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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
095425
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
There is potent irony in the fact that 68,000 American troops, with 30,000 more to come, are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, a landlocked country at the crossroads of South and Central Asia from which the United States worked so vigorously to oust the Soviets during the Cold War, and in which a predominant majority of those the United States now confronts have views and values akin to those it supported during that prior conflict. But then history in Afghanistan is ironic at its core and has a way of mocking the best laid of plans.
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| 2 |
ID:
095423
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In his keynote speech to the Republican convention, the chairman used most exalted words. After reviewing the record and achievements of the administration, he asked sonorously, "When have we rested more secure in friendship with all mankind?"
One of the tests English undergraduates have to endure is the "gobbet," an unidentified passage of literary or historical significance, whose date and author the examinee must guess. Maybe the arresting sentence just quoted will have stumped readers, but no one can possibly have dated that particular gobbet as 2008, or supposed that it was uttered by anyone at the last GOP convention in Minneapolis. John McCain and Sarah Palin, Lindsey Graham and Tom Ridge, could have said many other things. They might have boasted that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, or that it had never been more powerful, or that "We are winning," which is what Graham did say-but "friendship with all mankind"?
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| 3 |
ID:
095426
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| 4 |
ID:
095419
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| 5 |
ID:
095420
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
If Barack Obama's presidential campaign promised anything, it was to "rebrand" the United States of America. After decades-centuries, according to some critics-of throwing its weight around, capped by eight years of George W. Bush's presidency, the world's sole superpower was no longer viewed as a dutiful member of the international community, much less a beacon of freedom and democracy. And who better to repair the damage than a man whose very election would expiate the country's worst historical sin? The Texas cowboy would yield to a cool "citizen of the world," who had opposed Bush's war in Iraq, loudly repudiated torture, and pledged to join the fight against global warming. We would find it easier to be great, the argument went, because we would once again be seen as good.
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| 6 |
ID:
095421
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| 7 |
ID:
095422
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
One day in October 1989, in a Prague fish restaurant long since privatized, Vaclav Havel sat down to be interviewed by a British journalist. Asked about the ongoing events in the Communist bloc, he voiced-with my modest help as his translator-his pleasure at the direction things were taking in the round-table Poland, reformist Hungary, and even the once impregnable East Germany. The evidence of the crumbling of the system was everywhere around us, in the shape of hundreds of Trabant cars deserted unsentimentally on the streets of Prague, by East Germans voting with their feet for a future in the West. Yet, asked when the moment of truth might arrive in Czechoslovakia, Havel, in his-for a playwright-atypically undramatic manner, would not be drawn out. "I am not sure," he said. "It might take a month, maybe a year, perhaps a long time. We might not live to see the day. One simply cannot tell." Several weeks later the day arrived. Very few people had been able to predict it with any more precision than Havel.
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| 8 |
ID:
095424
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Many Americans-particularly those involved with the major news media, academia, and the world of policymaking-envision their country becoming an ever more predictable follower of global fashions in everything from health care to climate change, jurisprudence to economic policy. In other words, they look ahead and see a nation that is a somewhat larger version of those that make up the European Union.
But in reality, those who believe that the United States is sliding down from its historical apex-and that we must accordingly downscale our expectations and adopt the assumptions and economy more appropriate to our European friends-are wrong. American exceptionalism has lost none of its momentum, and the United States is becoming more, not less, distinct among the countries of the developed world in its economic, demographic, and cultural evolution
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