The New Republic

I’ve written myself about the Obama administration’s more-than-flatfooted policies on Syria (here, here, and here) and Iran ( READ MORE >>

The Susan in question is Susan Rice. And, according to a New York Times article by Neil MacFarquhar, it's Stewart Patrick who gives her the good grades. Rice is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. So who is Patrick? He is one of those hundreds of I.R. wonks in Washington who moves from fellowship to fellowship, eating up foundation money, and ends up being an expert in what actually amounts to nothing or maybe, just maybe, the same thing: "multilateral cooperation in the management of global issues; U.S. READ MORE >>

Being Treasury secretary is usually not a job that calls for great political skills. But with a banking crisis crippling the economy and threatening to turn a recession into a depression, Tim Geithner has been plunged into the center of politics--as both the person responsible for what the administration should do, and as the main exponent of that policy. But he has faltered in crafting an effective policy and failed miserably in putting it forward. READ MORE >>

This article originally appeared on November 20, 1961 These last hundred days have been so dizzying, so astonishing, and to some of us so dismaying a reversal of what we all took to be the inevitable course of history, that one can still hardly believe, much less explain it all. A reporter, trying to sum it all up in a few columns, cannot hope to capture the drama, the acute anxiety, the universal confusion. All he can attempt is the patchiest of outlines. READ MORE >>

A Death in November By Ellen J. Hammer (E.P. Dutton, 373 pp., $22.50) READ MORE >>

Continuing American participation in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) militates against prospects for any effective reassertion by Congress of its foreign policy role in Southeast Asia. Yet the Senate still displays a remarkable complacency toward the survival of SEATO. Though recently dormant, that old treaty is still alive, operative and available as an instrument for further presidentially initiated intervention. READ MORE >>

After more than four months and 24 sessions, the Paris talks are still at an impasse; no progress has been made; there have been only "official conversations" and no negotiations. These meetings have provided both sides with full opportunity to expound official positions on the origins and development of the conflict and to castigate each other's very different interpretations. But all this has amounted to little more than repetition of statements made publicly elsewhere by spokesmen of both governments. READ MORE >>

Because he is using his powers as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pressure President Johnson into a change of foreign policy, the name of Senator J. William Fulbright was dropped with a clang from the White House social list for six months, from last September until this March, when President Johnson apparently decided that wasn’t the way to influence an Arkansan. Fulbright’s response to the cease-fire took the form of three Christian A. READ MORE >>