14 Tuesday Dec 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The Orange Revolution in Ukraine is first and foremost the property of the people who are conducting it. They turned out in the streets of Kiev by the hundreds of thousands to protest fraudulent election results, and their persistence and numbers opened up enough cracks in the system to pave the way for a new vote on Dec. 26. Let’s not mistake this for anything but what it is: raw courage in support of freedom.
07 Tuesday Dec 2004
Posted in Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The argument over whether Republicans won in 2004 by appealing to their base, by pumping up turnout especially among evangelical Christians, or by reaching to the middle, where they made gains among women, Catholics, and so on, continues apace. And the political consequences riding on the outcome are generally thought to be large for the future of the party. Although I agree that the way in which Republicans interpret what happened last November is crucial to the party’s future, an embrace of this either-or approach to describe how the GOP won will only cause confusion and create opportunities for Democrats.
07 Tuesday Dec 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The post-re-election President Bush said he has acquired “political capital,” and he means to “spend” it – on a second-term policy agenda noteworthy for its ambition, including Social Security and tax reform. That’s an interesting little twist on the metaphor of “political capital.” Perhaps it was a slip and Mr. Bush’s intention in using the term was entirely conventional. But maybe not.
01 Wednesday Dec 2004
Posted in Policy Review
Policy Review December 2004/January 2005
A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004), a collection of essays on transatlantic relationships.
There is no question that the aftermath of September 11, 2001, has laid bare a divergence in view between the United States and Europe over the question of the place of power in international affairs. Insofar as countering terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has become a priority likely to dominate U.S. security policy for a generation or more, and insofar as the United States will likely seek recourse to military measures on occasion in this period, the divergence is likely to persist. Transatlantic relations may go through periods of relative warming in the years ahead, but they seem likely to be punctuated by occasions in which the differences reemerge starkly. We have, in all likelihood, doses of bitterness ahead of us every bit as unpleasant as the bitterness over the Iraq war.
But what I want to do here is take a large step back from all the disagreement and see if it does not, after all, take place within a frame of broader agreement about fundamental issues — more fundamental, even, than the question of the proper role of the use of force internationally, which is itself a mischaracterization of what was at stake in the dispute over Iraq, as we shall see.
To show how this is so, I would like to radicalize the discussion by proffering a thesis so contrarian in the current context that I should probably begin by asking readers’ indulgence. It is this: There are no fundamental disagreements or differences between the United States and Europe. Existing differences are often more apparent than real. When real, the differences are in all consequential cases actually agreements to disagree. And in any case, the views of Americans and Europeans have been converging for some time and will continue to do so.
30 Tuesday Nov 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
In an important but hardly obvious sense, the reelection of George W. Bush may have been the best thing that could possibly have happened in 2004 to improve relations between the United States and Europe.
16 Tuesday Nov 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Ralph Nader was the dog that didn’t bark in the 2004 election. He finished with about a third of a percentage point of the popular vote, down from 2.74 percent in 2000. In 2004, he was simply not a factor.
09 Tuesday Nov 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
At the risk of being insufferable, I said George W. Bush would win “just over 50 percent of the popular vote to John Kerry’s 48 percent.” As of late Sunday’s tallies, Mr. Bush actually finished with 51.0 percent of the popular vote and Mr. Kerry with 48.0 percent. I thus underestimated Mr. Bush’s majority victory by a few tenths of a percentage point. Sorry about that.
02 Tuesday Nov 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
And the winner is – but perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Analysis first, verdict second – though even this procedure is controversial in this presidential election.
01 Monday Nov 2004
Posted in Weekly Standard
It’s already over, and the neocons won.
View this article at The Weekly Standard
RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the “neoconservatives” of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics’ telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake the world in the image of the United States.
And for this, come November 2004, the neoconservatives must pay. The defeat of George W. Bush by his Democratic opponent–and for purposes of the critics’ argument, any Democratic opponent would do–would mean a repudiation of this neoconservative view of the world. Many Bush critics saw in Iraq a comprehensive discrediting of neoconservative policy prescriptions, including the doctrine of preemptive or preventive war, belief in the efficacy of military power in general, faith in democratization, and unilateralism. It merely remained for voters to administer the coup de grâce at the polls and the neoconservatives would be discredited once and for all.
26 Tuesday Oct 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
If I were running a presidential campaign, I would rather have a slight lead in the polls than a slight deficit plus a theory about why my opponent’s lead either wasn’t real or didn’t matter. On the basis purely of being on the side of the more likely winner, I would now rather be in the position of the Bush campaign than of the Kerry campaign. But the race is so close that the difference in the probability of either side winning is miniscule.
Tod Lindberg 