March 2010

The passage of the health reform bill has immediately transformed the perceived growing weakness of President Barack Obama. He is now master of his own house and can perhaps out achieve Lyndon Johnson and even Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda of domestic reforms. Foreign policy can also purr ahead. Very soon there will be a major nuclear arms accord with Russia, but one whose ratification would quickly be bogged down in the Senate if he’d failed to muster the votes to approve health care. It gives him more room to manoeuvre and compromise with Iran, North Korea and the Taliban. Above all it should give him the muscle to push the Israelis to deal productively with the Palestinians. This is a Sisyphean task that has defeated all his predecessors. Since the misconceived Balfour Declaration that gave the Jews a homeland right bang in the middle of someone else’s, peace has been negotiated...

The Israeli government’s slap on the face of visiting American Vice-President Joseph Biden has heightened the perception that the foreign policy of the Obama administration is not going well. The problem, some argue, is that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Besides Biden there are the powerful secretaries of Defence and State, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. There are the special trouble-shooters for the Middle East and Afghanistan, George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke. There is the president’s own intimate staff. The National Security Advisor is supposed to keep all these lions in harness. That’s what Henry Kissinger did during the Nixon and Ford presidencies, what Zbigniew Brzezinski did during the Carter presidency and what Brent Scowcroft did during the presidency of George Bush Senior. This is not to say the present incumbent, General James Jones, is a weakling. He is not. It is just that the coterie...

We appear to have been battered to a submissive intellectual pulp by the pro climate change lobby, although it was only 35 years ago, when I interviewed the world’s principal climate experts for the Washington Post, the consensus was that the earth was cooling. Today some of these same scientists rubbish those who hold the previous hypothesis. Within as short space of twenty years they had fundamentally changed their minds. But 20 years is nothing compared with the very slow evolution that they were looking at. How could they argue the reverse of what they thought it was such a short time before? When has scientific discovery moved so fast? The climate warming lobby started with a handful of then maverick scientists and in a few years gathered speed as the media hyped their research and funding agencies, who rarely know a lot about what they are giving money to,...