Peter Beinart: All Related Content

When most Americans hear the results of yesterday’s Israeli elections, they’ll be confused. When Barack Obama hears them, however, he should feel at least a little hope.

From the beginning, Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense has been about more than just the policies he’d pursue at the Pentagon. It’s been about the terms of legitimate discourse in Washington, D.C. And in this regard, even though he’s yet to be confirmed, Hagel is already proving an agent of change.

He’s proving an agent of change because over the past week or so, for the first time I can remember, the Jewish right’s tactic of calling people they disagree with on Israel policy anti-Semitic has begun to backfire.

In signaling that he’s likely to select Chuck Hagel as his secretary of defense, Barack Obama is sending a message about his second term. In the decade since 9/11, the spirit of Harry Truman has dominated American foreign policy. Now it may be giving way to the spirit of Dwight Eisenhower. And that could make all the difference in the world.

Whether Mitt Romney wins or loses tonight (or tomorrow, or next week), the most interesting story of the campaign, to my mind, is his turn to the center starting in the first debate. It’s interesting first of all because it happened so late. After the primaries, most pundits expected Romney to Etch-a-Sketch his way to the center. Instead, he chose Paul Ryan and temporarily turned the race into a referendum on entitlement cuts. Conservatives loved it, until Romney began falling behind in the polls, at which point they began slamming to the press.

Within minutes of the President’s reelection, my twitter feed was alive with conservatives fretting that Obama will take revenge upon Benjamin Netanyahu for doing everything he could to boost Mitt Romney and almost nothing to boost Israeli-Palestinian peace. Unfortunately, they’re probably wrong.

The argument that in a second term Obama will intervene aggressively in the peace process rests on the mistaken belief that because he himself doesn’t have to run for reelection, he’s freed from worrying about the domestic political costs of friction with Israel. That’s untrue.

Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist and New York Times best-selling author, and Peter Beinart, a former editor at the liberal-leaning New Republic, will face off Monday, Nov. 5, during "Red vs. Bue: What the 2012 Election Means for You." ...

Barack Obama didn’t win tonight’s foreign policy debate. Neither did Mitt Romney. George W. Bush did.

Bush won it because the framework for understanding the world that he put in place after Sept. 11 still holds, even though it wildly distorts the world that the next president will actually face.

Good for Martha Raddatz. In last Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, she served up the first serious, widely watched discussion of the foreign-policy differences between this year’s Democratic and Republican tickets. And in so doing, she revealed what foreign-policy wonks already know. There aren’t as many differences as the two sides would have you believe.

Benjamin Netanyahu loves history. And he loves deriding his critics for not understanding it as well as he does. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly last year, he attacked journalists for their weak grasp of past events, calling for a “press whose sense of history extends beyond breakfast.”

The conventions are over, but the individual who will determine the 2012 election didn’t attend either of them. His name is George W. Bush.

Obama’s acceptance speech had two apparent goals: The first was to lay out an agenda for the next four years so people feel they have something forward-looking to vote for. The second was to recapture the sense of hope that defined Obama’s 2008 campaign.

This week in Charlotte, N.C., Barack Obama will answer Mitt Romney. It’s a doable task, given that Obama is one of the most gifted orators in modern American history, and Romney, as he reminded us Thursday, is not. But to succeed, Obama’s speech must include two phrases that he doesn’t usually utter on the stump. The first is “financial crisis.” The second is “budgetary crisis.”