Compare Paul Mirengoff at Power Line, with John Bolton on Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech….
Compare Paul Mirengoff at Power Line, with John Bolton on Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech….
Stephen Walt, who with his colleague John Mearsheimer wrote this controversial book, has addressed a sensitive question in an article posted on the Foreign Policy website Monday. Walt asks: “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims?” He states that he has attempted to make his estimates conservative, but he finds that the United States has inflicted more casualties than it has suffered, by a factor of about 30. To make his point, he cites the remark of a British journalist: “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world … it should stop killing Muslims.”
I get his point, but I wish he had addressed criticism along the following lines, with which he is surely familiar, from a critic who suggests that internecine violence among Muslims is the bigger issue: “There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both [Iraq and Afghanistan] by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too…. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact?”
The UK does not observe Thanksgiving, and so the London Economist arrives in the inboxes of its electronic subscribers as it does every Thursday. A reader takes the weekly to task in an online comments section, in response to a leading article on American foreign policy.
“An example of foreign policy cleverness missed by the Economist had to do with tire tariffs against China, which the Economist (stupidly) dedicated a front cover article to, predicting that the U.S. had just ignited a trade war. As we now know (it was actually obvious in retrospect) the U.S. had actually cleverly outmaneuvered China, which could not afford to retaliate. As China exports so much more to the U.S. than vice-versa, any retaliation would harm China more than Americans, so out of wisdom China had to puff out its chest, complain, and then quietly retreat….”
“If you go on track record, the Economist has an embarrassing habit of underestimating Obama….”
At the Daily Beast, Leslie Gelb says that the Asia trip was not worth Obama’s time. “He should stare hard at the skills of his foreign-policy team and, more so, at his own dominant role in decision-making. Something is awry somewhere, and he’s got to fix it…. Presidents take trips like this one only when they need breakthroughs and accomplishments on certain issues that can’t be agreed on without the pressure of an impending presidential visit. In fact, most presidents wouldn’t even commit to trips abroad without knowing that key deals would be finally agreed on and announced during the visit itself.”
I don’t think all that much of Megan McArdle’s views on health care, but these musings on yesterday’s events from the Atlantic website are worth contemplating: “There is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this. Gun control would not have stopped a commissioned officer from obtaining guns. Barack Obama had no power to stop this. Infectious PTSD is a lousy theory. And nations certainly do not–and should not–shape their foreign policy around the possibility that a random psychopath will start shooting up a crowd. Evil people do evil things. That’s all.”
“German unification occurred much earlier — by the will of the German people, not because Gorbachev or Kohl wanted it. Americans often recall President Ronald Reagan’s appeal: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!’ But could that be done by one man? All the more difficult, too, because others were saying, in effect, ‘Save the Wall.’” A commentary on Reagan and Gorbachev, by — Mikhail Gorbachev.
Joe Biden is taking a fence-mending trip to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Der Spiegel has a report.
The Wall Street Journal’s “Washington Wire” feature offers first-impression speculation over what the Nobel award implies for President Obama. Mark Ambinder of the Atlantic Monthly conjectures that it could increase hostility to the president, among independents as well as Republicans. George Packer of the New Yorker makes a similar point — emphasizing the public impression that the award is European, not American. Stephen Walt of Harvard University warns that the award itself could be discredited if Obama eventually becomes more bellicose.
A State Department official recently spent six days traveling in Cuba, in a trip that “included meetings with officials, opposition figures and people from Cuban civil organizations,” reports the Washington Post. Talks are underway regarding the reestablishment of postal service bewteen the two countries.
Alonzo Fulgham of USAID argues in the Christian Science Monitor that governments in sub-Saharan Africa have been hard at work creating a more business-friendly environment — and American investors should be careful lest they miss the boat. The Chinese are already hard at work with their investments, he notes. The continent could sure use it….