Update: The event, co-hosted with the New America Foundation, has already concluded. Thank you to everyone who attended, asked questions and participated. Below is a video recording of the event for your convenience.

Just a few selected comments on this weekend’s newspaper reading, as it were. First, in the New York Times “Week in Review” section under the headline “Our Decade of Deluded Thinking,” an unsigned author makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not [...]

Tensions flared Friday at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen as China’s Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, using unusually blunt language, described U.S. Chief Negotiator Todd Stern as “irresponsible”, according to an AP report. The Chinese official was responding to comments Stern made at the conference yesterday regarding the possibility of Western aid to [...]

I found President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan policy remarkable. The speech itself, looked at as an object of art, is brilliant. Some of the formulations in it, not just rhetorical but also conceptual, are among the best presidential speechmaking I’ve heard in my lifetime—far superior to anything that we’ve heard in the last three administrations. [...]

I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night.  Republicans have been attacking it because they say that it sends a signal of weak [...]

Today’s headline in the Washington Post tells us that our Ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, opposes the sending of more U.S. and allied troops to Afghanistan, putting him at odds with the commanding general in that war, General Stanley McChrystal. Eikenberry happens to be a general, too—3-star instead of 4-star, but who’s counting? The [...]

The New Contrarian test post.