Farewell to the Era of No Fences
Posted: September 9, 2015 Filed under: Global, History, Think Tank | Tags: Alfred Nobel, Ali Khamenei, Arab world, Benjamin Netanyahu, Berlin Wall, East Germany, F. W. de Klerk, Israel, Nelson Mandela, President of Israel, President of South Africa, Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, The Wall Street Journal, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin Leave a comment
Europe’s openness rests on America’s strength—you can’t have one without the other.
writes: This was supposed to be the Era of No Fences. No walls between blocs. No borders between countries. No barriers to trade. Visa-free tourism. The single market. A global Internet. Frictionless transactions and seamless exchanges.In short, a flat world. Whatever happened to that?
In the early 1990s, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres published a book called “The New Middle East,” in which he predicted 
what was soon to be in store for his neighborhood. “Regional common markets reflect the new Zeitgeist,” he gushed. It was only a matter of time before it would become true in his part of the world, too.
[Order Robert Kagan’s book “Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order” from Amazon.com
I read the book in college, and while it struck me as far-fetched it didn’t seem altogether crazy. The decade from 1989 to 1999 was an age of political, economic, social and technological miracles. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union dissolved. Apartheid ended. The euro and Nafta were born. The first Internet browser was introduced. Oil dropped below $10 a barrel, the Dow topped 10,000, Times Square became safe again. America won a war in Kosovo without losing a single man in combat.
[Read the full text here, at WSJ]
Would Israeli businessmen soon be selling hummus and pita to quality-conscious consumers in Damascus? Well, why not?
[Check out Shimon Peres’s book “The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World“
Contrast this promised utopia with the mind-boggling scenes of tens of thousands of Middle East migrants, marching up the roads and railways of Europe, headed for their German promised land. The images seem like a 21st-century version of the Völkerwanderung, the migration of nations in the late Roman and early Medieval periods. Desperate people, needing a place to go, sweeping a broad landscape like an unchanneled flood. Read the rest of this entry »
Nobel Peace Prize Again Goes To Group That Has Done … What?
Posted: October 12, 2013 Filed under: Diplomacy, History | Tags: Alfred Nobel, Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace Prize, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Saddam Hussein, Syria, Vladimir Putin, Yasser Arafat 5 Comments
Globaloney: This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been given to the “Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons,” a group whose main achievement seems to be good intentions. This award is getting ridiculous.
Alfred Nobel would be rolling over in his grave to see some of the absurd choices his beloved peace prize is now drawing.
No, it wasn’t just the award to global terror pioneer Yasser Arafat in 1994. Or the one that went to the bureaucrat-filled, bankrupt European Union in 2012.
There also was the premature award to just-elected President Obama in 2009, who had done literally nothing but get elected president of the U.S. on a make-America-smaller platform.
As these unworthies collect their laurels, authentic peacemakers — such as 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who was shot in the face by Taliban terrorists solely for urging girls to go to school — go ignored.
The fact that the blood-soaked Taliban fighters are now gloating at the news that Malala didn’t win ought to embarrass the Nobel committee.
pundit from another planet 