openpolitics.com

Mrs. Clinton has appointed three Super Sub-Secretaries — George Mitchell to handle Arab-Israel negotiations, Richard Holbrooke to manage Afghanistan-Pakistan affairs and Dennis Ross to coordinate Iran policy. The Obama team seems to have concluded that these three problems are so intractable that they require almost full-time secretary of state-quality attention.

.. After the 1973 Arab-Israel war, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger set the gold standard for mediation by negotiating the disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria — the first real peace accords ever struck between those parties. But Mr. Kissinger had it easy. He basically needed to forge an agreement between one pharaoh (Anwar Sadat), one military dictator (Hafez Assad) and one overwhelmingly powerful prime minister (Golda Meir), whose Labor Party then totally dominated Israel. All three of Kissinger’s interlocutors could speak for their people and deliver and sustain any agreements.

That is not true today in the main theaters of conflict where the parties are either failing states with multiple power centers — Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine — or strong states with governments so fractious and hydra-headed that they border on paralyzed — Israel and Iran.

.. “The world today can be much better understood if you think of it from the perspective of regions and not states,” said Gen. Jim Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser. And the regions of disorder are likely to multiply as the world’s economic crisis metastasizes.

.. There is a geopolitical storm coming, concluded Bremmer, “and it is not priced into the market yet.”

.. “As the effects of the economic crisis spread and viable states become weak states and weak states become failed states, it is going to produce a series of geopolitical brush fires, if we are lucky, and real conflagrations, if we are not"..

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It began as a sub-prime surprise, then became a credit crunch and is now a global financial crisis. At last month's World Economic Forum at Davos there was much finger-pointing - Russia and China blamed the US, everyone blamed the bankers, the bankers blamed everyone - but little in the way of forward-looking ideas. From where I was sitting, most attendees were still stuck in the Great Repression: deeply anxious, but fundamentally in denial about the nature and magnitude of the problem.

.. Even before Barack Obama entered the White House, his predecessor's administration had already committed $US7.8 trillion in the form of loans, investments and guarantees. Now the talk is of a new "bad bank" to buy toxic assets from the banks that, despite the $US700billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, are still in deep trouble.

No one seems to have noticed that there is already a bad bank. It is called the Federal Reserve System, and its balance sheet has grown by 150 per cent - from just over $US900 billion to more than $US2 trillion - since this crisis began, partly as a result of purchases of undisclosed assets from banks.

.. Another objection to such a procedure is that it would reward the imprudent. But moral hazard only really matters if bad behaviour is likely to be repeated. I do not foresee anyone asking for, or being given, an option adjustable-rate mortgage for many, many years. The issue, then, is simply one of fairness.

It’s also a little strange. Barack Obama ran for president, you’ll recall, on the idea that the politics of the ’90s — if not the policies that brought about unbridled prosperity — could finally be put behind us. But the ’90s, it turns out, are not so easily dispatched. Much of Obama’s own administration has been culled, perhaps necessarily, from the ranks of those who fought alongside Clinton during those dark years when they and Gingrich’s army fought wars of attrition over the budget and impeachment: Rahm Emanuel, Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton herself. And now here comes their old adversary, back from the political dead, just to make the whole thing seem like some retro reality show — “Battle of the Aging Boomers.” Last time around, of course, Democrats got the best of their encounter with Newt. Republicans have to hope that Gingrich, an avid military historian, has learned a thing or two about how to regroup.

.. “Screaming ‘No!’ is just not a strategy,” Gingrich told me. But he said he was betting that Obama would take the second approach — that he meant what he said about leaving the old doctrines behind and intended to govern in a way that might fundamentally realign American politics. And if that were the case, Gingrich reasoned, not only would it be politically unpalatable to stand in Obama’s way, but chances were he would soon face serious fractures within his own party and would need to create a broader coalition of partners to get his initiatives through the Congress.

In other words, Gingrich wasn’t suggesting to Cantor and the others that they should simply pretend to like Obama well enough. He was telling them that if Obama was going to move far enough in their direction, their best play — and maybe their only play — was actually to team up with him on legislation if they could.

.. And yet, at the same time, Gingrich pointedly declines to do what Roosevelt and La Follette did, which is to directly confront the Republican orthodoxies of their day. Those reformers demanded their fellow Republicans make a choice between ideas and ignorance. By contrast, Gingrich doesn’t really challenge any core ideological precept of the Bush era — only the strategy of “base mobilization” that underlay it. Nor do the last several months of economic calamity seem to have ignited in him any of the populist fervor that energized an earlier generation of progressives. His main remedy for the financial crisis has been to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley law that Congress passed to step up regulation after the Enron scandal; Gingrich claims such accounting rules as “mark to market” are needlessly crippling banks and small businesses. In other words, his prescription for the runaway financial industry is to regulate it less — a position that hardly sounds like a departure from Bush, let alone progressive or insurrectionary.