Democracy

John McCain loved vulnerable democracies. Will anyone else?

As goes Trump, so goes the conservative movement.

It’s fitting that Sen. Elizabeth Warren should have chosen the Center for American Progress’s ideas conference to declare, as she did last week, that “democracy is crumbling around us.” For the death knell of democracy is one of her party’s oldest ideas, a staple of progressive nightmares from…

'Suicide of the West' is a big, baggy, sometimes brilliant case for gratitude and perpetuation.

Chilean voters on Sunday stepped back from a precipice. In a runoff election pitting former president Sebastian Piñera against Senator Alejandro Guiller, sanity prevailed, albeit by a slightly anorectic margin of 54 to 46. Piñera election to a non-consecutive second term was a roller coaster ride.…

Pollsters, pundits, and public intellectuals identify declining levels of trust in America’s civic institutions as a threat to social and political order. Public opinion data bear out that trust has indeed waned in recent decades. The great majority of citizens in the early 1960s broadly viewed the…

With a week to go before Virginia’s governor’s election, Democrats were wringing their hands.

A week before Kenya’s August 8 presidential election, the mutilated body of Chris Msando, head of software for the country’s chief electoral body, was found in a ditch outside Nairobi. His autopsy revealed that he had been tortured before dying of strangulation. That the man who held the passwords…

It was in the mid-1980s that I first heard the term “politically correct,” from an older housemate in Berkeley. She had a couple glasses of wine in her and was on a roll, venturing some opinions that were outré by the local standards. I thought the term witty and took it for her own coinage, but in…

Tony Smith, political science professor at Tufts, is a man on a mission. His mission: save Wilsonianism from its perversions by post-Cold War social scientists, military strategists like General David Petraeus, the RAND Corporation—and especially the neocons and neoliberals of the Bush and Obama…

Newspapers aren't just throwing Trumpoplectic fits, they're monetizing them. The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times have all rolled out clothing lines tweaking the new president. The most comic is found at the Post website, which features a T-shirt in rock-concert black…

A bipartisan congressional delegation is expected to visit emerging democracies near Russia's borders this week in an effort to assure allies that the United States won't stand for Russian aggression, according to a release first obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Elliott Abrams, writing at the Council on Foreign Relations website, argues that America has an interest in supporting democracy in the Arab world. Here's an excerpt:

In a joint statement, Brookings Institution scholar William Galston and WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol offer a defense of the "basic institutions and principles of liberal democracy" which they argue are under assault. Read the full statement below:

Since 1992, even before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, U.S. policy has been based on the premise that Beijing's Communist leaders value Hong Kong's autonomy. The theory was that Beijing would not want to damage Hong Kong and so could be relied upon not to undermine Hong Kong's…

RETRACTION: The following post was based on an erroneous news report from KING 5 television. Arcen Cetin is in fact a United States citizen.

Donald Trump likes dictators and likes to be liked by them. After meeting Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week, Trump called Sisi "a fantastic guy," gushing, "he took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it." Trump approves of the unprecedented repression that followed Sisi's…

Hong Kong

The Foundation for Constitutional Government has released a new episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol.

Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer held a press conference Thursday morning alongside Planned Parenthood's executive director in an effort to justify their decision to block $1.1 billion in federal funding to combat the Zika virus.

I live out in Real Virginia, which is to say the part of Virginia that is technically a D.C. exurb, but is populated almost entirely by normal people. My neighbors are teachers and plumbers and soldiers and engineers. Plenty of the folks out here work for the federal government, but none of them…

On Monday, President Obama arrived on a presidential visit to Ethiopia. The trip to the east African state raised eyebrows, even among President Obama’s allies on the American left.

Even in the context of China’s steadily deteriorating human rights situation, the developments of the last few weeks have been remarkable. 

In at least one respect, visiting China is a little bit like traveling back in time to America in, say, 1957. (Or so I gather.) That is, people routinely smoke cigarettes in shopping malls, elevators, lines, apartment building hallways, schools, and yes, even hospitals. (Oh, and of course bars and…

In a comment unprompted by any question from the media, White House press secretary lashed into some of the rhetoric Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu used in his reelection campaign. The White House even suggested it had hurt Israel's democracy and America's relationship with its greatest…

Everyone knows that the coming Israel election, to be held March 17, is a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Michael Brendan Doughtery had an interesting piece at The Week, in which he calls Andrew Jackson “The Worst Great President.” He writes:

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a possible Republican presidential candidate, is using a crowdsourcing platform to try to reach dissidents and human rights activists in autocratic regimes. In particular, Rubio is trying to help those oppressed by the governments of Iran and Cuba.

With the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing safely over and regional leaders departed, China’s new strongman Xi Jinping decided to lower the boom on Hong Kong. Police there began clearing the barricades last week from the city’s main thoroughfare with the students in…

In the "Great Hall of the People" in Beijing, China, President Obama appeared with China's current president Xi Jinping at a joint press conference Wednesday. During his remarks as he noted the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China, President Obama recalled a saying of…

On Sunday, the leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy protests abruptly scrapped a poll of protester sentiment they had announced just days earlier. The idea of the poll had been to get protesters’ reactions to two bones thrown to them by the Hong Kong government in televised talks held on October 21.   

Representatives of the student led democracy protests in Hong Kong are due to enter into a dialogue with the Hong Kong government on Tuesday.  The prospects for success are not good.  The two sides are far apart, with the government saying it will not even discuss the protesters’ chief demand – the…

Douglas Murray has a terrific post at the London Spectator's website, a reply to Hugo Rifkind's claim in his column in the magazine that Israel is "drifting away" from the West.

In a 2007 article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “Let a Hundred Flowers Be Crushed,” the Chinese lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, told of being followed by security agents every year around the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre of democracy protesters. Pu responded by ushering the agents to a conference room at…

In spite of a string of worrisome human rights and freedom of expression violations, the Obama administration is holding out hope that Egypt's government lead by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is still headed for democracy.  State Department official Richard Stengel, under secretary of state for…

In his speech today at the United Nations, President Obama continued his administration’s odd and somewhat schizophrenic policy with respect to freedom, human rights, and democracy. 

The White House just emailed to reporters this "Readout of the President’s Meeting with the National Security Council Regarding the Situation in Egypt":

In a statement, press secretary Jay Carney says the U.S. respects the Iranian election and congratulates the Iranian people.

Earlier this week, the brother in-law of Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Matthew Kaminski on Donald Kagan, in the Wall Street Journal:

Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Sunday the release of a quarter of a billion dollars in aid to Egypt. The Associated Press reports:

This week marks the second anniversary of the fall of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Two years after the refrain “the people want to topple the regime” filled Tahrir Square, it is now Egypt itself that is toppling. Street violence has pitted various groups against each other—anarchists against…

This morning on the Today show, former vice president Al Gore claimed that "our democracy has been hacked."

As the June 2013 presidential election in Iran draws near, it appears there is an effort underway to rekindle a national debate about the regime’s legitimacy. This effort, led by senior opposition figures pushing for clarification on the legal status of Green Movement leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi,…

There are some facts so obvious that only a liberal could deny them. One of them is that, from Benghazi to Be’er Sheva, the West is under attack.

Does Alexis de Tocqueville have anything to say to the current generation of Chinese leaders?

China and the United States both launch leadership transitions this week. Earnest persons, in fear or hope, turn a raindrop of coincidence into a storm of meaning. In fact, November 6 here and November 8 in Beijing, when the Chinese Communist party (CCP) opens its 18th congress, have nothing in…

Tbilisi

One year ago today, North Carolina governor Bev Perdue suggested suspending national elections.

A group of protestors gathered this afternoon outside the Russian ambassador’s Washington residence to protest the jailing of the three Russian punk rock musicians from the group Pussy Riot. The musicians—Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29—were sentenced…

Low expectations for the 17th round of the U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue, conducted on July 23 and 24 in Washington, were borne out by Assistant Secretary Michael Posner’s briefing yesterday. Posner’s main points were that the dialogue is not a negotiation, but rather “just a piece” of “365 days…

In his latest fundraising email to supporters, President Barack Obama seems to suggest that this presidential election will be a test for democracy.

In a remarkable development, the people of Libya on Sunday voted against the seemingly-irresistible advance of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the “Arab Spring” countries of North Africa. Until Libyan ballots began coming in, Western media seemed assured that the MB would repeat, in that country,…

Either the Iranian regime is lying or Egypt’s new president, Mohammed Morsi, gave an interview that will raise some eyebrows.

While the Obama administration and its allies at the New York Times are waiting for Russia to intervene and get Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down, the children of Kafranbel show a clearer sense of strategic reality:

In this video, obtained by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Saudi women blasts religious police for harassing her in a public mall for wearing nail polish:

President George W. Bush was back in Washington today, to mark the opening at his Bush Institute in Dallas of the “Freedom Collection.”

Maarab, Lebanon

Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident who briefly took refuge in the U.S. embassy, recently expressed his hope that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would rescue him. "My fervent hope is that it would be possible for me and my family to leave for the U.S. on Hillary Clinton’s plane," Chen…

Bashar al-Assad’s security forces have brazenly slaughtered more than 10,000 Syrian civilians, and injured or detained tens of thousands more, since the anti-regime protests began in March 2011. Despite these facts, America’s policy towards Syria—a terror-sponsoring government that is Iran’s…

An essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy by Egyptian-born activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy, “Why Do They Hate Us? The real war on women is in the Middle East,” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. Today Egypt’s new Islamist-dominated parliament drafted a law permitting men to…

The Chinese Communist party’s preoccupation with its leadership transition, expected to be made final next fall when Xi Jinping becomes general secretary, should not dissuade the U.S. from making a “strong intervention at the highest level” regarding Tibet, according to Lodi Gyari, who spoke…

Here's video from Homs, documenting yet more violations of the Kofi Annan-brokered Syrian ceasefire that the Obama administration is celebrating:

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan sought a ceasefire in Syria between forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the opposition. The Obama administration insists that the ceasefire is holding. "What we saw in the last day or so was a very fragile truce emerge, a very fragile first step," State…

In April 2009, four months after taking office, President Obama wooed Latin American leaders and liberal elites at the Summit of the Americas by apologizing for decades of U.S. foreign policy and promising a new era of cooperation. Obama said:

During the decades of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, successive U.S. administrations yearned for regime change. The hope was that longstanding frustration with international isolation and relative deprivation would inspire some unspecified Baathist general to assassinate…

Today, the first Tuesday in March, is town meeting day in Vermont, as it has been for more than a century. Town meeting was a tradition in Vermont before there was any officially designated town meeting day. Town meeting was part of Vermont before Vermont was part of the Union.

On March 28, 2011, Barack Obama defended his decision to intervene days earlier with military force in Libya, arguing that for the United States to stand by without responding would have been “a betrayal of who we are.”

Two years ago in Cairo, Nobel laureate and former International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei was the talk of the town. Newly retired from the IAEA, ElBaradei returned to Egypt in February 2010 after living abroad for decades. He began criticizing the Mubarak regime, hinting that he…

In a recent presidential debate, Congressman Ron Paul made a bizarre equivalence between a Chinese dissident taking refuge in America and Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan, as he was attempting to criticize American foreign and defense policies generally. And while it may come as a relief to…

“China is the largest hypocrisy in the world,” Richard Gere told an interviewer from Indian television station NDTV yesterday, while attending a major Buddhist teaching by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Bodh Gaya. In the lengthy interview, the transcript of which can be read here, Gere argues that…

On behalf of the Working Group on Egypt, Michele Dunne of the Atlantic Council and Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution have sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning disturbing activity in Egypt.

Another country has calculated that Christmas time is a good time to launch a crackdown on human rights. Following China’s harsh sentencing of two writers on subversion charges, Egyptian security forces today rolled up to several prominent democracy and human rights NGOs in Cairo and shut them…

Two very important changes have occurred in America, and indeed in other Western economies. My guess is that they will prove to be permanent phenomena, just as permanent as the changes introduced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Now is the time to undermine Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. With major protests going on in response to the recent fraudulent parliamentary elections, with Mikhail Prokhorov announcing that he is likely to challenge Putin for the presidency in the next election, and with major ferment in Russia,…

Vladimir Putin’s official launch of his presidential campaign late last month coincided with the publication of a damning new dossier of evidence relating to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower attorney who has become a martyr to anti-corruption efforts in Russia.

Earlier in the week Israel Hayom reported that the new Tunisian constitution may include “a section condemning Zionism and ruling out any friendly ties with Israel.” Yesterday Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of al-Nahda (Revival), the main Islamist party that won more than 40 percent of the seats in…

The Daily Show explores whether there is class division at the Occupy Wall Street encampment:

Hong Kong

When Honduran leader Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo visits the White House today, it will be a watershed moment in the Central American country’s diplomatic rehabilitation. More than two years have passed since Honduran authorities removed Manuel Zelaya from the presidency to block his unconstitutional,…

New York Times: "As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe"

Well, I suppose we should give Governor Perdue credit for thinking outside the box:

On September 25, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made world headlines by proclaiming the right of his female subjects to nominate and compete as candidates in municipal elections. The king also pledged to appoint women to the country’s 150-member, unelected “shura council,” or executive consultative…

While most Americans spend their Labor Day weekend savoring the last moments of summer vacation, political scientists are normally hard at work at their annual association meeting, held this year in Seattle. This event is usually a rather sedate affair, with scholars debating such recondite…

Benghazi, Libya

Rick Perry only entered the presidential race a week and a half ago. As governor, Perry’s foreign policy experience has been limited. And his views on these issues have hardly been relevant, even if they’ve been known, since few care what the chief executive of Texas thinks about America’s…

President Obama has just called upon Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to step down. "We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way," the president said in a statement. "He has not led.  For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for…

Beirut—Kuwait and Bahrain are the most recent additions to the list of Gulf Cooperation Council states that have withdrawn their ambassadors to Syria. First Qatar yanked its diplomat, after a regime-led mob attacked Doha’s embassy in Damascus. Now, with the ruler in Damascus laying siege to Deir…

Lobsang Sangay was sworn in today as head of Tibet’s democratic exile government in Dharamsala, India. He succeeds Samdhong Rinpoche, the first directly elected Kalon Tripa, or chief of cabinet, who served two terms.

The other night on Current TV, former vice president Al Gore said to the host of Countdown with Keith Olbermann that America needs to work toward the “reinvigoration of democracy.”

In his column for Tablet, Lee Smith asks, "The recent massacres in Oslo, Norway, and Hama, Syria, were both carried out by heartless sociopaths. Why does one of them—Syria’s Bashar al-Assad—continue to enjoy diplomatic relations with Washington?"

President Obama deserves some credit for using strong language to condemn the Syrian regime’s massacre of peaceful protestors over the weekend in Hama, Deraa, Idlib and other cities in the pre-Ramadan onslaught. With reports still coming in, the most conservative assessment estimates that 145 were…

Following this write up, Joshua Foust seems to have regained an interest in the reports that Russia is responsible for bombing the American embassy in Georgia. You can read it here, but the long and the short of it: Foust remains skeptical of Georgian claims, he remains skeptical of Eli Lake's…

Last week, Eli Lake reported on a very specific allegation by a senior Georgian official that the Russian GRU was behind a series of bombings in that country, including the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi. The charge was so detailed that it even included the name of the Russian officer who…

Journalist and Arab media specialist Hussain Abdul Hussain links to a remarkable film about the Syrian uprising, Syria’s Youth Revolutionaries:

It’s been five months since the revolution that ended the 30-year tenure of Hosni Mubarak, but the upheaval in Egypt is far from over. Large protests have become routine if not habitual in Egypt. In late June, 1,000 civilians criticizing the slow pace of reform were injured in clashes with riot…

The author Liao Yiwu has left China. Repeatedly denied the right to travel abroad, Liao recently slipped out of China to Vietnam, and arrived last week in Germany.

Secretary Clinton had nothing but glowing remarks for Malaysia’s leadership when she stopped there in November of last year.  “We already have a strong partnership based on common values like respect for cultural diversity, pluralism, religious tolerance… We know that Malaysia is a leader in this…

This week, “Russia denied registration of a key opposition political party Wednesday, effectively barring it from upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections that the Kremlin had hinted might be open to some competition,” the Wall Street Journal reports. According to opposition leader Boris…

Earlier today, Republican Rep. Peter Roskam, deputy whip in the House, put out a statement signaling his support for the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act.

Let’s assume that it was not President Obama’s intention for the final section of his big Mideast speech, in which he took up the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to entirely overwhelm everything he had just said in support of democratization and the “universal rights” of those living…

Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport had been planning to provide an initial public offering to investors this week, allowing folks from around the world to buy shares in the currently private company that operates the facility. Suddenly, over Memorial Day weekend and in the middle of the night, Domodedovo…

Here's the full text, as prepared for delivery, of President Obama's Middle East address:

It’s Friday, so Syrians are out in the streets again protesting, as they have been on every Friday now for almost two months, braving the atrocities of a regime that has surrounded several Syrian cities with tanks and allegedly fired on its citizens with artillery.

A bipartisan group of senators joined together yesterday to discuss a proposed Senate resolution on Syria, which would condemn the rogue regime and urge the Obama administration to act decisively. The strongly worded resolution "expresses solidarity and support for the people of Syria as they seek…

The Oslo Freedom Forum is the brainchild of activist and social entrepreneur Thor Halvorssen. As the National Review’s Jay Nordlinger recently commented, Halvorssen’s Forum is “that rare thing under the sun: a genuine human rights conference.” Unlike so many other such gatherings, the goal here in…

Ahmed Benchemsi would probably have held on to his job as editor of Morocco’s top newsmagazine, TelQuel, had he known a wave of democratic uprisings was about to engulf the Middle East and North Africa. Last October, he had been forced to shutter TelQuel’s Arabic-language sister publication,…

A recent scene on Iraqi television, via Bad Rachel: 

One of the Senate's rising Republican stars is today backing calls for the Obama administration to withdraw the U.S. ambassador to Syria. "Clearly, we should be on the side of the Syrian people longing for freedom and challenging the regime's corrupt and repressive rule," writes Senator Marco…

Article 7 of the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) defines "crimes against humanity" as "murder" and other "inhumane acts" committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population." It would be hard to find a clearer case of such offenses…

Former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak has reportedly been placed under detention in his hospital room in Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak has been there since last night, when he is thought to have had a heart attack. The AP reports:

The New York Times has apparently come across photos that show atrocities Muammar Qaddafi and his henchmen committed on Libya's own people. "Some depicted corpses bearing the marks of torture," the Times reports, describing the photos they came across. "One showed scars down the back of a man…

In a post last week about the dramatically deteriorating human rights situation in China, there remained many questions about what had really happened to Dr. Yang Hengjun, the Australian citizen of Chinese descent, who disappeared one week ago and was believed to have been in Chinese custody.On his…

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu took a question at a press conference on Tuesday about the disappearance of another dissident. Her response, which quickly pinged around the Chinese online community and its English-language China-watching counterparts, was to blithely assert: "I have…

Senator Marco Rubio offered his full-throated support Wednesday for the U.S. intervention in Libya and called on President Barack Obama to be clear that regime change is the objective of America’s involvement. In an interview yesterday afternoon, Rubio said that failing to remove Libyan leader…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained the text of a letter freshman senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent tonight to the Senate majority and minority leaders. In it, Rubio proposes that the Senate authorize the president’s use of force in Libya, and that the authorization state that the aim of the use of…

Gene Simmons, a cofounder of the rock band Kiss, recently returned to his native Israel, after a 52-year hiatus. Unlike other entertainers who have boycotted the Jewish state, such as Elvis Costello, the Pixies, and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, Simmons expressed his support for Israel. “The countries…

Where the political shockwave inspired by Tunisia's democratic rebellion will lead we don't yet know. We do know what set Tunisia's revolt in motion: the end of Arab fear. When an oppressed people snap fear's psychological bonds, they shatter the tyrant's most potent weapon.

Here's video from the Foreign Policy Initiative's event, "Democratization in the Middle East? Implications of the Arab Spring," which was held earlier this week in Washington, D.C.:

The president has wistfully been thinking about how easy it would be to be the leader of the People's Republic of China, the New York Times reports. And one unnamed official told the Times's reporters that "No one is scrutinizing [Chinese leader] Hu Jintao's words in Tahrir Square."

“Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.’”

During his annual address to the Tibetan people on March 10, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet announced that he wished to complete his decades-long effort to divest political authority from the Dalai Lama’s own institution. While the media has characterized this as a retirement announcement, it…

In mid-February, a mysterious posting on a Chinese language website called on Chinese citizens to take to the streets for low-risk meet-ups at locations with heavy pedestrian traffic throughout the country, starting on Sunday February 20 at 2 p.m. (Beijing local time). Labeled by the organizers as…

The Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal is the author of The German Mujahid. The book addresses a unique theme for an Arab author: the Holocaust. Via the reflections of two young brothers in a Parisian banlieue, it tells the story of Hans Schiller: a German SS officer who immigrates to Algeria,…

One frequent criticism of the war in Iraq has been that it is impossible to impose democracy from above. The revolution in Egypt represents an attempt to achieve democracy from below, as it were. The jury is out on both nations--and on both paths. However, as many have noted, revolutions that…

The controlled public rage against corruption, oppression, and marginalization at the hands of tyrannical Arab regimes that has unfolded in recent weeks is unprecedented and probably unstoppable, but it caught most Western observers by surprise. While they accept the Arab revolt for what it is—a…

Though Egyptian state TV has announced Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, it is unclear what the mass revolt rocking Egypt has in store for that ancient nation’s future. But what is clear is that the momentous events in Cairo--and, indeed, the massive tsunami of people-power engulfing the entire…

UPDATE: On Friday the Army made its decision. Mubarak was forced out. His Thursday speech was a disaster and it seems to have helped persuade the generals that they had, at last, to choose between Mubarak and the people. They made the right choice.

Herzliya, Israel

The White House is accusing the Iranian regime of “hypocrisy” for placing a leading opposition figure under house arrest. Mehdi Karroubi, one of the leaders of Iran’s Green Movement after the rigged elections in June 2009, has been placed under house arrest in Tehran and is unable to meet with his…

The Working Group on Egypt, led by Michele Dunne and Robert Kagan, yesterday sent letters to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging the administration “to press for an unmistakable and irreversible transition to democracy.”

Harvey Mansfield's review of the new books Alexis de Tocqueville: Letters From America, edited and translated by Frederick Brown, and Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America, Olivier Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer, appeared over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal: 

Natan Sharansky shared his memories of Ronald Reagan with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, after the former president died, in 2004:

Just last night I had encouraged an Egyptian friend, Raouf, living in the United States, who wanted to go back home to witness his country’s historic events. “I need to see this,” he told me excitedly. Now with fighting in the streets today I’m not so sure.

Scrambling for a simple standard to measure events in Egypt and across the Arab world, the blogosphere and the airwaves have been full of references to 1979. That point of reference is probably more apt than imagined, for much more happened that year than just the Iranian revolution. It was also…

This is the 3 a.m. phone call. Will President Obama rise to the occasion?

The Obama administration has gradually been adjusting to reality. On Friday evening, President Obama was still exhorting President Mubarak: “I told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.” By this morning,…

The prestigious and, since its formation less than a year ago, consistently ahead-of-the-curve Working Group on Egypt, co-chaired by Michele Dunne of Carnegie and Robert Kagan of Brookings, has just issued a new statement late Saturday. The Group includes Middle East and foreign policy experts…

Reports from Egypt say that protests across the country’s major cities are getting violent. And now the ruling National Democratic Party’s headquarters are on fire in Cairo (follow the live stream here). But even before the demonstrations that were held after Friday prayers today turned volatile,…

Tunisia’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali abandoned his post on Friday after 23 years, and has reportedly landed in Saudi Arabia. To retire from the position of president-for-life is an exceedingly rare move for an Arab regime chief. Indeed, no modern Arab ruler before Ben Ali has ever willingly…

Americans don't really need another reason not to link the senseless actions of a deranged individual in Tucson to the tenor of American political discourse, but it is worth considering how accusations that the lunatic shooter in Tucson was influenced by our political rhetoric feed directly into…

A bipartisan group of China watchers and human rights advocates have written a letter to Barack Obama, urging the president to "seize the opportunity before [him]—an opportunity nearly all Chinese lack—to confront the Chinese leadership about its profound disrespect for universal human rights."…

President Obama issued the following statement this morning on Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiabo:

Tomorrow, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will give its award to jailed Chinese human rights advocate Liu Xiabo. How is China responding? In short, not well.

Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain had some sharp words about President Barack Obama’s policy toward Afghanistan earlier today at a conference in Washington. Presidents should not make decisions based on political calculations, McCain said, and that has been the problem with…

The first cheer comes from Bret Stephens, in today's Wall Street Journal:

Totalitarianism thrives on deliberate ambiguity and the installation of perpetual fear in the mind of its subjected citizenry. Even after emigrating to Great Britain, the great Hungarian-Russian historian Tibor Szamuely could never get to bed at night because he never knew when that knock at the…

As the American midterm election campaigns head to the finish line, the Obama administration is trying to convince Jewish voters that its treatment of Israel is not as hostile as it appears. In fact, it’s worse. The U.S. State Department has now adopted a practice honed by Israel’s Arab negotiating…

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, now serving an 11-year jail sentence, I could not help but think of a small, inspiring museum in Oslo called the Museum of Resistance. It tells the story of Norway’s courageous citizens who refused…

“When the United States sneezes, Latin America catches a cold.” This old maxim proved true in 2008 and 2009, when the U.S. financial crisis deeply affected countries throughout the Western Hemisphere. Yet while the U.S. economy has been struggling through a painfully weak recovery, Latin America’s…

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches, press conferences, and interviews in New York City last week, it’s obvious the Iranian president lives in a parallel universe. This has been difficult for many in the West to grasp. The Western reflex to believe that there are “universal truths” is…

The 26-year-old Iranian human rights campaigner Shiva Nazar Ahari was sentenced last Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to six years in prison after being convicted on all charges made against her by the state, including that of moharebeh (“rebellion against God”), conspiracy to commit a crime…

Kabul  

In its Friday afternoon news dump before Labor Day weekend, the White House announced that President Obama had invited the ten leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to join him for a summit in New York on September 24.  This will be the second U.S.-ASEAN summit, and the…

A few miles up the road from Ground Zero, the Obama administration recently submitted its account of the United States human rights record to the United Nations Human Rights Council.  The administration’s report, the first ever submitted by this nation to that body (whose members include Libya and…

A source reports from Moscow that Mikhail Schneider, a leader of the Solidarity opposition movement, has been jailed for three days in connection with a demonstration on Russia’s Flag Day, which was held on August 22. He follows to jail Lev Ponomarev, a well known human rights activist, who also…

Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her ‘crime’ was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she’s taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the…

In recent years, Latin America’s trade with India, the world’s largest democracy, has grown much more slowly than its trade with China. However, the Latin Business Chronicle notes that “an increasing number of Indian companies are now looking at Latin America as the ‘next frontier.’” The quote…