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Bret Stephens
5/18/2010
The nuclear game Tehran is playing isn’t any more complicated than checkers. But the trouble is they’re whipping us at it. The agreement of Turkey and Brazil to enrich Iran’s uranium is a signal defeat for the Obama administration. Iran’s leaders have learned to habituate the international community to its nuclear advances. What was once considered intolerable Iranian behavior–calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, enriching uranium in defiance of UN resolutions, even becoming a nuclear power–is increasingly seen as unremarkable or understandable or inevitable. The US will now be hard-pressed to explain why a deal they never withdrew from the table–and which they insisted remain unaltered–no longer makes sense.
Stephens writes ‘Global View’ for the Journal.
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Bryce says the Kerry-Lieberman energy bill would be a waste of money for carbon capture and sequestration. He says there are three technological hurdles that are potentially insurmountable: it greatly reduces the output of power plants; pipeline capacity to move newly captured carbon dioxide is insufficient; and there is a staggering volume of waste. He looks at each hurdle in turn and why they present problems to the bill. Before Congress throws money at the procedure, lawmakers should look closely at the issues of cost and scale that hamstring nearly every new energy-related technology.
Parallels between Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis and the global financial crisis are manifold. As with the housing market and the derivatives craze, the euro tale is one of easy money, excessive leverage, bad accounting, and failed supervision. De Vos states that the euro’s Stability and Growth Pact, meant to restrain budget deficits and national debt, was violated in its application and ignored in its supervision. In short, this was a bubble of public excess waiting to be pricked. For the sake of the euro’s and the continent’s future, political scapegoating needs to stop. The cardinal issue for the euro is whether its members will implement structural reforms that coincide with increased austerity before doing so only furthers their decline.
Kristof says one way to fight terrorism at home is to invest in schools abroad. He says the reason so many terrorists are coming from Pakistan, a US ally, could be that in the 1970s and 1980s Pakistan’s leader used religious fundamentalism to buttress his regime while ignoring education. In contrast, Kristof looks at neighboring Bangladesh, which Henry Kissinger called an international basket case and now, thanks to education, has bolstered its economy, reduced population growth, encouraged growth of a civil society, and dampened fundamentalism. Encouraging education and dropping tariffs on imports from Pakistan could do the same for Pakistan.
Cohen tells of his recent talk with Col. Avi Gil of the Israeli Defense Forces, who seems cautiously optimistic about the prospects of peace between Israel and Palestine. After leaving Israel for a two year stint training with the US Marine Corps, Gil returned to West Bank surprised to see the thickness of the yellow pages had tripled, a sure sign of an increase in business as well as a decrease in violence. Gil admires the state-building of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad but thinks he may be “walking on the edge” because his pledge of nonviolence hasn’t stopped the stone throwing or Molotov cocktails. Tensions will surely flare when the world pushes for Palestinian statehood in 2011 or 2012 and Israel applies the brakes. For now, Gil says, “Let’s walk slowly to arrive as fast we can.”
Krugman says the only plausible ending for the financial nightmare in Greece is for the country to end up in default and perhaps its eventual departure from the euro. Unlike California, which also has a history of financial woes, Greece has no central government to bail them out. California’s budget woes seem to have little effect on the state’s residents who can always rely on Washington to keep funding their Medicare reimbursements, Social Security checks, and defense contracts, but Greece has no such system in place. The only thing that could help Greece avoid default and get back on its financial feet is to leave the euro behind and go back to its own currency, which it could then devalue and increase its export competitiveness.
