“Who is Liz?”

This has nothing to do with anything, but it’s hilarious.

Sorry, but why are we still listening to Bob Kagan? (UPDATED)

I’ve had my share of complaints about Kagan in the past, but this one might take the cake. The President, we’re told, needs Ahmadinejad to win.

His extremely guarded response to the outburst of popular anger at the regime has been widely misinterpreted as reflecting concern that too overt an American embrace of the opposition will hurt it, or that he wants to avoid American “moralizing.” (Obama himself claimed yesterday that he didn’t want the United States to appear to be “meddling.”)

But Obama’s calculations are quite different. Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis.

PCCF and the FY10 budget request

Today the White House released the details of its FY2010 budget request, totaling $3.4 trillion. I’ll probably have more to say about the defense-related provisions of the request at some point in the future, but for right now I just want to highlight one thing: the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund.

Gelb on uniting the realists

Further rebuke for Kagan’s shallow mischaracterization of realism, however indirect, can be found in Leslie Gelb’s piece in the September/October National Interest.  The venue is appropriate: published by the Nixon Center, the National Interest is the field’s most prominent realist journal.  Gelb writes of the possibility for consensus among realists on both sides of the political divide, noting that Republican foreign policy practitioners like Kissinger, Scowcroft, Baker, and Eagleburger have little in common with the “latent isolationists with dogmatic slants on good-and-evil in the world” who populate the rightward corners of the party. Dogmatic slants on good-and-evil… sound like anyone we know?

Letter to FP magazine

No posts for a while, so here’s the letter to the editor that Ryan and I co-wrote in response to Howard Gardner’s recent “contribution” to the Foreign Policy feature “21 Solutions to Save the World.” The tone of our letter is considerably more charitable than that of my initial, personal response on reading the piece.

Gladwell on pension demographics

The August 28 New Yorker includes an article by Malcolm Gladwell — author of The Tipping Point and Blink — about the unsustainability of employer-provided pensions:

Gladwell, “THE RISK POOL: What’s behind Ireland’s economic miracle—and G.M.’s financial crisis?” The New Yorker, 28 August.