Columnist.
"The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War," President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: Last week's NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliance's most serious response yet to Russia's aggression and provocations on its western frontier. The post-Ukraine economic sanctions have been weak; the declamatory denunciations, a mere embarrassment. They've only encouraged further reckless Russian behavior — the buzzing of U.S. ships, intrusions into European waters, threats to the Baltic States. NATO will now deploy four battalions to front-line states. In Estonia, they will be led by Britain; in Lithuania, by Germany; in Latvia, by Canada; in Poland, by the United States. Not nearly enough, and not permanently based, but nonetheless significant.
Did FBI Director Comey follow Justice Roberts' logic on ObamaCare?
Why did he do it? FBI director James Comey spent 14 minutes laying out an unassailable case for prosecuting Hillary Clinton for the mishandling of classified material. Then at literally the last minute, he recommended against prosecution. This is baffling. Under the statute (18 U.S.C. section 793(f)), it's a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or "through gross negligence." The evidence, as outlined by Comey, is overwhelming.
Given their arrogance, pomposity and habitual absurdities, it is hard not to feel a certain satisfaction with the comeuppance that Brexit has delivered to the unaccountable European Union bureaucrats in Brussels. Nonetheless, we would do well to refrain from smug condescension. Unity is not easy. What began in 1951 as a six-member European Coal and Steel Community was grounded in a larger conception of a united Europe born from the ashes of World War II. Seven decades into the postwar era, Britain wants out and the EU is facing an existential crisis.
"I believe in an America always moving toward the future." —Hillary Clinton, June 21. This was not the most important line in Clinton's Ohio economic policy speech, only the most amazing. Surely there cannot be a more vacuous, meaningless piece of political rhetoric. Every terrestrial entity from nematode to the United States of America moves forward into the future quite on its own, thank you. Where else is there to go?
When in his 1964 GOP acceptance speech Barry Goldwater declared that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," a reporter sitting near journalist/historian Theodore White famously exclaimed: "My God, he's going to run as Barry Goldwater!"
The morning after, the nation awakes asking: What have we done? Both parties seem intent on throwing the election away. The Democrats, running against a man with highest-ever negatives, are poised to nominate a candidate with the second-highest-ever negatives. Hillary Clinton started with every possible advantage — money, experience, name recognition, residual goodwill from her husband's successful 1990s — yet could not put away until this week an obscure, fringy, socialist backbencher in a country uniquely allergic to socialism.
Part of Bernie Sanders' charm is that for all of his arm-waving jeremiads, he appears unthreatening. He's the weird old uncle in the attic, Larry David's crazy Bernie. It's almost a matter of style. Who can be afraid of a candidate so irascible, grumpy, old-fashioned and unfashionable? After all, he's not going to win the nomination, so what harm can he do? A major address at the party convention? A say in the vice presidential selection? And who reads party platforms anyway?
How do you distinguish a foreign policy "idealist" from a "realist," an optimist from a pessimist? Ask one question: Do you believe in the arrow of history? Or to put it another way, do you think history is cyclical or directional? Are we condemned to do the same damn thing over and over, generation after generation — or is there hope for some enduring progress in the world order?
Among the abundant ironies of this election cycle, there is this: We are now in the eighth year of the most liberal administration since Lyndon Johnson's. The primary elections reveal a national mood of anxiety, apprehension and anger, in turn reflecting stagnation at home and failure abroad. Two-thirds of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Yet after nearly two terms of Barack Obama's corrosively unsuccessful liberalism — both parties have decisively moved left.
What lies behind Donald Trump's nomination victory? Received wisdom among conservatives is that he, the outsider, sensed, marshaled and came to represent a massive revolt of the Republican rank and file against the "establishment." This is the narrative: GOP political leaders made promises of all kinds and received in return, during President Obama's years, major electoral victories that gave them the House, the Senate, 12 new governorships and 30 state houses. Yet they didn't deliver. Exit polls consistently showed that a majority of GOP primary voters (60 percent in some states) feel "betrayed" by their leaders.
Foreign policy does not determine American elections. Indeed, of all Western countries, we are the least interested in the subject. The reason is simple: We haven't had to be. Our instinctive isolationism derives from our geographic exceptionalism. As Bismarck once explained (it is said), the United States is the most fortunate of all Great Powers, bordered on two sides by weak neighbors and on the other two by fish.
We all have our ways of marking the seasons. I know it's spring when in early April I start my morning by skipping The Washington Post front page and going right to the sports section. It's not until I've fully savored the baseball box scores that I resignedly turn to politics.
How far they've come. And I'm not talking about the GOP, whose front-runner representing 37 percent of the Republican electorate has repudiated post-Reagan orthodoxy on trade, entitlement reform, limited government and Pax Americana (and possibly abortion, but who knows?). I'm talking about the Democrats. The center-left, triangulating, New Democrat (Bill) Clintonism of the 1990s is dead. It expired of unnatural causes, buried — definitively, if unceremoniously — by its very creator.
Yes, the big Wisconsin story is Ted Cruz's crushing 13-point victory. And yes, it greatly improves his chances of denying Donald Trump a first-ballot convention victory, which may turn out to be Trump's only path to the nomination. Nonetheless, the most stunning result of Wisconsin is the solidity of Trump's core constituency. Fundamentalist Trumpism remains resistant to every cosmic disturbance.
After dozens of contests featuring cliffhangers, buzzer- beaters and a ton of flagrant fouls, we're down to the Final Four: Sanders, Clinton, Cruz and Trump. (If Kasich pulls a miracle, he'll get his own column.) The world wants to know: What are their foreign policies? Herewith, four candidates and four schools: pacifist, internationalist, unilateralist and mercantilist.
The split-screen told the story: on one side, images of the terror bombing in Brussels; on the other, Barack Obama doing the wave with Raul Castro at a baseball game in Havana. On one side, the real world of rising global terrorism. On the other, the Obama fantasy world in which romancing a geopolitically insignificant Cuba — without an ounce of democracy or human rights yielded in return — is considered a seminal achievement of American diplomacy.
By international and historical standards, political violence is exceedingly rare in the United States. The last serious outburst was 1968 with its bloody Democratic-convention riots. By that standard, 2016 is, as yet, tame. It may not remain so. The political thuggery that shut down a Donald Trump rally in Chicago last week may just be a harbinger. It would be nice, therefore, if we could think straight about cause and effect.
Bernie Sanders is the most successful Jewish candidate for the presidency ever. It's a rare sign of the health of our republic that no one seems to much care or even notice. Least of all, Sanders himself. Which prompted Anderson Cooper in a recent Democratic debate to ask Sanders whether he was intentionally keeping his Judaism under wraps. "No," answered Sanders: "I am very proud to be Jewish." He then explained that the Holocaust had wiped out his father's family. And that he remembered as a child seeing neighbors with concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms. Being Jewish, he declared, "is an essential part of who I am as a human being."
What happened to the evangelicals? They were supposed to be the bedrock of the Ted Cruz candidacy. Yet on Super Tuesday he lost them to Donald Trump. Cruz still did make a reasonably good showing, winning Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas, the latter by an impressive 17 points. But he didn't have the great night he needed to put away Marco Rubio and emerge as Trump's one remaining challenger. Cruz had done all the groundwork to win evangelicals and sweep the South by putting together strong alliances with local pastors and leaders. And yet, outside Oklahoma and Texas, he lost them to Trump by stunning margins — by 21 points in Alabama, 13 in Georgia, 14 in Tennessee, 16 in Virginia and 36 in, of all places, Massachusetts.
