...same plight of unimpressive competentence of its political elites that we can observe in other parts of the former “first world”, like Japan and, indeed, the United States – leaving the as yet unfathomed Obama out of consideration for the moment. This poor quality of elites among active politicians, but also noticeable in, say, most editorial offices, deserves study. It may have something to do with the fact that the current generation at the top have made careers in an environment of relative prosperity – the Golden Age of post-World-War-II capitalism – and unlike the preceding couple of generations have had hardly any experience in truly fighting for political ideas and for helping to devise political institutions aimed at material betterment of middle class and lower than middle class society. Their natural brilliance has rather been put in the service of political elbow work, encouraged by the “baby boom” glut of potential rivals, and of the ultimately unserious goals involved in celebrity culture. I am talking about an environment conducive to a certain type of elite, but Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France, may serve as a rather good individual example of the type. Last Sunday the still serious newspaper...

...appears to manage potential opponents very well, also in this case. He does not bring it up, but Obama’s history in Chicago is witness to that as well. There are few American places in which the political wheeler-dealing is more vicious and corrupt than in that city. But in that critical earlier phase of Obama’s career he seems in a roundabout manner to have managed to make the toughs of that world give him what he wanted. The prospects of what Obama inherited in the realm of foreign policy do not against all appear promising, if Vice President Biden’s speech in Munich may serve as an accurate indication. How different is this from what Bush-Cheney and company might have said, asks Jan Sampiemon in his account of events that have disappeared in the shadow of of the financial story. Is Obama making sure that rightwing pols and media are not going to villify him in that area? Is that why in his inaugural address he said that America is ready to lead again? Lead who? And to where? Is that why in the same address he takes the moral high ground with respect to countries that do “not tolerate dissent”?...

...to fall back entirely on the knowledge of the bureaucrats they were supposed to lead. Originally ensconced in splinter parties, they found each other and formed the Minshuto, which only in the past two or three years began to take on the shape of a credible and electable opposition party. The Socialist Party before them had betrayed the Japanese electorate for four decades by never seriously trying to take over from the LDP. The voice of Minshuto could hardly be heard above the media-created hullabaloo preceding the previous lower house elections, four years ago, about the plans for cleaning up the LDP of the then Prime Minister Koizumi. He was Japan’s first TV celebrity prime minister, and succeeded in creating the illusion that he would embark on a political overhaul of Japan, while in actual fact helping a group of finance ministry bureaucrats in, among other things, continuing their decades old project to curtail the spending excesses initiated by Japan’s post-war genius politician Tanaka Kakuei. Koizumi kept the LDP together for years after it began showing strong signs of political exhaustion. But with those lower house elections in 2005 he also laid the basis for yesterday’s defeat, by destroying a...

...registered with Washington, or for that matter with the European capitals, notwithstanding the proven incapacity of Israel to knock out that movement. For a while, during the recent assault on Gaza, Sarkozy created the impression that he was looking for an opening. He visited Cairo three times. But there was no sign of that anymore in Munich. In the eyes of the American government European preparedness to support it in Afghanistan has become the touchstone of European loyalty. Washington is preparing a ‘surge’, a (perhaps temporary) strengthening of its combat troops over there, after the Iraqi example. As Biden sees it: “The result must be a comprehensive strategy for which we all take responsibility that brings together our civilian and military resources that prevents a terrorist save haven, that helps the Afghan people develop the capacity to secure their own future.” In this matter European support comes with conditions. The German government in particular does not appear to have the slightest intention to cooperate by fighting against the Taliban in the southern part of the country. The Bundeswehr is in a relatively comfortable position in the North. (The ethnic factor of the minority position of the Pashtun, giving the Taliban...

the column this jotting refers to New crises inevitably dim older ones. Bits of the past that a nation was half-digesting intellectually may then remain undigested for a long time, perhaps forever. The current financial crisis has pushed the moral crises caused by warcrimes committed by a part of what since World War II proudly called itself “the free world” well down the memory holes in several countries. We should remember that the state of things resulting directly from the American government’s response to the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September 2001, led to lingering moral and intellectual crises on both sides of the Atlantic. Probably none of the Westpoint cadets who flung their caps into the air, after listening to their president announcing his right to attack any country that he decided was an enemy, could have imagined one of the grisly outcomes of what he had said; that perhaps several among them and certainly many soldiers serving under them would kill themselves within two, three, four or five years. One calculation arrived at in 2005 indicated that some 120 veterans would did so every week at the time. Advanced medical technology allows fifteen wounded to survive against...

...propagation of false stories. We must not forget that false stories crowd out true stories – or those more closely approximating the truth – from the front and opinion pages of newspapers (which, for all their decline and diminishing importance, still direct the non-frivolous fare on TV and the Web). There are many ways in which false stories are amplified and come to us from different directions. Big false stories, the ones that protect many smaller ones against critical examination, tend to have a long life and crucially influence the way in which people live their lives on large patches of territory, spanning many countries, of our globe. Those big false stories are usually rooted in older stories that may have been partially true. And so it is with the two main false stories that I think have more than any other influenced the life on our planet for the past 20 years or so – the period we could call the post-Cold War era. One of them is composed of the ideas that have collectively been labelled ‘neoliberalism’, and the other one – the term ‘realist theory’ covers much of it – consists of a set of ideas around...