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Washington Needs NATO More Than NATO Needs Washington
Tweet Share on Facebook June 30, 2011 Comment (9)You know things are hopeless when Robert Gates, Washington’s famously straight talker, is reduced to political pantomime with America’s European allies.
There was the outgoing secretary of defense in Brussels this month, scolding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for not pulling their weight in Libya. The Poles, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spaniards, and the Turks sat on their hands, head bowed, as headmaster Gates berated them for neglecting their alliance commitments. The American taxpayer, he meditated darkly, was not going to tolerate European backsliding forever.
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Don't Misread Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood
Tweet Share on Facebook June 23, 2011 Comment (3)CAIRO--“There is no monolithism,” Chinese statesman Zhou Enlai once said to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after their historic visit to Beijing in 1972. He was referring to the uniquely American habit of reducing distinct, if not conflicting parties—in this case the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China—into a seamless confederation hostile to U.S. interests.
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Democracy In Action in Egypt
Tweet Share on Facebook June 16, 2011 Comment (4)CAIRO--It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday night, and democracy is playing to a standing-room-only crowd at the Egyptian Bar Association.
On stage—actually a half-finished podium with cables hanging down like jungle vines and illuminated by a single fluorescent bulb—are three coordinates on Egypt’s political spectrum: leaders of the country’s liberal, leftist, and Islamist “streams,” as proto-political parties here are often called. Over the course of a two-hour discussion, each will market his particular brand of governance as the best match for a country still reeling from the peaceful revolt that in February ousted President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of dictatorial rule.
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In Cairo, Hope Endures for Egypt's Revolution
Tweet Share on Facebook June 13, 2011 CommentCAIRO--On my first day here this week, I found myself among a clutch of young activists milling about the Ministry of Justice. They were rallying in solidarity with the nation’s judiciary, which managed to resist much of the endemic corruption that prevailed under dictator Hosni Mubarak. Now, in the afterglow of a peaceful revolt that ended 30 years of despotism, the judiciary is at the center of a debate over how and when to write a new constitution.
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The Limits of Free-Market Capitalism
Tweet Share on Facebook June 2, 2011 Comment (9)Until a few years ago, my spiritual devotions were limited to the free market and the music of Patsy Cline. I’m sorry to say it’s just me and Patsy now.
Karl Marx may have been wrong where it really mattered—communism, to paraphrase Churchill, is government “of the duds, by the duds, and for the duds”—but he was spot on about the pitfalls of capitalism, particularly when it came to the entrenchment of social classes, the fetish of consumption, the frequency of recession, and the concentration of industry. Yet, like trained seals, we continue to leap through the flaming rings of a system that is contemptuous of the public good while rewarding those who feed off “free” markets and the politicians who rig them. Nearly three years after the global economy almost collapsed under the weight of a corrupt and inbred financial order, Washington is still mired between the false choice of the state or private enterprise as the proper steward of the general welfare.
, will be published in August by Crown. You can follow him on Twitter 
