Fred Hiatt: Most Recent Articles and Archives

Liberals should lead entitlement reform

Fred Hiatt — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:45:53 GMT

If liberals succeed in blocking any serious entitlement reform during the Obama presidency, as seems increasingly likely, they will have handed conservatives a gift.

One number explains why: 2.7 percent.

Read full article >>

Will Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese dream’ include the rule of law?

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:19:00 GMT

As he accepted the Communist Party’s designation to be China’s president and supreme military leader in March, Xi Jinping vowed “to achieve the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

Read full article >>

Obama’s turn inward poses risk for U.S. interests abroad

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 20 May 2013 00:27:35 GMT

“And the war will end by the end of next year . . . ”

In the elusive search for an Obama Doctrine, that struck me as a telling phrase when I heard the president deliver it last week as he and British Prime Minister David Cameron took a couple of questions from reporters.

Read full article >>

Obama’s modest proposal to cap retirement entitlements

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 06 May 2013 01:24:51 GMT

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney admitted to keeping assets in the Cayman Islands, money managers for the wealthy were not surprised.

When it emerged that he had paid taxes at a lower rate than millions of Americans who earn far less, money managers yawned.

Read full article >>

A red state/blue state chasm

Fred Hiatt — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:53:42 GMT

In the week since modest gun control died in the Senate, those of us who don’t think guns make the country safer have been inclined to blame a few cowardly senators whose votes could have shifted the outcome.

Read full article >>

Playing mind games in Cuba and China

Fred Hiatt — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:19:00 GMT

Why would Cuban security agents choose to kill the island’s leading dissident while he was in the company of two Europeans who might bear witness to the crime?

To outside observers, it’s an intriguing mystery. For those directly affected, even to ask the question is, in some sense, to surrender to the malign influence of authoritarian control. That was one message this week from two inspiring young women, daughters of courageous democracy activists from opposite sides of the world, who happened to be in Washington at the same time.

Read full article >>

Fiscal stalemate needs Obama’s leadership

Fred Hiatt — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:47:45 GMT

It’s often said that Democrats want to raise taxes while Republicans want to cut entitlements.

That’s not quite right.

If they have to do something, Democrats would rather raise taxes (on rich people and oil companies) while Republicans would rather cut entitlements (for some distantly future retirees).

Read full article >>

Obama could get things done by governing today

Fred Hiatt — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:42:59 GMT

Shortly after the Republican gains in 2010, a tea party-backed senator was telling me his legislative goals, starting with a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget that would limit spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product.

Read full article >>

Shinzo Abe’s new agenda: Better ties with U.S.

Fred Hiatt — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:14:26 GMT

TOKYO

When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meets with President Obama on Friday, he will be seeking to press not one but three reset buttons. The United States has a big stake in at least two of his goals — and it’s within Obama’s power to help realize them.

Read full article >>

Asian tensions add urgency to Obama’s ‘pivot’

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:57:22 GMT

As President Obama ponders his second-term foreign policy, he faces jihadists spreading across North Africa, Syria dissolving into chaos, Israelis and Palestinians further apart than ever, Iraq trending toward civil war, Afghanistan mired in corruption and Iran relentlessly accelerating its nuclear program.

Read full article >>

The history Obama needs to make

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:52:05 GMT

If you wonder how historians can argue endlessly about what happened long ago — did Lincoln fight to free the slaves or to preserve the union, say — look at how we can disagree about what happened just during the past four years, while we all were watching.

Read full article >>

India awakens to its grass-roots power

Fred Hiatt — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:19:10 GMT

NEW DELHI

It’s common these days for people to compare India with China and conclude that maybe democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

In India, they note, power shortages force factories to rely on generators, and investors may spend years trying to gain title to land for construction. In China, by contrast, power plants, factories and entire mega-cities seem to sprout overnight. Sleek trains streak across China’s countryside while Indians cram themselves into — or cling to the tops of — wheezing old buses.

Read full article >>

Again, the tug of global retreat

Fred Hiatt — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:44:00 GMT

By nominating a defense secretary committed to shrinking the defense budget and openly entertaining a “zero option” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, President Obama is sending a message: His promise to refocus on “nation-building at home” was no campaign slogan. He hopes for a second term with diminished foreign entanglement.

Read full article >>

Putin turns back the clock in Russia

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:44:00 GMT

Habits instilled by fear are slow to fade but can be rapidly relearned. That is one lesson Vladimir Putin is teaching us.

Roaming through Russia just after the Soviet Union dissolved, I kept in my pocket a copy of the new U.S.-Russia treaty that opened the country to free travel.

Read full article >>

Paying for charitable giving

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:41:46 GMT

With tax-deductible donations in danger, the nonprofit world is mobilizing. Its lobbyists and supporters will be blanketing Capitol Hill this week. “Take action,” urges the Web site of Independent Sector, an organization of philanthropies and philanthropists. “Tell Congress not to limit the charitable deduction.”

Read full article >>

A scandal we can’t love

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:33:05 GMT

I love a Washington scandal as much as the next voyeur, but somehow this one feels different. The two generals on the front pages now have served their country beyond most of our experiences. I think many Americans understand that and take no pleasure in their travails.

Read full article >>

Following the Stalinist recipe in Russia

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 00:51:50 GMT

As dictatorships collapsed toward the end of the last century and into this one, many people assumed that history moves in only one direction.

The tide of freedom had lifted East Asia and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Indonesia. In an era of global trade and communications, the rest of the world surely would follow. Academics and think tanks studied democratization, often presuming that it could be observed and predicted like any other natural process — that the democratic West didn’t have to do much but watch and wait.

Read full article >>

No escape from the Middle East

Fred Hiatt — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 23:49:26 GMT

Before President Obama could turn to the regions and issues he believed should be foreign policy priorities in his first term, he felt he had to clean up the mess his predecessor had bequeathed him in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Read full article >>

Burma’s champion comes to Washington

Fred Hiatt — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:01:00 GMT

During all her years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi resisted getting a dog for company.

“I did not think it would be fair to the dog,” she told Post editors and reporters Wednesday during a visit to the newspaper.

Read full article >>

Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo navigates pension reform

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:02:51 GMT

At the Democratic convention in Charlotte last week, a delegate from Rhode Island walked up to Gina Raimondo and said, “You cost me $300,000.”

Raimondo, the state treasurer who had quarterbacked a major pension reform, steeled herself for abuse. Instead, the delegate, a retired schoolteacher and wife of another retired schoolteacher, thanked Raimondo and gave her a big hug.

Read full article >>

The election’s invisible war

Fred Hiatt — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 16:40:00 GMT

As Republicans gathered in Tampa on Monday, a 25-year-old Army sergeant serving his third tour in Afghanistan, Christopher J. Birdwell of Windsor, Colo., was killed in action.

“Everybody loved him,” his brother, Dustin, 23, told the Fort Collins Coloradoan. “He was a really fun guy to be around.”

Read full article >>

The motivation for voters is stopping the other guy

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:07:21 GMT

Do either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney really want to win this election?

Neither wants to lose, certainly, or for the other guy to win. They are both highly competitive. History judges one-term presidents as failures. Romney has spent the better part of a decade pursuing the quest on which his father fell short.

Read full article >>

The motivation for voters is stopping the other guy

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:07:21 GMT

Do either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney really want to win this election?

Read full article >>

The motivation for voters is stopping the other guy

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:07:21 GMT

Do either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney really want to win this election?

Read full article >>

The motivation for voters is stopping the other guy

Fred Hiatt — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:07:21 GMT

Do either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney really want to win this election?

Read full article >>