...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...

...top rulers rather easily gain the attributes of a king or emperor, regardless of how they rose to the top. Mao Ze Dong in China – not a democracy – and Indira Gandhi in India – known by common cliché as the world’s biggest democracy – illustrate the tendency. One of the main questions in the area of the, as yet, politically unknown Obama is what he will do with the extra discretionary power that his predecessor has bequeathed to the office he is about to enter, power without precedent sanctioned by a fictitious war, which in the absence of an impeachment has not been formally nullified. The next question is whether Obama, if he is the wise and decent politician many, including myself, believe he is, will require power akin to that of pre-democratic monarchs if only to repair what George W. Bush has broken. There is much to be repaired, as all appear to agree. We may safely predict that the causes of a world order overturned in the first eight years of the twentyfirst century will be a source of horrified fascination for historians and sundry scholars for at least a century to come. How could it...

As the Bush years are now one day away from finally drawing to a close, what occurs to me is how much is lost in writing from hindsight. Sure, the gains that come with it are not open to dispute: often a better perspective as earlier unknown elements of the story fall into place, or revelations emerge that give it a dramatic twist. But there is something about the immediate experience of an event that, when conveyed with an effort, may contain knowledge about it that will be very difficult to recapture at a later stage. Which is why historians like diaries. Some knowledge just simply disappears. George Orwell understood this when writing about the Spanish Civil War and being sure that what he himself had learned about it from direct experience would never enter generally accepted historical records. Two striking examples from my own experience come immediately to mind: the last days of Saigon before North Vietnamese regulars took over the city in April 1975, and never-explained aspects of what happened during the horrific Kobe Earthquake and its aftermath in January 1995. I experienced the Bush years in a special, haunting manner. I had just embarked and a writing...

and a new Sampiemon column. Who in his or her right mind does not want to help Barack Obama succeed as President of the United States? Almost everyone in Europe hopes he does, so is the overwhelming general impression. And Europeans should help him, so write a number of American commentators. They should end their unwillingness to cooperate with Washington. What that means for the liberal hawks, over-represented among them, was conveyed by a Thomas Friedman column shortly after the election. This correspondent, who has what must be the most enviable job in contemporary journalism, may not be much as a political analyst, but as a weathervane indicating the direction of the winds of received opinion in Washington he certainly is useful. You wanted Obama, now you have him, and it is therefore time to do something in return, so spoke Friedman to the Europeans. And that something is mainly to send more troops to Afghanistan. More misconceived advice for helping Obama is hard to imagine. We do not yet have a clear idea of what his true thoughts are about Afghanistan and what he is being told by relevant advisers. It is a central question among American friends and...

...First Lady appeared on stage. Sarkozy continued his show series with his spectacular divorce from Cécilia, and with an even more spectacular third marriage with a well-known Italian model and singer. The series began to get bad reviews as a result of repetitive high-handed presidential interference with sensitive dossiers, something that has earned him the ire of especially Germany. Sarkozy’s condescending attitude toward the German Chancellor inspired Le Figaro, a Sarkozy admiring newspaper, to run the headline last Sunday ´La France bouscule le sommet des Vingt-Sept´ (France turns the summit of the 27 upside down) and subsequently commented that the meeting showed the imprint of just one man, Nicolas Sarkozy. It has been the unceasing demand of the president of the Republic, so argues Le Figaro, finally endorsed by the German chancellor Angela Merkel, that the Czech president call his 26 partners to a short meeting of no more than three hours, devoted to an economic crisis that weakens the European Union day by day. One sign of such weakening is the talk about possible impending protectionism among member states; obviously a sign of considerable regress in a grouping that began as a “common market” that had done away with...

Martin Wolf writing in the Financial Times asked a couple of days ago whether Barack Obama’s presidency has already failed. He concedes that in normal times, such a question would be ludicrous. But by now most politically thoughtful people have concluded that these are times, as Wolf puts it, “of great danger”. “Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it.” Wolf, along with many other economists not mired in ideological or Republican Party received opinion, is afraid that Obama will do too little to stave off a worsening of the economic crisis. Norm Schreiber in The New Republic warns against hasty conclusions on this score, and goes into the manner in which the political maneuverer Obama 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...