Weekly Standard

In his underdog bid to retain the presidency in 1948, Harry Truman ran hard against the “Do-Nothing Congress,” so much so that his put-down of the Republicans who controlled Capitol Hill became a permanent part of the political lexicon, far more resonant today than anything Truman ever said about his Republican opponent for the White House, Thomas Dewey.

Since a Democrat is once again in the Oval Office facing down a GOP-controlled House, some have broached the possibility of Barack Obama’s doing a reprise of Truman’s theme in 2012 and taking on, once again, a do-nothing Congress. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

The United States and Iran have been on a collision course since the Iranian revolution in 1979, when elements of the newly proclaimed Islamic Republic took U.S. diplomats and Tehran embassy personnel hostage. U.S. relations with Iran have been bad ever since. The focus in recent years has been the Iranian program to develop a nuclear weapon, but the backdrop is Iran as a growing regional threat, not only to Israel and to U.S. and allied interests in the Persian Gulf region, but also to the many Sunni governments of the Gulf, which fear an increasingly powerful Shiite government in Tehran.

Meanwhile, Iran props up the Assad dictatorship in Syria, meddles in Lebanon through the Hezbollah militia, supports the radical Hamas regime in Gaza, and seeks to expand its divisive clout in neighboring Iraq, a task made easier by the decision of the Obama administration to end the deployment of U.S. combat forces there. The picture that emerges is of an Iran that is not so much aproblem but the problem of the broader Middle East, eclipsing even the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Maybe we’re just more used to changes in control of the House of Representatives than we were in 1994. Bill Clinton seemed to spend months knocked back on his heels after the Democratic defeat that November. But Barack Obama has not exactly been reeling.

If anything, he seems to have found his lost groove. He’s getting deals done (on taxes, arms control, gays in the military). He’s garnering praise from Republicans, of all people (for the tax deal, for dropping his 2011 withdrawal timetable for Afghanistan, for his repudiation of liberal attempts to pin the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on conservative hate speech). And he’s evidently winning some support back from the independents who deserted him and his party in November, with an uptick in his job approval ratings. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

On a dangerously windy early November afternoon, a military plane carrying a delegation of six U.S. senators made four successive approaches attempting to land at Halifax airport before giving up and turning around. Rather than heading for home, though, the plane landed in Bangor, Maine, where senators and staff overnighted before trying Halifax again, this time successfully, early the next morning.

There was, then, a certain determination in their effort to get to the Halifax International Security Forum, an annual gathering of mostly Western policymakers and security specialists spearheaded by the indefatigable Canadian defense minister Peter MacKay and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. No one said why the delegation was so determined. But to judge solely by the effect, maybe the answer was: because one of the senators, Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, had a message he wanted to convey. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

No, this is not going to be a full-blown exercise in the fiction genre of Alternative History: A minor adviser to the 2008 McCain presidential campaign chronicles the day-to-day ups and downs of the two eventful years following the American people’s reluctant conclusion that they don’t know a blessed thing about Barack Obama and want something a little more reliable than “hope and change.” We’ll leave that to Harry “Guns of the South” Turtledove—the master of the genre. While we will be engaging here in flagrant speculation, and though the claims we will make are accordingly beyond truth or falsehood, this is not fiction but rather an attempt to take what we know about American politics and ask what would have happened if, mirabile dictu, the 2008 election had gone the other way and John McCain were president of the United States today. Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

Oh, sure, there’s enough particulate matter in the New York City air to turn a white shirt gray by the end of the workday. And a couple whiffs of a narrow West Side cross street tightly enclosed by high-rises on a hot summer day when the trash is overdue for pickup could put even the strongest stomach to the test.

Nevertheless, blessed be the New York air: When I moved there after college, my longtime seasonal allergies were gone within a month. At the time, I thought I had at last outgrown them—a breakthrough for someone who’d been taking allergy pills since he was a, well, snot-nosed kid.  Continue reading →

Weekly Standard

At last, we have the essential complement to Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, and its subtitle—“How America and Europe Are Alike”—will surely evoke protest from those on both sides of the Atlantic who have become vested advocates of the differences between the United States and Europe and the manifest superiority of one side over and against the other.

Kagan encapsulated his provocative dual thesis, propounded at short-book length in 2003 as transatlantic relations were blowing up over the Iraq war, in the phrase, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” Critics have been trying to chip away at him ever since, but he really did pin down something essential about how power shapes attitudes and attitudes shape power in the United States and Europe. His argument remains the lodestone for debate over transatlantic relations and will continue to do so until the underlying configurations of power and ideas about power change. Continue reading →