Ron Asmus, of the German Marshall fund, asks
“Is this president and Administration capable, in its last 18 months in office, of using this new lineup [of leaders] in Europe to begin to lay the foundation for a new relationship for his successor?”
No.
—
Concept of simple answers gleefully lifted from Atrios.

And by their enemies. It is now clear that the Iraq and treatment of detainees policy of the current US administration has found little favour down at the Financial Times. The FT is hardly a ‘radical rag’ and views expressed there can hardly be dismissed in the same way some might feel able to lightly-brush-aside [...]

If you had long suspected that under the Bush administration the CIA was running secret prisons around the world, now you know. It wasn’t just the one in Thailand, which was closed in 2003, and the annex at the tip of Cuba, closed last year.
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most [...]

So we’re all following the US news, and we know that Bush’s senior aides may be indicted this week for exposing a US spy, right? And the reason the people in the White House deliberately exposed one of America’s own intelligence agents is that they were mad at her husband. And they were mad at [...]

This blog doesn’t usually resound with praise for the far-sighted wisdom and diplomatic cunning of the Bush administration. (Neither does my own blog, for that matter.)
So I thought I’d be a bit contrarian, and point to a recent episode where Bush, or Colin Powell, or undersecretary of state Marc Grossman, or /someone/, [...]

Colin Powell has been making the headlines over the weekend for his seemingly more realistic appraisal of the difficulties facing current US policy in Iraq when compared to the view emmanating from other members of the Bush administration. Again Juan Cole has been offering some informed comment on the topic here.
All of which makes [...]

Readers of my previous comment on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even [...]

In the US presidential elections the big news of the week must be the endorsement of Howard Dean by Al Gore. A somewhat smaller, but still interesting, development - although this isn’t exactly new, but simply new to my attention - is the fact that someone has created an Economists for Dean weblog. [...]

Even though it may appear that this post runs along much the same lines as my last two or three, I should warn you: appearances are sometimes deceptive. The origins of what I want to say here stretch back in time two or three days to some comments I made on an earlier post [...]

[Nota Bene: Due to the deeply inane nature of JavaScript, clicking the "continue reading" link may not display images linked to posts. It doesn't work for me in Mozilla or IE. If you click on the permalink, you will see all the content.]
Reader Christophe Kotowski sends a link to today’s International Herald-Tribune (a.k.a. [...]