David Ignatius's Blog, page 138

Ignatius: From Tunisia, hopeful signs

For three years now, the Arab world has struggled to create a political culture of tolerance that could anchor the revolution for citizen rights known as the Arab Spring. So far, it has largely been a disillusioning story, but there are some rare hopeful signs in Tunisia, the country where the upheaval began.

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Ignatius: An emerging market problem

Afunny thing happened on the way to the decline of the United States and the rise of China, Brazil and other emerging markets: Many prominent analysts began wondering if the pessimistic predictions about America were wrong — and whether it was the emerging markets that were heading for trouble.

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Ignatius: Senate intelligence report takes GOP tirades about Benghazi head-on

The Senate intelligence committee made headlines this week by reporting that the 2012 attack in Benghazi was preventable. But frankly, we knew that. The deeper message of the bipartisan report was that Republicans in Congress wasted a year arguing about what turned out to be mostly phony issues.

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Ignatius: America’s energy boom

For decades, Americans have talked about “energy policy” as if it were the political equivalent of a migraine. The phrase connoted pain — in ever-rising gas prices, costly government schemes and dependence on imports from precarious Middle East regimes.

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Ignatius: Only Obama can fix his broken foreign policy

Reading the devastating memoir by former defense secretary Robert Gates, people are likely to ask the same troubling questions that emerge from the morning newspapers these days: How did the Obama administration’s foreign policy process get so broken, and how can it be put back together?

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Ignatius: Iran’s fingerprints in Fallujah

Four years ago, al-Qaeda appeared to have been destroyed in Iraq. Last week, fighters from the group captured Fallujah, a city where hundreds of Americans were killed or wounded in the last decade fighting the jihadists. How did this stunning reversal of fortune happen?

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Ignatius: Ben Bernanke, crisis manager

When Ben Bernanke was asked last month what historians would write about his eight-year tenure as Fed chairman, which ends Jan. 31, he gave a characteristically reticent answer: “I’ll be interested to see. I hope I live long enough to read the textbooks.”

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Ignatius: In 2014, a chance to overcome our national despair

For an optimistic country, 2013 was a heck of a downbeat year, perhaps most of all for the nation’s chief executive. The top half of The Post’s Dec. 15 Outlook section cover carried the bleak review: “President Obama, you had the worst year in Washington.”

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Ignatius: Iran copes with sanctions but wants to bloom

TEHRAN

The Iranian economy manages to hobble along despite “crippling” economic sanctions. The streets are clogged with traffic, ATMs dispense streams of cash, banks issue Iran-only debit cards and a nation of traders finds ingenious ways to evade legal obstacles.

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Ignatius: Iran’s hard-liners resist nuclear deal

TEHRAN

Hossein Shariatmadari’s business card identifies him as the “Supreme Leader’s Representative” at Kayhan, Iran’s leading conservative newspaper. Listening to his unwavering advocacy of Iran’s revolutionary politics, you realize just how hard it will be to reach the nuclear agreement that many Iranians I talked with here seem to want.

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