Gerard Baker

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InternacionalEconomía

The capitalist fat cat has long held a treasured place in popular demonology. Russians used to deride casino capitalism before showing us how to do it really well - by playing with the house's money. British trade union leaders castigated the City of London even as it created jobs at many times the pace at which their own mulish Luddism destroyed them.

Even for Americans - perhaps especially for Americans - Wall Street has been the target of popular revulsion and caricature almost since the first banks opened in Lower Manhattan. From William Jennings Bryan's philippics against the “idle holders of idle capital” in 1896 to Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko almost a century later, the susceptibility of the American public consciousness to the perceived cupidity and selfishness of Wall Street is every bit as acute as that of any European.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoCáucasoEuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Exterior,

To some, China's muscular domination of the Olympic medal table is a powerful allegory of the shifting balance of global power. A far better and more literal testimony to the collapse of the West may be seen in the distinctly weak-kneed response to Russian aggression in Georgia by what is still amusingly called the transatlantic alliance.

Once again, the Europeans, and their friends in the pusillanimous wing of the US Left, have demonstrated that, when it come to those postmodern Olympian sports of synchronized self-loathing, team hand-wringing and lightweight posturing, they know how to sweep gold, silver and bronze.

There's a routine now whenever some unspeakable act of aggression is visited upon us or our allies by murderous fanatics or authoritarian regimes.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

You have to go back to the Beatles' first US tour to find a transatlantic trip freighted with the sort of pregnant excitement that attends the one Barack Obama is about to make next week.

The faces of the crowds expected in Berlin when he arrives on Thursday will be portraits of the same devotional ecstasy that greeted the Liverpool quartet on their way from JFK to Manhattan that February day in 1964. In London next weekend Gordon Brown will play Ed Sullivan to the Fab One, hoping to borrow, just for a day, a little of the superstar charisma to bolster his own ratings.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

When governments undertake grand gestures in the full glare of public attention, the only thing you can be sure of is that they do not mean what they appear to mean. That's a useful rule of thumb to apply to any exercise in public diplomacy but it's especially helpful when trying to fathom the volatile politics of the Middle East.

There has been a certain choreographed quality to events in the skies over the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf in the last month. This week Iran fired a volley of medium-range missiles into the skies over the Gulf, demonstrating its capacity to hit targets in Israel.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalTerrorismo Internacional

"My centre is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack!”

If only our political leaders and opinion-formers displayed even a hint of the defiant resilience that carried Marshal Foch to victory at the Battle of the Marne. But these days timorous defeatism is on the march. In Britain setbacks in the Afghan war are greeted as harbingers of inevitable defeat. In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.

And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalIglesia Católica

Anybody who has ever had to stand at a podium after a gifted speaker knows how it might have been for Pope Benedict XVI this week as he has made the first papal visit to the United States since John Paul II.

His predecessor was the ultimate media-savvy leader. When he came to the ultimate media-fixated nation, it was a match made in Heaven. Millions of the faithful and the merely curious flocked to parks and stadiums. People at times had to be physically restrained from throwing themselves at him. Even on his last trip here in 1999, visibly deteriorating, his mere presence was enough to move the least sentimental of grizzled Midwesterners.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia, ,

Nothing better measures the retreat of religion in our postmodern society than the diminished intensity of the war over Christmas.

This fight — waged for decades by a dwindling band of religious insurgents against a prevailing secularist consensus — used to be fought with a real passion. People actually once got quite upset about saucy Christmas cards or television schedules that omitted even a hint of religion between the comedy classics and the game shows.

Now it just amounts to a few feeble skirmishes, a couple of barmy Christians railing outside the shopping malls, while everybody else gets on with their daily worship at the shrines of the modern trinity: shopping, eating and drinking.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

This just in: the Third World War has been cancelled. Iran, a founder member of the Axis of Evil, once deemed to be bent on world domination at the point of a nuclear weapon, turns out to have been about as threatening as a teddy bear. Well, an inoffensively named, non-Sudanese teddy bear, I should quickly emphasise.

There we were, all thinking that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader, was painstakingly fashioning a nuclear bomb to further his dreams of a new caliphate, when it turns out that he and the peace-loving mullahs of Tehran were actually busy beating their swords into ploughshares.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

I pity the poor immigrant,” wrote Bob Dylan, “Who wishes he would have stayed home/ Who uses all his power to do evil/ But in the end is always left so alone.” The minstrel-poet from Minnesota was chronicling attitudes a generation ago, but his words seem especially apposite today.

Immigration is toxic now in most of the developed world. In Britain, Gordon Brown's Government seems eager to test to destruction its insistence that tolerance is the essential facet of what it means to be British. The incomparable bungling that resulted in illegal immigrants being hired among other things to police border security would surely be parody if it were not prosaic reality.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

Nestled deep in George Bush’s latest $190 billion request to Congress for emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a tantalising little item that has received scant attention.

The US Department of Defence has asked for an additional $88 million to modify B2 stealth bombers so that they can carry a 30,000lb bomb called the massive ordnance penetrator (or MOP, in the disarming acronymic vernacular of the military). The MOP is an advanced form of a “bunker buster”, an air-delivered weapon with an explosive capacity to destroy targets deep underground. Explaining the request, the Administration says it is in response to an “urgent operational need from theatre commanders”.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

The ethnic origins of General David Petraeus are apparently Dutch, which is a shame because there’s something sonorously classical about the family name of the commander of the US forces in Iraq. When you discover that his father was christened Sixtus, the fantasy really takes flight. Somewhere in the recesses of the brain, where memory mingles hazily with imagination, I fancy I can recall toiling through a schoolboy Latin textbook that documented the progress of one Petraeus Sixtus as he triumphantly extended the imperium romanum across some dusty plain in Asia Minor.

The fantasy is not wholly inapt, of course. General Petraeus was the star turn in Washington this week, testifying before Congress about the progress of the surge by US forces in Iraq.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

At this late stage in an American presidency, even in the most favourable circumstances, even for the most popular incumbents, lame duck is definitely on the menu.

These are hardly the best of circumstances and this is hardly one of the most popular incumbents. With little more than a year to go to the end of George Bush’s presidency, his approval ratings stand near historic lows at just above 30 per cent. Last November his party lost control of both houses of Congress.

The death march of senior officials out of the Administration, routine around this stage of a second presidential term, has become a stampede.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo,

Democracy, Winston Churchill famously observed, is the worst form of government ever devised – except for all the others. Well, he was right about the first part.

In America these days democracy is living down to its reputation, producing sticking-plaster solutions to epochal challenges, indulging the worst populist instincts of its voters, throwing up demagogic leaders unworthy of the job and rejecting those of true courage. The most depressing spectacle is unfolding over Iraq. Washington has reached the stage where vital national interests – and the security of much of the world – are being determined almost entirely by immediate, panicky political considerations.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

How do you like your jihadi? Is yours the avenging physician sort; self-immolating practitioner of weird medicine outside nightclubs and airport terminals who hopes to take hundreds of innocents with him on his journey to Paradise?

Or do you prefer the voice of sweet reason, the heroic freedom fighter turned politician, who magnanimously leaps into a hostage drama and helps to free your innocent journalist from his captors?

Not difficult, is it?

We’ve had an exercise in good-cop, bad-cop with our Islamist friends in the past week. In London and Glasgow, the nutters – the scale of their murderous ambition matched only by their ineptitude with a car a mobile phone and a tankful of petrol – tried the explosive, take-no-prisoners approach to persuading the West to do their bidding Over in Gaza, they’re a bit more sophisticated.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, , ,

By the desensitising standards of routine American gun violence, yesterday’s shootings at Virginia Tech university were shocking only in their scale. Over more than 20 years, Americans have got grimly used to a ritual that plays out on the cable news every few months. The initial news is sketchy, reports of shots fired at a campus or in a schoolyard. Then, the first confused images of students running terrified from classrooms, black-clothed Swat teams gingerly pressing into doorways; the press conference in which some dazed school principal or university president mutters the first incomplete details, with casualty estimates and emergency phone numbers for worried relatives to call.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

America completes a gloomy year this weekend, mourning the loss of two rather different national icons who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. The former Godfather of Soul, James Brown, was eulogised in Harlem yesterday even as the obsequies for the former President, Gerald Ford, began in California.

On the surface there are not many obvious connections between the lives of the two men. You can hardly imagine the quietly decent Ford making much headway with something called Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and not, presumably even in his most intimate moments, would the 38th President have answered to the description, Like a Sex Machine.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

As you enjoy your non-denominational pageants, trim your holiday trees and yell season’s greetings at each other, the defiantly secular among you could be forgiven for feeling a little smug about celebrating Winterval after all that has happened in 2006. As years go it has hardly been a great commercial for the idea that religion is balm for the soul. Depressingly it has rather reinforced the impression, developed over the centuries, that religious belief only deepens and strengthens Man’s propensity for hatred and self-destruction.

All year in Iraq, Sunni and Shia Muslims have been busy replaying the message that Christians have so effectively articulated through the ages — that intrareligious intolerance can be more bloody and murderous even than that between the followers of the great Abrahamic faiths.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

George Bush has wisely decided not to ruin everybody’s Christmas by announcing his plans for a new strategy in Iraq before the end of the year. It would have been preferable if the White House had not added to the general impression of disarray in Washington by saying initially that he would speak next week and then saying he would wait. But in grand strategy as in courtship, even when you are inclined to haste, it is better to be right than quick. We will have to wait until the new year.

It is unlikely that the delay is caused by President Bush’s desire to ponder more deeply the findings of the Iraq Study Group, released last week.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

No one expected the Iraq Study Group to manufacture out of the air the sword necessary to cut the Gordian Knot America has tied for itself in Iraq.

The tangle produced by escalating civil war, US military overstretch and Iraqi political immobility was always too complex to be resolved even by the reflective deliberations of some of America’s grandest and most seasoned political figures.

But there was a general view in Washington that the report might at least provide some political cover for President George Bush to execute an indelicate U-turn.

Having spent the last three years insisting the US would stay the course until the job of producing a stable democracy in Iraq was finished, Mr Bush was always going to find it politically and psychologically hard to start anew and begin the messy business of extricating America’s military from a deepening quagmire.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalEconomía

Being of an evangelical persuasion, President Bush could be forgiven for wondering whether something apocalyptic isn’t afoot as he surveys the world from his Washington bunker this winter.

At home, the End Times have already been clearly signalled by the triumph of the Anti-Christ, otherwise known as the Democratic Party, in the midterm elections. Abroad, the leader of the world’s sole superpower must hear the ominous clatter of horses’ hooves and the steady swish of their riders’ scythes through the burning fields of his foreign policy.

War in Iraq is melting down US resolve. In Lebanon, another assassination and another political crisis have highlighted America’s weakness and the ascent of its adversaries, Iran and Syria, in the struggle for power in the Middle East.…  Seguir leyendo »