It’s a playbook from which the GOP is unlikely to diverge anytime soon.There’s an argument to be made that the president’s passive-aggressive approach to policy-making actually paid big benefits in terms of policy successes in his first two years. There is no way the House and Senate both would have passed health reform bills, for example, if the president had intervened aggressively and demanded things like a public option that would never have survived a filibuster in the Senate.

John Bolton and Paula A. DeSutter: A Cold War Missile Treaty That's Doing Us Harm

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security from 2001-05. Ms. DeSutter was assistant secretary for verification, compliance and implementation from 2002-09. 'Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: They last while they last." So said Charles de Gaulle a half-century ago, but he could have been describing the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement signed by the United States and the Soviet Union. The INF Treaty has far outlived its usefulness in its current form—so it should either be changed or thrown out. The Cold War strategic reality that existed in 1988 has passed into history. And yet the U.S. (and Russia) remain constrained by the INF Treaty's terms, even while today's strategic threats—China, Iran and North Korea—come from states outside the treaty.

William Broyles: Oval Office Appeaser

William Broyles, a screenwriter and former editor of NEWSWEEK, supported Barack Obama in 2008. When Barack Obama was inaugurated, a Republican president had taken the peace, prosperity, and budget surpluses of the Clinton years and given us two wars, a devastated economy, and an almost trillion-dollar deficit. Obama was going to be our Franklin Roosevelt, our Winston Churchill—a visionary leader who would give America hope again.

Robert D. Kaplan: The South China Sea Is the Future of Conflict

Robert D. Kaplan is senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, national correspondent for the Atlantic, and a member of the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Policy Board. He is the author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Europe is a landscape; East Asia a seascape. Therein lies a crucial difference between the 20th and 21st centuries. The most contested areas of the globe in the last century lay on dry land in Europe, particularly in the flat expanse that rendered the eastern and western borders of Germany artificial and exposed to the inexorable march of armies.

Soner Cagaptay: From Ataturk to Erdogan, Reshaping Turkey

The writer is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. As the Ottoman Empire vanished after World War I, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new Turkey in the mold of Europe. Controlling all levers of power, including the military, Ataturk implemented his vision by mandating a separation between religion, public policy and government, and by telling his compatriots to consider themselves intuitively Western. It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power in 2002 — for Turkey’s “Kemalist Occident,” or dalliance with the West, to end.

Nile Gardiner: Is Obama Now the Most Unpopular US president Since Carter?

Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analysts and political commentator. Gallup’s latest numbers are a real eye-opener. The polling company now has Barack Obama’s approval rating at just 39 percent, the lowest level of his presidency, and down 13 percentage points since the start of June. Gallup finds that 54 percent of Americans now disapprove of the president’s job performance. And according to the RealClear Politics average of several major polls, a staggering 73.8 percent of Americans now believe the country is moving down the wrong track.

Christina Romer: What the government can do to create jobs

by Christina D. Romer

AFTER the grim economic developments of the last few weeks, it’s easy to lose hope. Could the Great Recession of 2008 drag on for years, just as the Great Depression did in the 1930s? Adding to the despair is the oft-repeated notion that it took World War II to end the economic nightmare of the ’30s: If a global war was needed to return the economy to full employment then, what is going to save us today?Look more closely at history and you’ll see that the truth is much more complicated — and less gloomy. While the war helped the recovery from the Depression, the economy was improving long before military spending increased. More fundamentally, the wrenching wartime experience provides a message of hope for our troubled economy today: we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.

Bruce Crumley: Why London Riots Are Scarier Than Paris '05

Bruce Crumley is the Paris bureau chief for TIME. With the violence that broke out in London Saturday having spread to other English cities during a third straight night of rioting Monday, it's tempting (and probably portentous) from the comfort of Paris to offer up lessons learned from the nearly three weeks of upheaval that rocked French towns in 2005. Yet while there seem to be certain details common to both those explosions of urban fury, significant differences not only complicate directly comparing events in the U.K. to those that occurred in France nearly six years ago—but also leave the current unrest looking more serious in terms of destruction and consequence. As shocking as the images of burning cars, vandalism, and clashes with police were in 2005, the scenes today from across London inspire an even stronger, awesome fear.

Editorial in the Independent: Britain Has Experienced its Katrina Moment

Britain has been plunged into an urban nightmare. Parts of some of our largest cities, London in particular, have witnessed a terrifying breakdown of law and order. Shops have been smashed and looted. Properties have been vandalised. Families have been burned out of their homes. Cars have been set on fire. Running battles have been fought between gangs of youths and riot police. For days the capital has been awash with trepidation. The political ramifications will be profound. This is beginning to look like the Government's Hurricane Katrina. George Bush's Republican administration looked clueless when the levees broke in 2005, engulfing the city of New Orleans. The same can be said of the Coalition since the violence first flared at the weekend. The impression left by Theresa May yesterday, where the Home Secretary surreally implored listeners of the BBC's Today programme to report rioters, was of anything but grip. David Cameron returned from holiday yesterday in response to the crisis, but his attempts to project authority were scarcely any more convincing. Yet the Katrina analogy is appropriate in a more profound way.

Michael Tomasky: Why Isn’t Barack Obama Tougher?

Newsweek/Daily Beast Special Correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas....Obama believes in civic virtue, and in the idea that in a democracy it’s the duty of responsible leaders to reason together on behalf of something they all agree to call the common good. The fancy name for this theory of government in political-philosophy circles is civic republicanism: the “civic” part refers to action taken in the public sphere, while “republican” (a small-r republican and a big-R Republican are very different animals) signals a concern with tyrannical majorities and a faith that reasoned debate will produce a balanced result.

Peter Beinart: Obama’s Era of Decline

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 latest book is The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris. ...For liberals, the Obama years were supposed to mark a return to progressive government activism, a latter-day Great Society. But the Great Society, it’s crucial to remember, was launched in the mid-1960s, at the high noon of American optimism about our position in the world. What destroyed it, among other things, was the painful realization, by the early 1970s, that American resources were more finite, and America’s international position more fragile, than Johnson and his whiz-kid advisers had understood. Similarly, it is now clear that today’s political environment is less like the early and mid-1960s, that era of liberal optimism—or even the 1980s, which were dominated by Reagan’s conservative optimism—than by the deeply pessimistic 1970s. President Obama, like presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, will be defined by how he manages the politics of decline.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version)

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, most recently Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This essay is a shortened version of a new afterword to her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, just released by Picador Books.

Susan Glasser: Post-Soviet Lessons for Arab Spring

Susan Glasser is editor in chief of Foreign Policy. This column is a regular monthly feature on Reuters.com. When Hosni Mubarak was wheeled in to his courtroom cage the other day, gasping out his not-guilty plea from his sickbed-behind-bars as his son tried to shield him from the cameras, Egypt seemed to have produced the ultimate photo-op of revolutionary upheaval: the pharaoh brought low before the people's tribunal. But I couldn't help thinking about an unlikely character: Russia's strongman leader Vladimir Putin.

William McGurn: They Once Loved Jimmy, Too

William McGurn is Main Street columnist at the Wall Street Journal. In a polarized nation, on the eve of another divisive contest for the White House, those seeking a unified America are not without hope. For amid the partisan bickering, there remains one principle on which all Americans are agreed: Any comparison to Jimmy Carter is always and everywhere a put-down. Given Mr. Carter's Democratic affiliation, it's mostly Republicans and conservatives who traffic in Jimmy Carter allusions. That makes for something of a yawn, as Mitt Romney is finding out with his claim that the community organizer from Chicago is worse than the peanut farmer from Georgia. More in the man-bites-dog category is when one of Mr. Obama's own sticks the Carter tag on him. So it must have stung when the New York Times's Maureen Dowd recently quoted an unnamed Democratic senator moaning that "we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes." She was not alone... 

Ariel Cohen: Russian Reset a Cold War Restart

Ariel Cohen is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Recent statements by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian president's Special Representative for Missile-Defense Cooperation with NATO, raised hackles in Washington. Putin called the United States a “parasite” on the global economy, while Rogozin claimed that U.S. senators told him our missile defense is aimed at his country. Putin was speaking at his United Russia Party youth camp on Lake Seliger, while Rogozin let his hair down during a visit to Washington. Their words were not uttered in a vacuum.

Jim Newton: Today's Politicians Could Learn from Eisenhower

Jim Newton is The Times' editor-at-large and the author of "Eisenhower: The White House Years," to be published in October.

Ross Douthat: Waiting For A Landslide

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the NYT.In 1955, a political scientist named V. O. Key published an essay entitled “A Theory of Critical Elections.” He argued that realignments in American politics are usually punctuated by transformative elections, in which the old order suddenly gives way and a new majority emerges in its place.This “realignment theory” was embraced by many scholars because it fit the historical record so well. Every 30 to 40 years, it seemed, the American political order had decisively turned over: in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans trounced John Adams’s Federalists; in 1828, when the Democratic-Republicans split into the Democrats and the Whigs; and then on down through Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 victory, William McKinley’s 1896 consolidation of a Republican majority, and the emergence of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.

Nate Silver: The Stock Market Is the Least of Obama’s Worries

Nate Silver is a staticistian and blogger who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog for the NYT.There’s some Twitter sentiment to the effect that today’s crash in stock prices is bad news for President Obama. That doesn’t seem like a terribly controversial conclusion — but I’m not so sure it’s true.Let’s be clear: the economy is struggling, and that’s a gigantic problem for Mr. Obama. In my view, his chances of re-election have dropped from perhaps two-in-three as a couple of months ago to more like a toss-up as the economic numbers have deteriorated.But is the stock market a concern for Mr. Obama above and beyond the economic fundamentals?

Joshua Muravchik: Protection Racket ... ‘Responsibility to Protect’ Becomes a Doctrine

Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His upcoming book, How the World Turned Against Israel, will come out next year. NATO’s deployment of air power against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in Libya has been called—by some with hope, by others with alarm—the first exercise of the “Responsibility to Protect.” This new principle, which calls for international military action against “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” was endorsed at the 2005 “high- level plenary meeting” of the UN General Assembly.

Morton Abramowitz and James Hooper: Balkan War Redux

Morton Abramowitz is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and James Hooper is a managing director of the Public International Law & Policy Group. Ethnic violence is back in the Balkans. And once again, it has taken the West by surprise. This time the focal point is northern Kosovo, the region north of the Ibar River. Formally under Kosovar sovereignty, the area is claimed by Serbia and treated by the West as a de facto part of Serbia, where Serb paramilitaries profit from smuggling to the Albanian mafia while enforcing obedience among the area’s overwhelmingly Serb population. NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) units—which include some U.S. troops—and the EU’s rule of law mission (EULEX) tread gingerly around this reality. Belgrade exploits the paramilitaries to reinforce Serbia’s territorial claims.