Re: Clinton, McCain, and Obama: “We Stand United”
As Gordon has noted, today’s joint statement on Darfur, by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain, places pressure on the next president to address the ongoing slaughter in Darfur come January....
View ArticleDamascus Reverts to Form
Well, that didn’t last long. Last week, Syrian President Bashar Assad announced he would resume peace negotiations with Israel without preconditions, but now he suddenly says it’s impossible. “What we...
View ArticleAssad Returns as the Strong Horse
As Jonathan noted yesterday, Lebanese Prime Minster Saad Hariri just spent two days with Syrian strongman Bashar Assad in Damascus, and you’d think from reading the wire reports that Lebanon and Syria...
View ArticleThe French Emissions Debacle
The French constitutional council may have blocked the president’s carbon tax for the wrong reasons late last night, but the message France unintentionally relayed about emissions-curbing taxes is...
View ArticleMore Peace in Our Time
Another year brings another wintertime oil dispute between Russia and an Eastern European client. In January 2009 it was Ukraine; this year it’s Belarus. Although oil has surged to more than $80 a...
View ArticleAllies Be Wary
Robert Kagan says Israel shouldn’t take it personally: Israelis shouldn’t feel that they have been singled out. In Britain, people are talking about the end of the “special relationship” with America...
View ArticleSarkozy Has Figured It Out Too
As this report explains, “The American and French presidents called for quick action on sanctions against Iran on Tuesday, with U.S. President Barack Obama saying he believed such penalties could be...
View ArticleFlotsam and Jetsam
Michael Barone explains young Americans’ economic outlook in the Obama era: “The programs of the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership will increase government’s share of the...
View ArticleWe Only Expected Competence
It somehow has never dawned on the Obama devotees who like to cite the administration’s “inherited mess” that this president’s failures don’t exactly reflect the overcautiousness of a leader...
View ArticleBetter Than Nothing
Nicolas Sarkozy made some widely reported, albeit cryptic, comments on Iran to an audience of foreign ambassadors: “If a credible agreement cannot be reached, Iran’s isolation would only worsen,”...
View ArticlePlus Ça Change
A poignant development illustrates the disintegration of the rarefied post-Cold War order we have inhabited since the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of shocks to that order over the past year and...
View ArticleObama Snubs Britain Yet Again
He just can’t help himself. President Obama has apparently dissed Britain once again by declaring that “[w]e don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people”...
View ArticleMorning Commentary
It looks like Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier misread the judicial system in Haiti. Just days after he mysteriously returned to the country after a 25-year exile, the former Haitian dictator was...
View ArticleLebanon: Too Quiet?
As the situation goes from bad to worse in Lebanon, there are odd little signs. Chief among them are the comments made by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal when he quit the Saudis’ mediation effort...
View ArticleWhat Happens When You Assume
When I pulled up the home page of the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz this morning, I was greeted with a somewhat humorous sight. The top headline, in large print, was: “Israeli security forces evacuate...
View ArticleFrench-German Rift Puts Voters and Markets On Edge
The dominoes continue to fall. The deepening of the Eurozone economic crisis claimed the sitting governments of Greece and then of Italy, and the biggest domino yet–French President Nicolas...
View ArticleSarkozy’s Defeat Might be a Victory for Iran
For Americans, picking favorites in French elections is a difficult task. The political combat between the inheritors of Charles De Gaulle’s centrist faction, the socialists and their more marginal...
View ArticleHollande Win Will Boost Anti-Israel Left
The head of the CRIF, the head of the umbrella group representing French Jewry, is coming under criticism for saying a victory for Socialist Party presidential candidate Francois Hollande is a...
View ArticleObama Will Miss Sarkozy’s Stand on Iran
Much of the analysis of the victory of Francois Hollande and the Socialists in the French presidential election will focus on the impact of the change in power on the European economy. German...
View ArticleBonne Chance, M. le President
The French have a genius for many things: food, art, couture, wine, décor among them. There is no city on earth—except my native New York—that I enjoy being in more than Paris. But not even the...
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