Peter Beinart

For nearly half a century, the Cold War dominated U.S. foreign policy. Encompassing some of America's greatest successes and failures, its legacy has shaped U.S. debates over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relations with Russia, China and Iran. What are the right and wrong lessons to take from America's long "twilight struggle"? And how has the reality of the Cold War been distorted in public memory in the years since?

To hear the Obama administration tell it, the problem with American foreign policy towards China is that we haven't been paying enough attention. In the weeks and months leading up to the President's arrival in Beijing, a bevy of administration officials implied that the Bush administration had become so preoccupied with the Middle East that it gave China free reign to expand its influence in Asia. Now, by sending Obama to the continent in his first year -- after sending Hillary Clinton there on her first foreign… more

"If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon ...

"If you want to rebuild the American welfare state," Peter Beinart writes in the Daily Beast, "there is no alternative" than for Democrats to abandon ...

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After Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey and a near-miss in upstate New York, conservatives have supposedly gotten their groove back. But it's not the same old groove. In the late 1990s, it was social issues that obsessed the American right: abortion, gay rights, gun control, Monica Lewinsky. After 9/11, it was the war on terror. Now both obsessions have faded. Doug Hoffman-the right-wing insurgent candidate for Congress in the 23rd District of New York-didn't even list his position on the Afghanistan surge on his Web… more

Peter Beinart, who recently wrote an article called "Bury the Vietnam Analogy" on thedailybeast.com, has said there is a real sense of national identity for ...

... become smaller and more ideologically extreme,” says Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the liberal New America Foundation and a Daily Beast columnist. ...

Maybe that Saturday Night Live skit wasn't so funny after all. Four days after Fred Armisen announced that Barack Obama's signature accomplishments were "jack" and "squat," our do-nothing president did something that Democratic presidents have been trying to do for most of the last century: He celebrated a universal health care bill's passage through Senate Committee. For good measure, the Dow topped 10,000 for the first time since last fall's meltdown. Obama's polling has even ticked up: According to Gallup,… more