It’s been obvious almost from the beginning of the first Bush Administration that neither Bush nor his kitchen cabinet had much interest in or knowledge of the world outside the USA. They blundered from one embarrassment to another, screwing up or forgetting funny foreign names, confusing Sunnis and Shiites (that’s after the penny finally dropped that the Middle East wasn’t populated by homogeneous Muslim terrorists), expressing child-like amazement at the size of Brazil on a map and so on. Read more »

Of the three remaining serious candidates for the presidency, Barack Obama seems to me to be the only one who might give the USA a new sense of identity and a new role in the world - one that treats others nations as deserving of respect and steps back from the strident exceptionalism and belligerence that has marked the last eight years. Read more »