International Affairs

“Why is Canada beating America?” Jason Clemens asks this week in The Wall Street Journal.

Ten years ago Canada was on the skids. The Bloc Quebecois was on the rise, the IMF was glaring and Canadians were self-effacing and avidly in between, not sure if they were real unto themselves or a kind of cold-country America. At that time the Canadian dollar was converting to 75 cents American. Today it is worth $1.04 U.S and rising. What happened? How did Canada get strong?

The answer: It overcame two existential and psychological challenges, the United States and Quebec.

Regarding the post by Anne Penketh (whom I always consider very thoughtful), I agree with her point. In the interest of brevity (wink):

The financial and political problems here are part of a global phenomenon. Perhaps we can call it "multinational Satan sandwiches.”

One theme I have discussed on foreign television and radio and will soon address here is: We need an American Spring, a European Spring and an Asian Spring as well as an Arab Spring.

Stay tuned.

The killing of the Libyan rebel military commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younis, suspected of working for Moammar Gadhafi despite abandoning the Libyan leader in February, is an ominous and embarrassing development that raises further questions about the ill-prepared NATO intervention.

The haste with which the West has embraced the Transitional National Council (TNC), which now has access to frozen Gadhafi regime assets and is setting up embassies in London and Paris, is staggering considering that the rebels were an unknown quantity only months ago. The TNC was recognized by Washington last week as the legitimate government of Libya.

I was delighted to see that The Jewish Press, the largest independent weekly Jewish newspaper in the United States, published an essay by Moshe Feiglin, a conservative Israeli leader, repudiating Glenn Beck’s upcoming pilgrimage gathering in Jerusalem.

Feiglin wrote: “The problem is not Beck's beliefs. He is a good person who believes in what he is doing. The problem is that the most loyal Jewish public is giving him its support without thoroughly checking his message. They are unwittingly abetting a very gentle and heartwarming type of modern crusade.”

I'm delighted because the only other place this essay occurred outside of Israel was here in my blog at The Hill, and I am not a Jew. But I see Beck’s event in Israel as the height of blasphemy. Read more...

The pope does it. Obama does it. So last week I finally decided to open a personal Twitter account to “join the conversation,” as friends had urged. I signed up to follow some of them, and others in the foreign-policy community¸ and then waited for something to happen.

It soon did. It was a tweet on Friday that first alerted the world to the killings in Norway. It did not take long before thousands of #Norway and #Oslo tweets were voicing their thoughts and spreading the views of the experts from the mainstream media and the blogs across the twittersphere. From the Washington Post and New York Times to the BBC, the working theory was that there was a link to the Muslim extremists of al Qaeda. I retweeted to my 17 followers a piece by Max Fisher from The Atlantic on “Al Qaeda’s problem with Norway,” despite my better judgment and the caution of the local police, who would later announce that the suspect was a Norwegian.

Jon Huntsman made an interesting comment the other day. He said the al Qaeda terrorism sweeping the world these last decades represents the collapse of old regimes much as collapse swept old Europe and the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago. It would run another five to 10 years, he said. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a rising expert on global terror and has recently been interviewed in Wired and Salon on current threats, particularly in the south of Africa, and published dozens of articles on terrorism.

The Horn of Africa is currently racked by what seems to be its worst drought in 60 years, with tremendous humanitarian consequences. Compounding the problem, and creating a dilemma for the United States, some of the hardest-hit areas are controlled by an al Qaeda-aligned organization that regularly extorts humanitarian organizations — and will likely do so again, Gartenstein-Ross and Tara Vassefi write in this month’s Atlantic.

Glenn Beck plans to hold a “Restoring Courage” event in Israel on Aug. 24. Incredibly, the title assumes that his Israeli audience used to have courage but now does not, so he will bring it back to them. From Beck’s site:

“Now is the time to Stand and Restore Courage. We ask those of you who value freedom, honor and faith to travel to Israel and stand with Glenn Beck and leaders from around the world with one united voice.”

Initially he intended to hold his event at Temple Mount but fears prompted a move to the Mount of Olives, according to the Jerusalem Post.

"I invite you to join us," Beck said recently to a gathering of influential Israeli conservatives, quoting the Scroll of Ruth. "Your nation is my nation and your God is my God.”

The House is about to embark on a short-sighted and ultimately counterproductive attempt to shave the funding of an organization that serves U.S. foreign-policy interests.

It’s such an easy target. It’s not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last, that Congress has identified the United Nations for cuts.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is to mark up the fiscal 2012 State Department authorization bill on Wednesday as the process of appropriation begins. What I find particularly objectionable is the proposed withholding of funds to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for the welfare and education of 4.8 million Palestinian refugees, and the underfunding of U.N. peacekeeping operations.

There’s a question that’s been obsessing me for the last few days about Britain’s sensational phone-hacking scandal, and it’s the question “Why?” Why did editors and their journalists break the law systematically in their desperate competition for scoops? And why — we hope — did it not happen here?

For me the answer to the second question is easier. I’m in the camp that believes that the tabloid picture is so different here, compared to the national tabloids in the U.K., that their influence here is far less than their British counterparts. Although let’s not forget that it was the National Enquirer that in 2007 broke the story about John Edwards’s affair that eventually led to his withdrawal as a presidential contender. Secondly, the relationship between newspaper proprietors and politicians cuts across political boundaries in Britain, enhancing the magnates’ clout, whereas here — apparently — they do not cross the aisle.

South Sudan is a sparsely populated and largely undeveloped land full of lush savanna, jungle and the famous Sud — a vast collection of swamps that form the source of the Nile River in Sudan.

Until now, South Sudan's largely dispersed and independent tribal groups have been joined together in hopes of defeating a common enemy. But it remains to be seen whether they can actually form a strong enough national identity to garner the political and economic capacity they will need to survive as an independent nation. Especially now, any decline in national unity or collective purpose will weaken the new South Sudan considerably. The disparate groups will especially need such unity if they are to effectively negotiate the oil pipeline stranglehold currently enjoyed by the North.