William Kristol

After his 1851 coup d’état, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the real Napoleon, pronounced himself Napoleon III. It was the rise to power of this great-man-wannabe that prompted the famous opening of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Bonaparte: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.

From the New York Times website:

TWO BIG DATES are coming up in the presidential campaign: The Iowa caucuses will take place on January 19. The New Hampshire primary follows on January 27. But the key date in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination may well turn out to have been October 10, 2002. On that day, Senators Joseph Lieberman, John Edwards, and John Kerry joined most of their Democratic colleagues, and a large majority of the Senate, to vote to authorize President Bush to use force against Saddam Hussein.

WE DON'T CLAIM to understand the mind of Howard Dean. With back-room assistance from a small army of Democratic party foreign policy brahmins, Dean recently produced a long, formal speech on "Meeting the Security Challenges of the New Century." The speech was advertised as a reassuring demonstration that Dean's overall thinking about world affairs, notwithstanding the spicy antiwar rhetoric that has propelled his campaign so far, lies safely within the bipartisan consensus that's governed American politics for 50-plus years.

IT WAS A SAD SPECTACLE: Sitting next to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, visiting emissary from the world's largest dictatorship, President Bush last week performed a kowtow that would have made Bill Clinton blush. Following a script dictated by Beijing, and translated into English by senior national security council official James Moriarty, the president condemned Taiwan's popularly elected president for certain unspecified "comments and actions" indicating a desire for Taiwan's independence.

U.S.-CHINA-TAIWAN POLICY contains a host of formulations, complications, and nuances, all of which (at least most of which!) we are happy to discuss. But let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

SENIOR BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS may be engineering a dramatic and dangerous shift in American policy toward Taiwan as a gift to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting the United States next week. There are two elements of this proposed policy change, both of which favor Beijing at the expense of democratic Taiwan, and one of which may actually encourage Beijing to take military action against Taiwan. Both policy changes are being pushed by the staff of the National Security Council over the objections, we understand, of both the Departments of State and Defense.

ON THE SURFACE, it might seem like a simple case of media bias. In the November 24, 2003, WEEKLY STANDARD, Stephen F. Hayes summarized and quoted at length a recent, secret Pentagon memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The memo laid out--in 50 bullet points, over 16 pages--the relationship between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Much of the intelligence in the memo was detailed and appeared to be well-sourced and well-corroborated.

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH first entered the White House, the conventional wisdom was that his inexperience and lack of vision in foreign policy would be compensated for by his wise and experienced cabinet. This may or may not have been a reasonable view at the time. Right now, however, it is clear that the most visionary and, yes, the wisest and most capable foreign policy-maker in the Bush administration is the president himself.

THE FRONT PAGE of the November 7 Washington Post says it all. The first headline, in large type: "Bush Urges Commitment to Transform Mideast." Below, in slightly smaller type: "Pentagon to Shrink Iraq Force." And below that: "Iraqi Security Crews Getting Less Training." It's a jarring juxtaposition. The president eloquently makes the case for a necessarily and admirably ambitious foreign policy.

YOU KNOW THE STORY. The frog in a saucepan on the stove will die--because the temperature creeps up so smoothly and stealthily that he's never given the clue that now is the time to hop out. And so he boils to death, for if the rise from 70 degrees to 71 degrees didn't make him jump, why should the rise from 150 to 151?

We've never entirely believed the story--or its allegorical applications. Surely the frog will jump, and people, too, before the water gets too hot.

"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N.