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Napoleon was a lunatic who thought he was Napoleon, and the joke applies to the 44th United States president with a vengeance. What doesn't the president know, and when didn't he know it? American foreign policy turned delusional when Barack Obama took office, and the latest batch of leaks suggest that the main source of the delusion is sitting in the Oval Office. From the first batch of headlines there is little in WikiLeaks' 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that a curious surfer would not have known from the Internet. We are shocked - shocked - to discover that the Arab...

Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran's most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens' industrial control code to plant malware in Iran's nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. The information technology apocalypse that the West feared on...

Asymmetrical warfare was supposed to benefit the insurgents. For the price of a few flying lessons a gang of jihadis brought down the World Trade Center,a terrorist with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and powdered Tang can blow up an airplane,and a few pounds of plutonium can cripple a major city. Meet the Reverend Terry Jones, asymmetrical warrior. It appears that pinpricks can produce chain reactions in the Islamic world. The threat may be termed asymmetrical because Islam is more vulnerable to theological war than Christianity (or for that matter Judaism). As the youngest of the major religions (apart from...

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Popular antipathy to a proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero is so fierce that even President Barack Obama, the nation's Islamophile-in-chief, "clarified" his August 11 statement supporting the plan to say, "I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there." It is not just a mosque, of which there are two in the neighborhood, but a symbol of Islamic presence. The most recent CNN poll shows an overwhelming 70%-29% margin of opposition. When liberal politicians - like the president and New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg - defend the plan, what they mean is,...

If Pakistan's intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning's Asia Times Online, is everybody. This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, current...

The 92,000 American classified military documents released by WikiLeaks add to the evidence that Pakistan's intelligence service backs the Taliban, to the point of helping the Taliban plan assassinations of American and Afghan officials. This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, current US President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, India, China and Iran....

To paraphrase a Wall Street adage: bulls make money, bears make money, and PIIGS get slaughtered. Of course I'm referring to Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Germany won't bail them out again. Germans work. The country's unemployment rate stands at 7.5%, against an average of 13% for Europe's so-called PIIGS. Those are heavily massaged estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). More revealing is a comparison of youth unemployment, now at 10% in Germany. By contrast, as Doug Saunders observed in the July 16 Globe and Mail, "The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit...

One doesn’t get promoted at the Pentagon, or for that matter on Wall Street, by telling the boss to sacrifice this quarter’s results in order to address a looming disaster in the long term. Petraeus pulled the Bush administration’s chestnuts out of the fire, as well as the reputations of conservatives who signed on to the COIN (for “counterinsurgency”) strategy of turning the American military into a Peace Corps with guns. Afghanistan is different. Hiring the locals with bags of money is far more difficult for a number of reasons. One is that there is no clear sectarian division; the...

Baby Bust: The Demographics of Global Depression by Spengler on December 08, 2008 Why will this recession be different, and likely much worse, than all the other recessions of the past? Imagine a Paleolithic village which has no children. When all the adults grow too old to work, everyone dies. Now imagine a country with a well-funded national pension system, also without children. Everyone retires on the same day, and the pension fund instantly goes bankrupt. These hypotheticals overstate the predicament of the industrial nations, who have too few children and too few old people, but it does not overstate...

Israel mishandled the Gaza "humanitarian aid" flotilla through extreme forbearance, and will suffer a marathon of tongue-clicking and hand-wringing by diplomatic hypocrites who know better. The Jewish state lost the propaganda battle the moment the floating time bomb disguised as a humanitarian mission sailed from Turkey. If Israel had denounced the matter as a provocation and withdrawn its ambassador from Turkey, warning that the object of the exercise was to provoke violence and open the way for weapons deliveries to Hamas, the outcome might have been quite different. The facts in the case are straightforward. Although it is true, as...

“A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women,” I wrote in a 2006 “Spengler” essay about Iranian prostitution. “The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999.” It is a cultural marker of inestimable importance that the one Arab whose name every American knows is Rima...

This was supposed to have been the final triumph of John Maynard Keynes, the crisis in which governments actually did what he urged them to do during the Great Depression, the proof that an elite of puppeteers in control of monetary and fiscal policy could make the innumerable actors in economic life march wide-eyed toward recovery. Keynes' idea is simple; in fact, it is simple by construction, for it focuses on the very short term within a closed economy. If consumers won't spend, the government will spend for them; if businesses won't invest, the government will invest for them; and...

Memo to heads of state: beware the clever general who turns up at a tough moment, and says "Leave it to me: I can fix it for you." Two examples come to mind. The great field marshal of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, Albrecht von Wallenstein, taught armies to live off the land, and succeeded so well that nearly half the people of Central Europe starved to death during the conflict. General David Petraeus, who heads America's Central Command (CENTCOM), taught the land to live off him. Petraeus' putative success in the Iraq "surge" of 2007-2008 is one of...

A decade ago I argued that radical Islam might horrify the West into submission through the mass sacrifice of Muslim lives. During the past two weeks Iran has virtually invited a nuclear exchange with the West, in a series of statements that blend a deranged sort of bluster with malevolent calculation. Iran's Kayhan press service warned last week, "If the US strikes Iran with nuclear weapons, there are elements which will respond with nuclear blasts in the centers of America's main cities." Meanwhile, Behzad Soltani, the number two man at Iran's Atomic Commission, proclaimed last week, "Iran will join the...

I profiled Barack Obama on Feb. 26, 2008 in Asia Times Online. This essay caused more revulsion and anguish than all the rest of my “Spengler” writings put together. I stand by every word, and believe that subsequent events validate the analysis. Obama is a Third World anthropologist studying us who has cleverly infiltrated our culture. He is deeply and fiercely hostile to the American proposition. “Cherchez la femme,” advised Alexander Dumas in: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist...

The chess-masters of Tehran have played a single combination for the past five years: threaten America's flanks in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to gain control of the center of the board, that is, by pushing on with a nuclear program that many suspect is designed to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran has sufficient assets in the territory of its troubled neighbors to make a shambles of America's Potemkin village. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may be able to govern Iraq with a third of the seats contested in the March 7 parliamentary elections, provided that Iran's allies such as Shi'ite...

I will be on The Kudlow Report this evening (slated for 7:20), Discussing China March 15th, 2010 By David Goldman I’m slated to join the discussion at 7:20 on CNBC’s The Kudlow report on whether the US should try to force China to revalue the yuan. As Reuven Brenner and I wrote in December in First Things, the issue is NOT a minor adjustment in the relative price of US vs. Chinese goods, but the fact that the Chinese save more than half of their income. They should save less and spend more and buy American goods. Currency instability promotes...

History speaks of a Pax Romana, a Pax Britannica, and a Pax Americana - but no other namable eras of sustained peace, for the simple reason cited by Henry Kissinger: nothing maintains peace except hegemony and the balance of power. The balancing act always fails, though, as it did in Europe in 1914, and as it will in Central and South Asia precisely a century later. The result will be suppurating instability in the region during the next two years and a slow but deadly drift toward great-power animosity. Those who wanted an end to US hegemony will get what...

Here is a Top 10 of reasons to scrooge the BLS report: 10. As noted, nearly 300,000 people disappeared from the labor force, yet the BLS reports no increase in "discouraged workers" or workers forced to take part-time jobs for economic reasons. 9. Private sector service jobs supposedly increased by 51,000, yet the National Institute of Purchasing Managers' (NIPM) survey shows that services employment fell during November. The unexpected drop in the NIPM report, which is a reasonably good advanced indicator of economic activity, doesn't square with the BLS report. 8. The reported improvement in services was driven by an...