Because Mitt Romney has repeatedly said he would not criticize President Obama or U.S. foreign policy while abroad, it has been unclear what he would say in Israel to separate himself from current policy. “Because I’m on foreign soil,” Romney told CBS, “I don’t want to be creating new foreign policy for my country or in any way to distance myself from the foreign policy of our nation.” Read more »

Every administration suffers from leaks of classified information. Given the size of the government and the large number of people who have access to information that is not only highly classified but truly sensitive, some leaks are impossible to prevent. For example, every administration faces leaks from officials who have lost interagency fights and are using the press to attack policy decisions. Read more »

Having undermined democracy in Honduras in 2009 and watched democracy disappear in Nicaragua as the Sandinistas regained power in 2011, it is perhaps not surprising that the Obama administration appears indifferent to the disappearance of democracy in El Salvador. But it is tragic to see the FMLN, the old communist guerrillas’ party, starting to subvert what has been decades of democracy since the Salvadoran civil war ended. Read more »

Though there is not much Western reporting yet on this phenomenon, Shia unrest in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province appears to be growing.

Two recent reports, including interesting amateur films of demonstrations and some violence, can be found in this Arab web site and buried in the New York Times here. The key question is whether the unrest is over or will spread among Saudi Shia. Read more »

The past year has seen a long debate about whether young American Jews are becoming alienated from Israel. This assertion was the central argument in an article and then a book by Peter Beinart, who argued that this is happening. As Beinart announces at his web site, “A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America….In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself.” Read more »

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague delivered a sentence of 14 years yesterday against a Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga. This is not much cause for celebration, for it is the first sentence ever handed down by the ICC–after ten years of work, at a cost of about $100 million a year. The court suffers from a variety of ailments that go beyond being new; as an example, judges are chosen by its member countries through a political process that does not bring the best qualified jurists to the top. Read more »

Secretary of State Clinton’s blast at Russia and China last Friday blamed them for holding up international action against the Assad regime in Syria, but surely their position on Syria was not news. Clinton complained that they were “blockading” progress and “paying no price.” Read more »

Who is helping the Palestinians in the financial crisis the Palestinian Authority now faces? The United States and the nations of the European Union are the largest donors. Arab nations, including the very wealthy oil producers, have never been particularly generous. Israel, of course, is almost universally reviled for its “oppression” of Palestinians.

But now we learn that it was Israel who intervened with the IMF to seek a one billion dollar loan for the Palestinian Authority. Read more »