Oliver Lough is a research intern at the New America Foundation. China’s 60th birthday was celebrated in elaborate and wonderfully old-fashioned style by the thousands of carefully choreographed performers (and pieces of military hardware) that congregated in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square this morning.

David Shorr is a program officer at the Stanley Foundation and co-editor of Powers and Principles: International Leadership In A Shrinking World.

As my colleague Oliver Lough wrote on this blog yesterday, climate change is one of the foreign policy issues on which Europe has led the way for some time now. Try as they might, it has been difficult for Europeans to get their American friends to follow suit.

Politico‘s Mike Allen has the attendance roster for President Obama’s big Afghan pow-wow today: At 3 p.m., the President will participate in a THREE-HOUR meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan in the Situation Room. . .

(Photo Credit: White House Photostream) While at home in Boston this past weekend, I found myself google-news-ing (is that a word yet?) Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett to get their take on the Obama administration’s recent moves with regard to Iran and last week’s revelations concerning the uranium enrichment facility near the holy city…

Sam Sherraden just returned from Berlin where he was on a study tour with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a think tank associated with Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP). The Free Democrats (FDP) and the Christian Democrats (CDU) put together enough votes in Sunday’s national election to form Germany’s next coalition government.

Oliver Lough is a research intern at the New America Foundation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, months of faintly superior-sounding European criticism of American intransigence on climate change has started to ruffle a few feathers. “It may be,” retorts an exasperated U.S.

Jackie Northam of National Public Radio put this clip together in which I comment about the multiple views in the administration on America’s Afghanistan strategy.

I just had a fascinating discussion with economist David Hale who thinks that the US economy may get a “dead cat bounce” in jobs created in 2010. Hale thinks this relatively optimistic scenario depends on the American consumer coming back to life.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff of the Department of State from 2001-2005 and served for 16 years as an aide to General Colin Powell. Many people today are focused on former Vice President Dick Cheney’s complicity in torture.