Merry Christmas to those who feel so inclined and Season’s Greetings to the rest!Team Mead moves into holiday mode today; the halls are decked with holly and the wreath is on the door.We are celebrating the season by shifting focus; on Christmas Eve and all through the twelve days of Christmas to come, I’ll be […]

Scott Erwin, a former Team Mead associate, ditched his old friends at Team Mead and threw away a brilliant future as a lifetime Mead minion simply to chase after the illusory ‘prestige’ of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.  After several years of intensive study of the intellectual and theological links between Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln […]

Today as we observe the 30th anniversary of the Soviet move into Kabul, it’s useful to think about the concept of ‘blowback’: a term that originally referred to the unwanted consequences of covert action and is now often used to describe the ways in which foreign policy choices of the past come back to haunt […]

Today is not one of the great days in the history of American foreign policy. In fact it’s the 202nd anniversary of one of the stupidest things we ever did. On this day in 1807 a besotted Congress passed a law essentially banning all US foreign trade at the request of President Thomas Jefferson. It […]

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (work will make you free) sign over the main gate of the original Auschwitz camp has, it appears this morning, been found in Poland.  It had been reported stolen over the weekend.  As far as police have determined at this point, the thieves were thinking about money, not politics.  They […]

The Cluster of Copenhagen, the chaotic and orgiastic assembly of the representatives of 192 countries plus uncountable throngs of NGO leaders and miscellaneous activists, is, as Les Gelb notes this morning over at The Daily Beast, a window into the future.  In many ways, it’s not a very nice future.In the first two posts, I […]

Barack Obama and the nation he leads owned the Copenhagen summit, and the administration used its commanding position to achieve some vital national goals.  In many ways this summit shows the outlines of an emerging world order in which the form of American leadership has changed and the chief challenges it confronts have changed, but […]

Beyond the brightly crackling hearth here at Mead manor, the world press is still sorting out what happened at Copenhagen yesterday. The UK Guardian has an unequivocal take: “Copenhagen Ends in Failure!” screams the headline.  The New York Times is more cautious, noting that a deal was reached but that its provisions are less stringent […]

President Obama ran for office as Mr. Cool, the unflappable leader who would calmly lead the nation through the economic and political storms ahead.  Like Joseph Addison’s famous ‘angel in the whirlwind’ President Obama would be the unmoved mover at the center of American politics and bring his intellectual firepower and his steady temperament to […]

Yesterday came the news: South Africa’s Beet Lady is dead.I’ve often been surprised but have rarely been shocked; the Beet Lady managed to do it.About five years ago in South Africa where I was attending a press conference held by Ms. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, then Minister of Health.  Glowing with confidence and assurance she told us […]