Politics

Leaky Diplomacy and Arab Anxiety

By Dana H. Allin and Steven Simon

The Wikileaks trove of diplomatic documents confirms what many have known for a long time: Israel is not the only Middle Eastern country that fears a nuclear armed Iran and wants Washington to do something about it.

If Tehran was listening, the truth of this fear was apparent last month in Bahrain, where the International Institute for Strategic Studies organized a large meeting of Gulf Arab ministers, King Abdullah of Jordan, Iran’s foreign minister Mottaki, and top officials from outside powers including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The convocation was polite: no one said it was time to “cut off the head of the snake,” as Saudi Arabia’s King was reported, in one of the Wikileaks cables,

A GOP Front-runner Emerges

By Elvin Lim

The Republican party has traditionally been a more ordered, hierarchical organization, one in which the norm of waiting for one’s turn has been entrenched through the decades. When there is no consensus on the available candidates in the field, the runner-up to the last nomination contest becomes, by default, the front-runner. Today, Palin, Pawlenty, Thune, Huckabee, Gingerich, and Santorum are all names being mentioned. Yet no name stands out the way Mitt Romney‘s does.

Conservative Anger and Liberal Condescension

By Elvin Lim
The vitriol that liberals and conservatives perceive in each other is only the symptom of a larger cause. There is something rooted in the two ideologies that generates anger and condescension respectively, and that is why a simple call by the President for participants to be more civil will find few adherents.

Liberals are thinking, what is it about conservatism that it can produce its own antithesis, radicalism? Whether these be conservatives of the anti-government variety, such as Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber) or Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), or conservatives of the anti-abortion variety such as Clayton Waagner, Eric Rudolph, or

John Boehner and Jared Loughner say: Read the US Constitution, but do they get it?

By Elvin Lim

The new House rules require that bills be posted online for 72 hours before they come to the floor for a vote.

If this is a nod to the Tea Party movement, either the nodders are naive or the Tea Party movement has no clue what the Constitution really means.

One needs quite a lot more than a public reading of the US Constitution to unpack its meaning. For to understand the Constitution is not only know what it says, but how it works.

The more the House succeeds as a check against itself, the less it would be able to be a part the original checks and balances the Framers invented. The checks they envisioned were mostly inter-branch, not intra-branch.

Consider the various rules the House has now adopted to constrain its own powers.

Here We Go Again

By Elvin Lim
A new year, a new Congress. But, in all likelihood, we shall soon be witnessing the same politics.

2010 was a year of promises. Promises to return to common sense, to the American creed, to a simpler and better time before old and tired stratagems were tried ad nauseam on seemingly insurmountable problems. The world was black and white (or red and blue), politics was dice play, and there was a right answer and a wrong answer.

So was 2008.

2009 was a year of hubris, of dissension within political ranks, and ultimately of political learning. A year when the promisers went about trying to fulfill their promises, only to find out that what was presented to the electorate as new had already been tried before, so that what was cast as novel during the elections was quickly cast by the opposition

The Repeal of DADT

By Elvin Lim

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” has finally been repealed. It is time now to look back on the hypocrisy of those who maintained a “separate but equal” philosophy regarding gays and lesbians serving in the military.

Remember the “unit cohesion” argument? That was a popular and prevailing argument in the 1990s. It appears ridiculous to most people today, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we have had our fair share of ridiculous convictions in our past. Consider “separate but equal,” the jurisprudential doctrine that upheld Jim Crow laws in the South for over half a century. There is actually a common thread linking “separate but equal” of the 1890s with the “unit cohesion” argument of the 1990s. Those arguing for racial segregation a century ago believed that people of different races should not interact with each other, and the nation’s highest court codified this belief.

Obama’s Silent Reset

By Elvin Lim

President Barack Obama, who had taken a backseat to allow the First Branch to set the health-care reform legislative agenda last year, has now moved into the driver’s seat of American government. An electoral shellacking was all it took to for a former constitutional law professor who once espoused the separateness and equality of branches to stop practicing what he once taught.

The irony is that it was united Democratic party control of all branches of government that allowed Obama the luxury of taking the back seat. When before, he could have relied on Pelosi and Reid, Obama has recently learnt that he can only rely on himself. The Oval Office is a lonely place, but he who realizes it quickly learns that as a result, it is also a powerful place.

4 Lessons from the Legacies of Washington & Lincoln

Tweet As the year draws to a close, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and in doing so, we’ve also realized there are some classics worth revisiting. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, which will appear regularly until the New […]

Obama’s Deal with Jon Kyl

By Elvin Lim

Obama is a politician, and that’s why he’s made an estate tax deal with Jon Kyl in return for Kyl’s support for ratifying the START treaty.

As Senator Chuck Schumer has suggested, the Democratic party would probably benefit by allowing the Bush era tax cuts to expire, but this is not what Obama is proposing because he has something up his sleeve.

Consider if Democrats allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire. People would be angry for a few days, but then come 2011, Democrats would be in a better bargaining position to play chicken with Republicans. Democrats would then be able to dare Republicans to

WikiLeaks, Anarchism, and the State

By Elvin Lim

WikiLeaks affirms on its website that “democracy and transparency go hand in hand.” This may be true in the abstract, but in the world in which we live, it is not, because the only democracies we know of operate within the confines of the nation-state, and nation-states are not comfortable with transparency. That is why the campaign by the nation-states of the world to shut the site down is proceeding with such ferocity.

Individuals – at least those who live in states committed to the rule of law – enjoy a presumptive respect for our privacy. There is no reason why anyone or any institution should have access to details of our private life. We do not owe anyone a transparent account of our lives.

Why Racial Profiling is like Affirmative Action

By Elvin Lim

The Transportation and Security Administration‘s new video screening and pat-down procedures has given new fuel to advocates of racial profiling at airports around the nation. Opponents of racial profiling argue that treating an individual differently simply because of his or her race is wrong because discrimination, even for noble intentions, is just plain wrong. Let’s call this the principle of formal equality.

Oddly enough, this is exactly what opponents of affirmative action say. They typically argue that some other signifier, for example class, can be a more efficient, and less discriminatory way of achieving similar outcomes if affirmative action policies were in place.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Love Story

By E. Stanly Godbold, Jr.
In the hot, dusty summer of 1945, people in Plains talked about the heat, the crops, and the war, unaware of an event on Main Street that three decades later would catapult their town onto the world stage. Jimmy Carter, the twenty-year-old eldest child of a prominent local family, was visiting his hometown before returning for his final year at the Naval Academy. As he drove down Main Street in a Ford car with a rumble seat, accompanied by his sister Ruth and her boyfriend, he glanced toward the Methodist church. There he spied a pretty young woman loitering on the steps. Petite Rosalynn Smith, with her large, warm, intelligent eyes, exuded a seductive shyness that captivated the Academy man. Graduated as valedictorian of her class at Plains High School, she had completed one year at a nearby junior college. Jimmy stopped the car, not knowing that Ruth and Rosalynn had conspired to set up the meeting. He invited Rosalynn to attend the movie at the Rylander Theater in nearby Americus that night. She accepted.

Obama is Attempting a Reset

By Elvin Lim

For all the talk of a presidential reset button, the truth is that formal, public, dramatic resets don’t work. They never have. Not when Nixon fired Joseph Califano, or when Carter fired four of his cabinet secretaries. The American presidency works best when it works silently, and the power exercised is invisible. It doesn’t matter which party is in control of the White House; when foreign policy becomes issue number one, the executive becomes branch number one.

Something has crept up on us under an invisibility cloak. It is the new agenda in Washington. How quickly Washington has forgotten about jobs now that the elections are over. (Politicians won’t have to pander to voters for another year or so.) Check out any newspaper, or cable channel: the bait and switch from jobs to national security is nothing short of astounding. Washington is abuzz with talk of TSA pat-downs, the NATO summit, North Korea’ uranium-enriching facility, and, most prominently, ratification of the new START treaty.

George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream

By Dan P. McAdams
In the spring of 2003, President George W. Bush launched an American military invasion of Iraq. From a psychological standpoint, why did he do it? Bush’s momentous decision resulted from a perfect psychological storm, wherein world events came to activate a set of dispositional traits and family goals that had long occupied key positions in Bush’s personality. At the center of the storm was a singularly redemptive story that, around the age of 40, George W. Bush began to construct to make sense of his life. After years of drinking and waywardness, Bush fashioned a story in his mind about how, though self-discipline and God’s guidance, he had triumphed over chaos, enabling him to recover the freedom, control, and goodness of his youth. In the days after 9/11, President Bush projected

Article 2 of the Constitution is a Paradoxical Thing

By Elvin Lim
These are deliquescent days in Washington. As the Democratic party works out a deal to keep both Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn in the leadership hierarchy, and the Republican party takes stock of what it means to welcome 35 new Tea Party members into its caucus, the President must be wondering, what now?

Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen are advising Obama to not seek re-election. Others are simply predicting a one-term presidency whether or not Obama likes it.

China: Behind the bamboo curtain

By Patrick Wright
On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking. In China to present a statement of friendship signed by nearly 700 British scientists and artists, he was watching a parade that the reporter James Cameron reckoned to be “the greatest show on earth”.