WPR Blog Archive

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 […]