After months upon months of fruitless back-and-forth over the Eurozone crisis, as Greece and then Spain brought the continent ever-closer to the brink of catastrophe, the signs of a coherent German policy are beginning to emerge. The Wall Street Journal reports: Germany is sending strong signals that it would eventually be willing to lift its […]

The Middle East is looking pretty dismal for the Obama administration right now. That peace process he was going to revive between Israelis and Palestinians? No US president since Richard Nixon has gotten less done on that front. The Arab Spring that was going to open a new era in US-Arab relations and turn power […]

What most American pundits don’t seem to fully comprehend when talking about the Eurozone crisis is that Germans are far from unified on the question of what they should be doing. As we wrote in one of this week’s essays, Germans face the real prospect that they will have to choose between the two pillars […]

Last Friday’s unemployment news crashed the stock market and upended the presidential race. Lost in the excitement, however, was the news that African-American unemployment, already significantly above general levels, rose by much more.Nationally, unemployment in May rose from 8.1 percent to 8.2. This is bad, especially considering how much time has passed since our economic […]

I should have been more suspicious. There’s a big birthday looming on the Mead calendar; June 12,1952 saw my squalling and undignified entrance into the portion of this vale of tears known as the State of South Carolina.But I strolled down to Smith and Wollensky last night without a care in the world, expecting a […]

We’ve talked here about the demise of  blue-collar manufacturing jobs in the US before: as automation establishes itself in industry and companies outsource their jobs to cut down on labor costs even more, Americans (and workers in other developed countries) find themselves with far fewer unskilled factory job opportunities. The revolution of the assembly line […]

Ever since the struggle in Syria began, the Obama administration has consistently underestimated Russia’s commitment to the Assad regime. Even last week we were hearing hopeful noises from Washington about possible moves on the issue in Moscow.The roots of Russia’s support for Butcher Assad go deep. This is much more than nostalgia for Russia’s last […]

Visiting the deep water harbor at Cam Ranh Bay, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took another step towards the most important US foreign policy shift since the 1940s as he talked about the importance of access to the prime ports of Asia to America’s emerging grand strategy in the east.Fresh from the announcement of a […]

Regular readers know that while I disagree with George Soros on a number of points, I find him to be one of the keenest observers of world events. And of all the subjects on which George is brilliant, Europe is perhaps his best. Born and raised in Hungary, educated in the UK, and active across […]

John Ellis, one of the country’s shrewdest political analysts, offers a way to score the Wisconsin recall election. Using concepts familiar to Via Meadia readers, Ellis argues that the Wisconsin election is a referendum on the Blue Social Model. Because of this, the election in Wisconsin offers an early clue as to how voters feel […]