"Debt-ridden Greece gets vote of confidence from China"

Helena Cobban, just back from Syria, posts on Turkey's expanding economic and political engagements, and adds:

So this latest Türk Telekom deal is really significant. As important for the M.E. region as was China's August 2008 announcement that it was investing $3.5 billion in developing Afghanistan's Aynak copper field, for Afghanistan. (Funny that in all the recent reporting in the U.S. about the Pentagon's recent "discovery" of Afghanistan's mineral wealth, that never got mentioned?)

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Brian Leiter and "Joshua Cohen (Stanford)" seem entirely ignorant of the history of the American fantasy of can-do individualism, perhaps because they partake in it themselves. It's a fantasy that's become harder and harder to maintain outside the academy as well. The proudly self-reliant population of red states is supported by the redistribution of income from the coasts, though it comes from those who otherwise treat them with contempt. Bernstein ruminates too much, indulging in a public display of imagination, but that doesn't make him wrong.