The Washington Post

Like most people who write about Washington politics, I operate from a bifurcated point of view whose components are A) a set of positions I favor on a variety of issues and B) a curiosity about how the Washington animal works. One must be vigilant against allowing the former to interfere with one’s investigations into the latter. But, of course, this is not an easy thing.

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The Washington Times

I came to Washington in 1985 with the expectation that I was going to spend my professional career fighting the Cold War (ideas division, that is). This was just fine with me. I thought the difference between a democratic, free-market system in which civil, political and human rights were protected, on one hand, and, on the other, the expansionist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union was something worth devoting a career to.

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The Washington Times

Having spent the past couple months in this space on weightier matters, I thought I might look at the pre-September 11 subject of this column, namely, what’s going on in politics. It’s clear that the pre-September 11 political world is gone, but it’s entirely unclear now who best understands the post-September 11 concerns of American voters.

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The Washington Times

Russian President Vladimir Putin has advanced by retreating. Since September 11, most of the old red lines Russia had drawn with regard to United States policies have been erased, some of them quite dramatically. Russia’s former determined opposition to the enlargement of NATO in general, and especially to the inclusion of states from the territory of the former Soviet Union (the Baltics), has all but dissipated. Similarly, opposition to U.S. missile defense efforts seems to have given way to a willingness to accommodate the United States by modifying the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Also, Mr. Putin’s Russia made it easy for the governments of Central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union to say yes to U.S. requests to use their territory in staging the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan – something hard to imagine a year ago, or even six months ago.

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