A few more items for your reading list

A few recent items that I thought I’d call your attention to, mostly about the Middle East.

1. Jerome Slater — a distinguished professor emeritus from SUNY-Buffalo — has started a new blog at www.jeromeslater.com. I’ve been reading Jerry’s excellent scholarship for years, and have learned a great deal from him on a number of subjects, Israel-Palestine included. His opening entry is a sober discussion of the Goldstone Report, in which he demolishes the recent piece of hasbara by Prof. Moshe Halbertal in (surprise, surprise) The New Republic.  Halbertal’s analysis was sufficiently slanted to earn a "Sidney" award from the Times’ David Brooks, but Slater’s critique is quietly devastating. (For another telling critique of Halbertal’s dust-kicking operation, see Jeremiah Haber’s response at The Magnes Zionist, here and here.)

2. Tony Karon ("Rootless Cosmopolitan") has an excellent short analysis of Obama’s foreign policy out at Time. His opening metaphor is dead on the mark: "the presidency is more like taking over the controls of a train than getting behind the wheel of a car. That’s because you can’t steer a train; you can only determine its speed." One might add that when most of the train’s crew are enthusiastic liberal imperialists — ooops, I mean "liberal internationalists" — and when political operators are as important to your decisions as people with genuine foreign policy expertise, then you’re not going to get much help if you try to switch to another track.

3. Over at Truthout.org, Tom Englehart and Nick Turse ask a lot of good questions about the direction of U.S. national security policy.

4. Gershom Gorenberg has a fine article in The American Prospect on the bogus "settlement freeze." Highly recommended for those who still believe the Netanyahu government wants peace more than it wants land.

5. My interview with The Browser on "five books on U.S.-Israeli relations" is available here.  I couldn’t resist plugging our own, but I do feel a bit sheepish about it. Frankly, I could easily have added five or ten more — including a few books I have some disagreements with — so don’t view my list as even close to comprehensive.

6. Foreign Affairs is not the first place I look for analysis that breaks a lot of new ground,  but the latest issue has a fine article by sociologist Jack A. Goldstone on the demographic changes that are going to remake global politics over the next several decades. Money quote:

"Four historic shifts . . . will fundamentally alter the world’s population over the next four decades: the relative demographic weight of the world’s developed countries will drop by nearly 25 percent, shifting economic power to the developing nations; the developed countries’ labor forces will substantially age and decline, constraining economic growth in the developed world and raising the demand for immigrant workers; most of the world’s expected population growth will increasingly be concentrated in today’s poorest, youngest, and most heavily Muslim countries, which have a dangerous lack of quality education, capital, and employment opportunities; and, for the first time in history, most of the world’s population will become urbanized, with the largest urban centers being in the world’s poorest countries, where policing, sanitation, and health care are often scarce. . . . Coping with them will require nothing less than a major reconsideration of the world’s basic global governance structures."

Goldstone is not the first person to discover these trends and one can quibble with some of his arguments, but his summary is rich and insightful and some of his prescriptions — such as encouraging out-migration to the developing world by retirees in the developed world — are intriguingly outside-the-box. Well worth a read.