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 […]

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 […]

As the British celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s sixty years on the throne, Americans congratulate them and share the celebratory moment. She isn’t, thank goodness, our queen, but she is a symbol of some enduring British qualities and accomplishments that are worth remembering and celebrating at a time like this.This year Queen Elizabeth passes George III […]

Up until now, the Europeans have responded to the existential crisis of their currency union with a series of temporary measures: like a doctor treating cancer with painkillers. The pain goes away for a while, but the underlying condition gets worse.While we should never underestimate the capacity of European bureaucrats to fudge a decision, there […]

Perhaps the most useful way to think of this brief comment is as a postscript to what I wrote yesterday. The media reports on Syria today are deeply disheartening—frustrating, really. The basic theme is the realization that the Annan plan has failed, no internal negotiations in Syria are likely to arise at this point, and […]

President Obama’s signing of a strategic partnership agreement with President Karzai on May 1 and the ratification of a wind-down plan by NATO at its recent summit in Chicago in theory set the terms for the kind of presence the US will have after the “withdrawal” of US forces from that country in 2014. Of […]

There’s an old Booth New Yorker cartoon showing an old man sitting in an armchair cackling while reading the newspaper, and back over his shoulder his wife says to a visitor something to the effect, “George has always enjoyed reading the morning paper, but lately it seems to be frequently accompanied by a graveyard laugh”—or […]

The May 2012 issue of Commentary (the generally conservative monthly with a strong Jewish focus) carries an article by Michael Medved, entitled “What the Evangelicals Give to Jews”. Medved is a highly productive writer and television personality, very articulate and almost always interesting. Based in California, he is an observant Orthodox Jew, who has moved […]

As the Iranian mullahs’ nuclearization drive reaches its end goal, Western policymakers face a narrowing range of bad options. There are difficult choices ahead, and those choices are made all the more difficult by Tehran’s long track record of vicious rhetoric directed at Israel—the most notorious example of which was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call […]

In recent weeks I have twice written in this space of the Obama Administration’s efforts to cover up its politically motivated spinelessness over Syria with efforts to make it seem like it’s doing something constructive. Using the New York Times as its very willing channel, it first tried to crow over its closer cooperation with […]