Stephen Cohen has an excellent, urgent column in the IHT on the topic of McCain and Obama’s totally inadequate and positively harmful Russia policies. I have nothing to add for now that I haven’t said before; Russia is the most important country in the world as far as American foreign policy is concerned. With Russia [...]

Well this is embarrassing:
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart [...]

Who’s worse than Mugabe? And why don’t we hear about him? Perfectly good question fielded a few days ago by Peter Maass at Slate. I haven’t kept up with the Central African Republic like I used to, but his answer sounds as good as any, and without blowing the surprise (because you really should read [...]

It might crack. Sonny describes my defense of international law as “full-throated,” but it’s also as full-throated a warning against Europeans who want to put American officials on trial as it is against Americans who wouldn’t mind putting international law on trial itself. Sonny actually seems to conclude his enthusiasm for the latter approach with [...]

Once, the Democratic Party bestrode the nation, a colossus of consensus and community. But there was a catch. Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer tell us that
before the reunited Democratic Party can start to make a forceful case to the nation, it will have to [...] equal what was perhaps Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest political success: to [...]

So: is Sonny right that it’s out of control and stupid for foreign countries to think about capturing and prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes (after January)? Maybe. Is he right that Americans would totally flip out if high-ranking Washington geeks who wanted to dip their toes in the Mediterranean found themselves locked in [...]

Ross’s back and forth with Dan McCarthy and Daniel Larison (see also Matt Yglesias and MB Dougherty) merits a nice long read. As a casual fan of direly necessary and highly trivial interventions, but a deep skeptic of those that fall in the middle, I really hope to distill the entire debate down to the [...]

Unlike Reihan and like Matt Frost, My Sino-optimism is very limited. But after picking my way through thickets of ethnonationalism all throughout the past two weeks in Spain, I’ve got to give Alex Massie an amen:
I imagine China is too busy being China (On the March!) to worry too much about anyone who isn’t Chinese, [...]

I see thru Daniel that McCain’s new slogan is not, contrary to my advice, “Solvency, Citizenship, Subsidiarity.” It is, instead, “Reform, Prosperity, Peace.” I guess Prosperity is supposed to cover Solvency, Reform is supposed to encompass Subsidiarity, and — ah, but instead of Citizenship it’s Peace, a position sure to win over droves of libertarian [...]

I´ve been eating Spain´s tasty and delicious garlic shrimp as often as possible out here in Madrid. In a fine fit of synergy, Ezra has posted his recipe for the fragrant, sizzling dish. We´ve done without the vinegar, but I have full confidence in Ezra´s list of ingredients, and give gambas al ajillo my unreserved [...]

Director Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian Jew, saw himself as steering the film toward a message movie about European failure to fight fascism until it was too late. Zinneman’s vision is ultimately the one that prevails. — Kyle Smith
Sonny is maybe more right than he´d like to be that High Noon is a neoconservative allegory — [...]

Lots of laughs from Freddy Gray: the menu from World Food Summits past and present. I can´t vouch for the quality, character, or track record of the Food Summit, but we should be careful not to condemn people who work hard for the dispossessed and want to enjoy a nice dinner afterward. Problem is, the [...]

Jim Manzi has recently re-promoted American francophilia. I like this, and sympathize deeply with French civilization and French culture for many of the same reasons Jim and Charles Murray dwell upon. But from the catbird seat of wide-lens cultural comparativism, I think the root of any American francophilia has to be found in the uniqueness [...]

Sonny is right to accredit reports of al Qaeda´s timely demise as well-deserved good news. But it´s as good as occasion as any to exercise our contrarian muscles for the fun and edification of all. One of my great complaints about the way we´ve represented the threat of jihadist terrorism has zeroed in on the [...]

That’s a heavily rhetorical question that I might not live up to in this post, but I’ll try anyway for the purposes of casting a sharp, counterintuitive argument in the direction of everyone’s favorite punching bag, Michael Gerson. I’m inspired to do so by Kara Hopkins’ @TAC on Gerson’s latest round of name-calling:
Thus a new [...]

is that you remember how much worse it’s been, and how much worse it could be. Despite our frustrations with the war, we have repeatedly avoided catastrophe. Despite our oafish, incompetent government, we enjoy peace and freedom at home. Despite our economic anxiety and uncertainty, no one is selling their Escalade for three dollars or [...]

Having recently cast aspersions on his attitude toward constitutional law, I now take up the challenge of defending Barr against John Tabin, who was at the Libertarian debate hosted by Reason last night:
Dave Weigel asked the candidates if they favored any of the US interventions since the first Gulf War, and Bob Barr flatly said [...]

In his American Conservative review of Matt Yglesias’ new book, Heads in the Sand, Austin Bramwell contends that, “[i]n the end,”
it is unclear whether Yglesias seeks anything more than an internationalist fig leaf for the policies he happens to prefer.
So what if he does? As my long trail of blog crumbs reveals, I have deep [...]

I know this is a stretch as a thought experiment, but bear with me.
Imagine that the Nazi party were somehow able to rise to power in Germany without relying on, or even incorporating, an anti-Semitic plank. (I know, I know, just imagine.) Imagine then the incredible wealth of Jewish brainpower and manpower that would have [...]

Andrew has a roundup of commentary on the possibility of coercive helpy heroism in Burma, meaning Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat doing one of their good back and forths (as usual) on the matter. I think they’re both right. Idealism and relativism, the two most significant elements of Western thought today, make for a total [...]

I urge you to go back over to the main DTO site and read James Dellinger and Phil Brand’s piece on Hawaiian ethnonationalism. I’ve said pretty much all I need to say about the subject before, but there’s a related angle on this story that I’m increasingly fond of and is probably best captured in [...]

Over at The American Scene, Matt Frost is undoubtedly right to question and even ridicule supposed experts about ‘Millennials’ — that latest incarnation of the Pepsi generation who are supposed to be, individually and in the aggregate, both so much more enlightened than their ancestors and so much more trenchantly aware of the emotional and [...]

I’ll go to my grave, I’m sure, insisting that Iraq was an oddball case all along, and that the mass consensus for treating Iraq in strange and unique ways was never fungible for a whole host of reasons. (Fleeting triumphalism among a few commentators interested in following suit with any place Alexander the Great once [...]

We’ve heard so many empty promises and ritual BS from our own politicians that it might just be the right time to take new Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at something resembling face value. Imagine, if only as a mental exercise, that he even sort of means any of this:
Describing the eight years of Putin’s presidency [...]

Michael Brendan Dougherty makes an enjoyable @TAC upon the metric system, Hegelianism, and their latest champion, Fareed Zakaria.
The enthusiasts for the metric system (which is based on incorrect calculations anyway) remind me of the enthusiasts for Esperanto. George Soros speaks Esperanto.
But Zakaria’s conclusion is even worse:
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they [...]

I’d like to endorse my American Scene colleague Noah Millman’s incisive comments on diplomacy and benign American power:
our unipolar moment makes diplomacy look rather different than historical models. And for that reason, non-coercive “win-win” bargains may be genuinely elusive, howsoever disposed the next President may be to seek them.
As Noah goes on to explain, some [...]

Stands for, y’know, We Await Radical-life Extension’s Zarathustra. I see Sonny’s on board, praying for the Great Noontide. Then there’s this guy:
As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor [...]

Phil Klein reports at AmSpecBlog:
When I was in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago covering the primary there, I spoke to a man who could be described as a classic swing voter. While he was leaning toward Hillary Clinton in the primary, he said he’d reevaluate his choices in a general election. When I asked him [...]

Freddy Gray posts an @TAC on the way at least one glaring example of foreign policy hackery is sure to transcend the mere Bush era:
Very interesting and revealing post from Gideon Rachman about a lunch with Georgia’s President “Misha” Saakashvili [...]:
John McCain is also a personal friend – “the guy brought me a bulletproof vest [...]