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A pet shop owner in Yongin, Korea, about 25 miles south of Seoul, set off an international incident recently with an advertising sign featuring . . . a puppy. In the sign, a dog’s head replaces that of Mao Zedong in the portrait hanging at the northern end of Tiananmen Square. Last Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry summoned a South Korean diplomat to protest, and the shop’s owner immediately pulled down the sign and apologized to Beijing. What’s wrong with this picture? First, China’s authoritarian state tried to censor an image appearing in a democracy—and the democracy bowed. Yet there is...

Over the weekend, the New York Times published an open letter from the Elie Wiesel Foundation, originally released July 11, signed by 51 Nobel laureates, including Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, and a host of other luminaries, decrying the various British boycotts of Israel. These boycotts, the statement read, “glorify prejudice and bigotry.” But there is one man, reputed to know more about the horrific effects of “prejudice and bigotry” than anyone on earth, missing from the collection of signatories. The absence of his name is made even more conspicuous by the presence of another name: that of Frederick Willem de...

Dana Priest is a national-security correspondent for the Washington Post. Her professional success depends in large part on her ability to ferret out secrets from the U.S. intelligence and defense bureaucracy and from knowledgeable officials on Capitol Hill. Sources within government, acting in violation of the laws governing secrecy, regularly provide her with classified information in exchange for her promise not to disclose their identity, even if this means she must defy a court order and possibly go to jail. This year, Priest won a major journalism award for a November 2005 article bringing to light the highly classified fact...

Last Friday, RealClearPolitics ran in its lead feature spot an essay by Gregory Scoblete, a free-lance writer in New Jersey. The essay had the headline “The GOP, Ron Paul & Non-Interventionism,” and was subsequently commented upon by, among others, guest-blogger Stephen Bainbridge on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Scoblete’s premise is that, just as Barry Goldwater’s failed campaign for president led the Republican party to embrace a limited-government philosophy, so too Ron Paul’s presidential campaign today, doomed though it is, will cause the GOP to embrace his philosophy of “non-interventionism.” Scoblete goes on at great lengths to “distinguish non-interventionism from isolationism.” He...

contentions would like to welcome our latest blogger, Peter Wehner. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, formerly served as the deputy assistant to the President and as the Director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives.Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, has written a piece in the New York Times Magazine that is both a reflection on political leadership and an honest, self-condemning explanation of why he supported the war in Iraq. Ignatieff’s essay, “Getting Iraq Wrong: What The War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment,” places him in...

When Hamas and Fatah established a national unity government in March of 2007, Norway was the first Western country to recognize this new government, ending Hamas’s diplomatic isolation. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gar Store announced today, during a visit to Jerusalem, that his government has reversed its policy and no longer recognizes Hamas. Norway’s decision is a welcome one. Still, one cannot help noticing that, as early as April of 2006, Norway had invited Hamas representatives to visit in order “to maintain dialogue,” on the grounds that Hamas plays “an important role in developments in the Middle East.” It’s not...

There is a fascinating tidbit buried deep in this Washington Post story on America’s troubled relations with Pakistan’s military dictator Pervez Musharraf. After explaining why U.S. officials are bothered by Musharraf’s lackadaisical response to the Islamist extremists who have found a refuge in Pakistan’s tribal areas, Post reporters Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick write: "Musharraf also had a complaint of his own: His leverage over the tribal militants had slipped because of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Foreign fear of the might of the U.S. military, felt throughout the Muslim world immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was...

Is it possible that the New York Times could still be indicted for revealing the existence of the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program in a December 2005 front-page story? Shortly after the revelation appeared, a federal grand jury was empaneled to investigate the leak. A range of government officials, including Jane Harmon, then the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to the severe damage that the Times story did to our efforts to intercept al-Qaeda communications and thwart a second September 11. Shortly thereafter, President Bush called the newspaper’s conduct “shameful.” I agreed with these assessments. In fact, I...

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two doves posing as hawks, are fighting a phony war. Who is winning? Obama, on the defensive on account of his muddled idea last week of meeting foreign dictators without preconditions, precipitated the latest skirmish by calling for the possible use of U.S. troops to clean out terrorist enclaves in Waziristan. But then, in response to a question, he ruled out use of the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal.

Yesterday, a submersible lowered a titanium Russian flag onto the Arctic seabed, near the North Pole, at a depth of almost 14,000 feet. Canada immediately mocked Moscow’s stunt. “This isn’t the 15th century,” said Ottawa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter MacKay. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory.’ ” International law permits Russia, Canada, the United States, Denmark, and Norway, the nations with coastlines inside the Arctic Circle, to enforce 200-mile exclusive economic zones north of their shores. The Kremlin, however, claims a bigger zone that includes the seabed under the...

Barack Obama made headlines yesterday with tough talk about terrorism. Andrew Sullivan called his speech a “JFK Strategy,” alluding to the 1960 charge—the infamous “missile gap”—by the Kennedy campaign that Richard Nixon was not sufficiently hawkish. (The “gap” turned out to be complete fiction.) Sullivan, who thought Obama’s speech was “the speech of a potential president,” concluded that Obama “will not be Dukakized.” As it turns out, he won’t need to be—today he did it himself. Obama told the Associated Press earlier today: “I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance.”...

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the founding of the world’s largest private army: China’s. The biggest misconception about China’s military is that it belongs to China. Yes, the Chinese state pays for the People’s Liberation Army, but the PLA reports to—and pledges to defend—the Communist Party. On this Army Day, Beijing’s propaganda saluted (as it always does) the army’s 2.3 million members in their capacity as employees and defenders of China’s leading political organization. This year’s ritualistic expressions of mutual party-army appreciation seem more numerous and passionate than on past anniversaries. President Hu Jintao mentioned the party’s total control...

Thomas X. Hammes is a retired Marine colonel and the author of a well-regarded work on modern war: The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. He is also a fellow participant in an online discussion forum on military affairs called the Warlord Loop. I was so taken with one of his recent postings on how to battle jihadists on the Internet (a major venue for Islamist organizing and proselytizing) that I asked him if he would adapt it for contentions readers. He kindly agreed. Here it is: "For the last few years, individuals and private organizations...

The last I heard of Lawrence Summers, he was performing somersaults as president of Harvard, trying to ingratiate himself with the faculty he had offended by, among other things, frankly discussing some ideas–taboo in academia–about the linkages between sex and success. The somersaults were to no avail. Summers’s tenure as president came to an abrupt end last year and he returned to his post teaching economics as the Charles W. Eliot university professor. This was Harvard’s loss and our gain, for whatever one made of his ridiculous efforts to back away from his own thoughtful if provocative words, he is...

It’s hard to grasp the point of yesterday’s front page New York Times article on Chelsea Clintonby wunderkind reporter Jodi Kantor. While it’s clear that Kantor intended her piece to reveal the “real” Chelsea, she admits at the outset that the former first daughter and her parents “turned down interview requests for the article, as they have for countless others on the subject.” So, how does Kantor remedy this lack? With received wisdom and banalities, naturally. Kantor helpfully informs readers that the young Clinton has strawberry blond hair and favors tasteful pantsuits, that she graduated in 2001 from Stanford, did...

I took apart a New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Thompson yesterday, which had tried to tell us what the American statesman, George F. Kennan, were he still alive, would have said about counterterrorism. Thompson has written back, complimenting my remarks as “very smart and complicated” and “much better than some of the other comments I’ve been getting.” But he does take issue with much of what I said, including my contention that he was being dishonest. In the face of his very gracious note, I gladly retract that last charge. But what I do leave standing is my assertion...

Critics of the troop surge have been arguing that it isn’t making any difference on the ground—the only thing it’s doing, they claim, is driving up American casualties. The facts are starting to contradict their claims. I’ve recently posted a couple of items noting that reliable on-the-ground observers—namely Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of The Brookings Institution and John Burns of the New York Times—have found that violence against Iraqis is falling. Now comes news that the number of American casualties is also declining, at least temporarily. There were spikes in the number of Americans killed in action in April...

How worried should we be about Iran and its raging president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Can developments on Mars or in other locations in outer-space help us ward off the danger? This is not a facetious question. It is quite clear that the ayatollahs are determined to acquire nuclear weapons. In the face of this challenge, and assuming that diplomacy fails to stop them, we are likely to have two non-exclusive options: strike at their nuclear facilities or build defensive systems like the Airborne Laser. But from time to time, it helps to step back from the intricate problems connected with either...

“Did George Kennan know the best way to fight terror?” is the question asked by a New York Times op-ed today. My question in return is: why is so much that appears on the op-ed page of our leading newspaper so fatuous? In 1947, writes Nicholas Thompson, the author of a forthcoming book about Kennan, the late American strategist published his famous article in Foreign Affairs under the byline of X, setting forth the strategy of containment. The Soviet challenge, as Kennan understood it, Thompson explains, was political and not military, and it required a political not a military response:...

Say what you will about reporters in general or the New York Times in particular: John Burns breaks all the stereotypes. As the Times’ longtime Baghdad bureau chief, he has been a fearless and honest chronicler of the war. He has presented plenty of evidence of disasters, but he isn’t afraid to highlight successes when they occur, and to warn of the dangers of American disengagement.