Global Archive

PARIS — Perhaps the most revealing moment on election night in France was when Nicolas Sarkozy spoke in his victory speech of the friendship binding France and the United States. The moment was not revealing on account of what Nicolas Sarkozy actually said, which — like his comments on Europe, incidentally — reflected a predictably studied balance between expressions of fidelity and criticism. This is what Nicolas Sarkozy said: I want to make an appeal to our American friends: to say to them that they can count on our friendship, which has been reinforced by the historical tragedies that we […]

The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday. Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outlets worldwide, the column highlights a handful of the week’s notable op-eds. As news broke of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s “impromptu 3-minute discussion” with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Ghassan Atiyyah’s commentary in the May 4 Daily Star asserted that the much anticipated conference of the region’s foreign minister’s “could be a turning point that leads all sides toward concerted action.” In addition to using the conference to demonstrate a “new commitment to sustained, […]

The news coverage of Monday’s U.S.-EU Summit at the White House — where Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso met — was all over the map. Depending on the source, it either failed to achieve breakthroughs on substantive policy issues; was a success merely because the leaders managed to avoid confrontation, or achieved progress on climate change, the Doha round, Middle East peace, Iran, and even transatlantic air traffic. The State Department has a list of agreements that came out of the meeting. And the official EU postmortem similarly emphasizes the positive. Certainly most […]

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat introduced a bill on April 30 to “close the Department of Defense detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within one year of the bill’s enactment.” The bill marks the first time a Senator has backed up popular verbal criticism of the controversial prison with an official proposal to shutter the facility created by the Bush administration after September 11, 2001. A statement on her Web site says Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is “deeply concerned that open-ended detentions and documented reports of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay have tarnished America’s reputation […]