Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 51

The Candidate's Wife

WARSAW - The stylist looked over my clothes. "Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I thought you would have in your wardrobe," he said, eyeing my modest collection of suits with barely disguised disdain. He picked up a blue jacket gingerly, as if the dye might rub off in his hands. "This is a very … difficult color," he said. He grimaced, and removed it to another chair.

That was it: My first, last, and only meeting with the sort of person who spends his days dressing celebrities. By the...

Nasty Parties Don't Win Elections

My fellow disappointed conservatives, former conservatives, and disgusted conservatives, it is time for all good Republicans to come to the defense of David Frum and to endorse his critique of radical right-wing talk-show rhetoric. If you've left the party in disgust, call up your friends who are still members and get them to do it for you.

I am not writing this because David Frum is my friend, although he is. I am writing this because I have just come back from London, where I got a close-up ...

Germany is Tired of Paying Europe's Bills

"Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And sell the Acropolis too!"— headline, Bild newspaper, March 4, 2010

Sometimes they cut to the essence of the story, those tabloid headline-writers, even when they haven't got the quotation exactly right. What the German politician being quoted in the Bild article cited above actually said was, "A bankrupt party must use everything he has to make money and serve his creditors. … Greece owns buildings, companies and several uninhabited islands, which...

Shaken, but Not Broken

To say that Santiago, Chile, looks far better today than Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is of no comfort to the people of Chile. It will not rebuild their ruined houses, nor will it bring back their dead. It will not reconstruct the damaged airport or mobilize the field hospitals and emergency supplies needed to keep the death toll from rising further. It will not inspire charitable donations from around the world.

Yet the comparison is unavoidable, which is why so many people have already made it...

Preparing for the Worst

Let's be serious for a moment. President Barack Obama will not bomb Iran. This is not because he is a liberal, or because he is a peacenik, or because he doesn't have the guts to try and "save" his presidency in this time-honored manner, as Sarah Palin said she would like him to do.

The president will not bomb Iran's nuclear installations for precisely the same reasons that George W. Bush did not bomb Iran's nuclear installations: because we don't know exactly where they all are, because we d...

The Future is Greek

I have seen America's future, and it is Greece.

By this I do not mean that the Midwest will soon be covered with ancient ruins or that Texans will swap hamburgers for feta cheese. I mean that the ongoing Greek financial crisis is the same kind of crisis the United States might face a few years from now if we continue to make the same kinds of mistakes the Greeks have made over the last decade.

For those who haven't followed this saga, let me reassure you that the story is quite...