At last, there are signs of a working American policy toward Libya.  The embarrassing and damaging “days not weeks” war has turned into a stalemate that makes America look both violent (bombing villages in order to save them) and weak (the Loon is still spouting defiance from Tripoli).  The lesson so far to despots like […]

If there is one phrase in the global climate debate that sets my teeth on edge it is this: the claim by so many greens that the “science of global warming is settled.”Really?  “Settled?”  The essence of science is that it is never settled.  Science is a frontier, not a town.  That the science of […]

Back in March, Dan Drezner argued that my piece in Foreign Affairs marked the beginning of the end for the Tea Party as a factor in American foreign policy. Yet today, Dan observes that the Tea Party — high on the electoral and political successes of its “no retreat, no surrender” strategy — is a […]

Not everyone in the establishment is out to lunch.  The Nobel-winning Michael Spence at my old CFR stomping ground has been thinking about our failures of governance and the costs of backward looking policies.  In words that could have appeared on this blog, he’s written today that the bewildering pace of economic change taking place […]

The story that the Arab League will support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN next fall is not really news.  Real news would mean one of two startling developments: that the Arabs failed to give rhetorical and empty support to the Palestinians, or that they offered them real and meaningful help.Empty rhetorical gestures?  […]

If you are a student at an American private college, you are majoring in the humanities and you have a GPA of 3.75 or less, you are so busted.A couple of researchers have looked at grading patterns across the country and have found a few facts that employers and parents all over the United States […]

H.D.S. Greenway has a long and distinguished journalistic career and his NYT op-ed on US-Pakistan relations is nuanced, balanced, sensitive — and misses the main point.Greenway attacks the Obama administration for cutting military aid to Pakistan and tries to explain US-Pakistani relations.  They are angry, he says, because we want a “transactional” relationship and they […]

Robert Reich has a smart WSJ piece this morning saying that without job growth, Obama is toast in 2012.  His suggestion: an extended payroll tax holiday for the first $20,000 of income and Depression style job creation programs like the WPA and the CCC.Coulda, woulda, shoulda.  Obama could have done that in 2009, and he […]

In my post on global weirding I wrote that as China’s economy and society become more complex, it gets steadily harder for policy makers to balance competing interests and manage the tradeoffs.  This is what I mean: as the WSJ tells us this morning, turning the renminbi into an international reserve currency is much harder […]

President Obama recently admitted he was surprised to discover that shovel ready didn’t mean shovel ready anymore.He shouldn’t have been: the essence of blue social policy is to make everything complicated and hard.In the Depression, shovel ready still meant something.  No OSHA inspectors, no EPA paperwork: if the government wanted to open a camp and […]