Regions & Nations

Memo to Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Mexican presidential candidate who lost on July 1 by six percentage points: Losing is bad; not accepting your defeat is worse.

Losing well is an underappreciated virtue. Whether we’re talking about a family game of Monopoly, a summer softball league, or an intense firm whose associates vie for a promotion to be partner, the ability to lose gracefully, and concede defeat in a manner that isn’t destructive, is essential to community well-being.

The arguments between the west and Russia over what to do in Syria resemble the old proverb of the two bald men arguing over a comb. In truth, neither side knows what to do. Both, however, respond to their lack of a plan in their traditional fashion: Russia, with stonewalling; the west, with empty rhetoric.

Europe's fiscal future is looking bleaker by the day. This weekend, the G-20 will convene in Mexico to determine how to avoid a possible global market meltdown spurred by European bank debt and default. In this podcast, two members of New America's World Economic Roundtable --Jonathan Carmel, the portfolio manager at Carmel Asset Management, and Peter Tchir, the founder of T. F. Market Advisers -- talk about the implications of the impending Spanish bank bailout, the possible consequences of this weekend's Greek election, and how the U.S.

The news that Abu Yahya al-Libi, the No.2 leader of al Qaeda, is now confirmed to have been killed in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan's tribal region along the border with Afghanistan further underlines that the terrorist group that launched the 9/11 attacks is now more or less out of business.

Under President Barack Obama, CIA drone strikes have killed 15 of the most important players in al Qaeda, according to a count maintained by the New America Foundation (a nonpartisan think tank where I am a director).

Few issues of diplomatic conversation today have quite the same ability to generate a rolling of the eyes and turning of the page as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Stuck is an understatement.

Israel’s government argues with its Supreme Court over re-locating a few dozen families from an illegal outpost to an illegal settlement, ignoring the bigger picture, whereby one in ten Jewish Israelis now reside in the Occupied Palestinian territories.

In his 2011 State of the Union Address, President Obama declared, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” Sputnik was the satellite that the Soviets had launched into orbit 54 years earlier, setting off not only a space race (and a missile race to follow) but also a national panic over America’s primacy in the Cold War. Obama went on:

On May 25, gangs of primarily government-affiliated gunmen killed more than 100 people – including 49 children- in the Syrian town of Houla, The massacre ignited global outrage: Diplomats this week have demanded that Syrian President Bashar al Assad halt the violence that has plagued the country since last spring, and pressed him to implement the U.N. Security Council cease-fire plan that was supposed to take effect on April 12.

The main fault line in Lebanese politics is the division between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Years in the making, this divide must be overcome soon or it could plunge Lebanon into another civil war.

Recent sectarian clashes in north Lebanon and Beirut are but a symptom of this growing divide. At the political-leadership level, Hezbollah’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the Future Movement’s Saad Hariri — the Shiite and Sunni de facto leaders — are not on speaking terms. At the grassroots level, a wall of fear and mistrust separates Lebanon’s two largest communities.

Every time I hear about a massacre like last Friday’s in Houla, Syria, I think back to Srebrenica, the July 1995 Bosnian massacre that helped turn me—and many other post-Vietnam era journalists and policy types—into liberal hawks. Since then, humanitarian intervention has become a recurring feature of American foreign policy debates. After the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan (no, they weren’t humanitarian interventions but they have sapped America’s capacity and stomach for war), I’d have thought discussions of humanitarian intervention might go the way of the dodo bird. They haven’t.

The massacre in al-Houla, where Syrian military forces and allied militiamen massacred more than 100 civilians in cold blood, leaves no doubt about the intentions of President Bashar al-Assad's regime: survival at any cost and through any means. Assad does not have a Plan B.