Leon Hadar

The conventional historical narrative of U.S. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has traced the ascendancy of the neoconservative ideologues in his administration to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the ensuing war in Iraq. The common assumption among analysts is that if it were not for the terrorist attacks on … Continue reading “Why Can’t the US Apply Its New North Korea Policy to Iran?”

Are U.S. and Iranian officials holding secret talks to try prevent the diplomatic tensions between them from deteriorating into a military confrontation? That’s the question being asked now by diplomats and news organizations as they search through the current heavy “diplomatic fog” for some signs of what’s really happening out there, as opposed to what … Continue reading “US-Iran Ties: Is the Pen Mightier Than the Sword?”

Most of us are familiar with the saying: “Time flies when you’re having fun.” After all, five hours of flight turbulence feels much longer than five hours on a beach resort. In fact, scientists have demonstrated that patterns of activity in the brain tend to accelerate in response to positive emotional stimulation, and vice versa. … Continue reading “Bush’s Slow Race
in the Last Lap”

Sometime in the mid-1990s, during the roaring days of globalization, the high-tech boom, and a soaring market, I published a commentary in the Business Times titled “One Bill’s Washington vs. the Other Bill’s Washington: Guess Who Is Winning?” I actually wrote the piece upon my returning from a visit to the Microsoft “campus” in Redmond, … Continue reading “If Only Bill Gates
Made Foreign Policy”

Imagine 40 years from now how a global affairs columnist for the Fox-Xinhua (or New Shanghai Times) content-providing service will analyze the world’s geo-strategic and geo-economic balance of power. This might be the way he or she recalls the visit that China’s former president Hu Jintao made in April 2006 to Washington, the capital of … Continue reading “The War on Terror Is Over,
and China Won”

For about two decades after World War II, a powerful coalition of U.S. congressmen, publishers, businessmen, and military generals operating close to the highest levels of government in Washington tried to ensure that the United States would not recognize “Red China” and would continue backing Taiwan (the Republic of China) in its goal of ousting … Continue reading “From the China Lobby to the Israel Lobby”

In the 1993 movie comedy Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a weatherman who is reluctantly sent to cover a story about the rodent whose internal clock is believed to be affected by annual changes in the amount of daylight and who is supposed to start ending its hibernation on the second of February (marking the … Continue reading “‘Democratizing’ Iran:
A Case of Déjà Vu”

American officials, lawmakers, and pundits have been analyzing – over-analyzing is probably the right term – U.S. President George W. Bush’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), leading one to conclude that the document that was issued last week has major significance in terms of gaining insights into what kind of approach to world affairs the … Continue reading “Muddling Through”

Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (Alfred A. Knopf) received a few glowing reviews when it was published in early 2002 but did not get much attention beyond the confines of think-tanks and academia. Perhaps the book was too heavy for the broader readership (well, with more than … Continue reading “Saying Good Bye to Dubai; Bidding Adieu to Globalization?”

When future historians start to discuss the first decade of the 21st century and the dramatic events that unfolded in that era, starting with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, they will probably try to draw the outlines of the counterfactual what-if scenarios and contrast them with what-really-happened. They may … Continue reading “Wasted Chances and
Dire Portents”