David Ignatius's Blog, page 141

Ignatius: How Republicans can neutralize the tea party

Many Republicans have been muttering over the past few weeks of political craziness that the tea party’s hold on the GOP must be broken to protect their party’s health — not to mention the country’s. So I’ve been asking people what a movement to break the extremists’ power would actually look like.

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Ignatius: Turkey blows Israel’s cover for Iranian spy ring

The Turkish-Israeli relationship became so poisonous early last year that the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is said to have disclosed to Iranian intelligence the identities of up to 10 Iranians who had been meeting inside Turkey with their Mossad case officers.

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Ignatius: Lost in space — and on Earth

“I hate space,” says the character played by Sandra Bullock in the new movie “Gravity,” and you can understand why: It’s an empty void, filled with the wreckage of failed satellites and derelict space stations, a beautiful nothingness where human beings float helplessly, praying for some way to get home.

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Ignatius: Halting the GOP’s doomsday strategy

In the late 1950s, the famous nuclear strategist Herman Kahn facetiously suggested building what he called a “Doomsday Machine.” A computer would be wired to detonate a vast array of nuclear bombs if the Soviet Union took an action defined as intolerable.

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Ignatius: Obama’s diplomatic opportunity

President Obama is approaching one of those moments when a big turn in foreign policy is possible. People can debate whether it’s the equivalent of the opening to China or the end of the Cold War, but there’s no doubt that this is a time of opportunity — and that, as the old English proverb put it, “there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip.”

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Ignatius: What a war in 1973 can tell us about handling Iran in 2013

As U.S.-Iranian diplomacy heats up, and the Israeli prime minister expressesconcern about the risks of negotiations, it’s fascinating to look back 40 years to the prelude to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war — when a hauntingly similar set of circumstances prevailed.

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Ignatius: No following this leader

In the line of succession, House Speaker John Boehner is the third-ranking official in the country. For practical purposes, he has all but disappeared as a leader. That failure is pushing the country toward the financial brink.

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Ignatius: Rouhani sees a nuclear deal in 3 months

NEW YORK

The U.S.-Iranian diplomatic train is rolling fast, with President Hassan Rouhani talking Wednesday about a three-month timetable for a nuclear deal. But Rouhani was also cautiously insistent about staying on the single track of the nuclear issue — perhaps fearing that if this becomes a runaway, it will derail.

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Ignatius: Is Syria moving its chemical weapons?

A high-level Syrian defector has provided a disturbing new account of Syrian chemical weapons operations — including an allegation that some of these weapons have been moved since Russia proposed an international monitoring scheme to destroy the toxic munitions.

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Ignatius: David Ignatius: Both opportunity and peril over Iran

For a weakened but still ambitious President Obama, the biggest foreign-policy opportunity and danger of his presidency rolls into New York next week with the arrival of Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani.

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