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On TIME’s Battleland blog, the latest Command Post video dispatch discusses the U.S.’s ability to maintain its strategic preeminence over the West Pacific, particularly in the face of China’s rapidly modernizing fleet. Beijing’s new capabilities for power projection will vex U.S. admirals and Washington policy wonks for decades to come.
Summit Struggle - Ahead of Wednesday’s crunch E.U. summit, Der Spiegel reports that new French President François Hollande will pressure German Chancellor Angela Merkel to agree to euro bonds, which she has so far strictly opposed. “Italy and Britain are expected to back Hollande in a further sign that Merkel is increasingly isolated in Europe with her austerity plan for saving the euro,” the German news magazine predicts.
Sunday was Jerusalem Day in Israel, a holiday once again observed by thousands of young Jews who chanted as they marched through Arab neighborhoods conquered in the 1967 Six Day War. The tension is always highest in the narrow passages of the largely Palestinian Old City. So much so that the city’s police this year tried to route the column of youths — most singing patriotic and religious songs, a few chanting “Death to the Arabs” — away from the Arab Quarter. But in the end, the police proved powerless against tradition, and the original route was restored. On Jerusalem Day, marching through the Arab Quarter is the whole point.
President Barack Obama huddled with President Hamid Karzai in Chicago on Sunday, urging Afghanistan’s leader to accelerate negotiations with the Taliban over a political solution to the longest war in America’s history. But the prospect for Karzai negotiating successfully with the insurgents is clouded by a question raised by Josef Stalin, on the eve of World War II, in response to the suggestion that he offer concessions to the Pope: “How many divisions does he have?” The Taliban now ask the same question about Karzai. And should the Afghan leader also ask himself the question, he might reach a similarly dispiriting conclusion. Karzai’s independent power base is minimal, as is his ability to influence the outcome of his country’s civil war absent direct U.S. involvement. And that gives neither Karzai nor the Taliban much incentive to cut a deal with the other.
