Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and an op-ed columnist for the NYT.

“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to inspire. And some of that dream has come true. When King spoke in the summer of 1963, America was a nation that denied basic rights to millions of its citizens, simply because their skin was the wrong color. Today racism is no longer embedded in law. And while it has by no means been banished from the hearts of men, its grip is far weaker than once it was.

To say the obvious: to look at a photo of President Obama with his cabinet is to see a degree of racial openness — and openness to women, too — that would have seemed almost inconceivable in 1963. When we observe Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we have something very real to celebrate: the civil rights movement was one of America’s finest hours, and it made us a nation truer to its own ideals.

Yet if King could see America now, I believe that he would be disappointed, and feel that his work was nowhere near done. He dreamed of a nation in which his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck....

AS Egyptians and Tunisians vote to replace ousted despots and the Syrian government teeters on the brink, two old imperial powers are competing to exert their political influence over Arab countries in upheaval. And they are not America and Russia. After years of cold-war competition over the Middle East and North Africa, it is now France and Turkey that are vying for lucrative business ties and the chance to mold a new generation of leaders in lands that they once controlled.

This rivalry is nothing new. Since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, France and Turkey have competed for dominance in the Middle East. France’s rise as a Mediterranean power has been an inverse function of Turkish decline around the same sea. As the Ottoman Empire gradually collapsed, France acquired Algeria, Tunisia and, temporarily, Egypt. The French took one final bite from the dying empire by securing control over Syria and Lebanon after World War I.

This rivalry subsided in the 20th century, when Turkey became an inward-looking nation state. During the era of decolonization, France lost political control of lands extending from Morocco in the west to Syria in the east. Paris, however, maintained economic and political clout in the region by supporting large French businesses, which established lucrative ties with the region’s rulers. Even Turkey once looked to France as a model: when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey in 1923, he championed the French model of hard secularism, which stipulates freedom from religion in government, politics and education.

While France has dominated much of the region over the past two centuries, that is now changing. And if Turkey plays its cards right, it could match France’s influence or even become the dominant power in the region....

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

FOR more than two years, conservatives have been riding a wave of Tea Party insurgency that has formed the most dynamic force in American politics, a protest movement that promised to slash taxes, close the federal deficit and remake Washington. And yet to judge from the results of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, some of the most engaged Republican voters are inching closer to nominating Mitt Romney, the candidate they like least, a Harvard-educated technocrat who is in many ways a mirror image of the president the insurgents want to dislodge....

This is all the more puzzling because the Tea Party movement did not lack for useful precedents or operating models. On the contrary, it is “the latest in a cycle of insurgencies on the Republican right,” as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in his new book, “Rule and Ruin,” a chronicle of half a century of internecine Republican warfare. “Even the name of the movement was a throwback to the ‘T Parties’ of the early ’60s, part of the right-wing, anti-tax crusade of that era.”...

It is hard to imagine a similar conflict happening during previous conservative insurgent cycles, mainly because they were centralized operations, often guided by insiders, in many cases Ivy League intellectuals who helped groom political figures for the national stage.

THE first successful insurgency, Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, was the brainchild of seasoned insiders in Washington and New York. Its strategic headquarters were on the East Coast — in fact a suite on Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Terminal. Its organizational genius, F. Clifton White, a political scientist who had taught at Cornell, teamed up with William Rusher, the publisher of National Review. Together they sewed up slates of delegates even as Goldwater fared poorly in a series of contested primaries against moderates like Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. Some of the ground troops for the Goldwater campaign were members of the Young Americans for Freedom, an organization created on the family estate of National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley Jr., in Sharon, Conn....

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007.

In an open race for the GOP nomination, no Republican has won both Iowa and New Hampshire, as Mitt Romney has. No one has come in fourth or fifth in New Hampshire, as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum did, and become the nominee. No one has entirely skipped Iowa, as Jon Huntsman did, and won elsewhere. No one has recovered after grabbing the 1% that Rick Perry received in the Granite State. And no one became the nominee after failing to win one of the first two contests, a position in which Ron Paul finds himself.

All this means history will be made this year, no matter what happens next.

The focus Tuesday was more on the winner's margin than on the victory itself. Mr. Romney won the New Hampshire primary by an impressive 16.4 points. (The state's last five contested GOP primaries have seen an average winning margin of 10.5 points.) True to its tradition, New Hampshire paid little attention to Iowa's big story—Mr. Santorum's impressive second-place finish. He finished fifth. The candidate who camped out in New Hampshire saw that pay off, as Mr. Huntsman did 17 times as well there as he's doing in the Gallup national poll, where he's at 1%...

Robert Haddick is managing editor of Small Wars Journal. 

A recent 10-day training exercise conducted by Iran's Navy included a test of an upgraded anti-ship cruise missile, presumably designed to counter the regular presence of U.S. 5th Fleet warships nearby. Before the Iranian exercise began, the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier strike group sailed from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. The carrier received some parting advice from Gen. Ataollah Salehi, the commander of Iran's armed forces. "We warn this ship, which is considered a threat to us, not to come back, and we do not repeat our words twice," Salehi said.

It would be difficult to find a credible naval analyst who thought that a clash between the Iranian Navy and the U.S. 5th Fleet would turn out well for Iran. But Tehran has apparently doubled down on Salehi's warning; the Iranian parliament is now considering a bill that would prohibit foreign warships from entering the Persian Gulf without prior permission from the Iranian government. This would violate long-standing international maritime law.

In contrast to its occasional all-thumbs response to irregular warfare situations, a conventional naval battle around the Strait of Hormuz would play to the U.S. military's strongest suit. American advantages in sensors, targeting, command and control, precision weapons, electronic warfare, training, and many other dimensions would quickly crush Iran's air and naval forces. Iran would also be unlikely to derive any political or diplomatic benefit from sparking a clash in the strait. Even competitors like China would expect the United States to fulfill its role as protector of the global commons (at least in the Strait of Hormuz). Iran would be seen as violating international maritime law. And the more the shooting accelerated, the more Iran would suffer. This is the definition of "escalation dominance," which would favor the United States as fighting intensified (and might therefore give the United States an incentive to escalate an outbreak of combat). Salehi and his officers must surely understand this.

So what is Iran up to?..

Mr. Gordon is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins, 2004). 

There are only two ways to win an election: Persuade people to vote for you or persuade them to vote against your opponent.

And while negative campaigning is routinely decried, it is also routinely practiced and has been since nearly the beginning of politics in this country. The reason is simple enough—it usually works. As Newt Gingrich discovered in Iowa, negative TV ads can drive down poll numbers alarmingly fast.

The negative ads these days are often tough, but they're nowhere near as vicious as early examples, when opponents were routinely "drenched in calumny," to use Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen's memorable phrase about the ordeals of Richard Nixon.

George Washington was twice elected president unanimously, but the election of 1796, between Vice President John Adams and former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, was a mudfest. The candidates themselves did not campaign at all, as was then the custom, but their surrogates in the party press knew few restraints.

Benjamin Franklin Bache (the grandson of his namesake) referred to the short and dumpy Adams in his newspaper, Aurora, as "His Rotundity," whose appearance was so much "sesquipedality of belly." Federalist newspapers returned fire, accusing Jefferson, an admirer of the French Revolution, of being a blood-thirsty Jacobin, an atheist, and a coward for having fled Monticello in the face of advancing British troops during the Revolutionary War, when he was governor of Virginia.

The ad hominem attacks got worse in the 19th century...

Moon Chang-keuk is a senior columnist of the JoongAng Ilbo.

As I observe the North Korean people in news reports about the death of Kim Jong-il and his funeral, I feel so pitiful for them. They cried so hard, and some even collapsed. In an outdoor plaza in bitterly cold winter weather, they bowed their heads deeply. I don’t want to talk about whether their tears were real or not. They were slaves, they were robots. Is there any other regime in the world where humanity is so completely abused and ignored?

The so-called North Korean leaders up on the podium were also pitiful. What were they really thinking? They were probably also desperate looking for a means of survival. They all knew very well that their status would simply disappear if the regime was not sustained. They were also slaves of the system.

North Korea was a gigantic stage last week and everyone on view was playing his or her part. The world media was almost dumbfounded at the unique scenes. What can the world think of the Koreans? Because my brother’s weakness is also mine, we should also feel embarrassed to the point of shame.

After Kim died, discussions flowered in the South and abroad on whether the North would maintain its petrified stability or face a unique crisis. Everyone was wondering if Kim Jong-un would be able to successfully maintain the dynastic succession or whether his grip would start to crumble. Those who were concerned about a crisis focused on what would happen to the North’s nuclear arms programs and what would happen if there were an exodus of refugees. They all concluded that they wanted a stable Kim Jong-un regime.

Some even went so far to say there was an opportunity for inter-Korean dialogue. The Lee Myung-bak administration appeared to expect some changes in the North’s attitude. But that was just a chimera. As soon as the funeral was over, the North declared that no changes should be expected.

Will Kim Jong-il’s death really end as a mere performance on a stage?..

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.

...To understand the lessons of the 1930s, you need to read the election returns. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s big victory in 1932 was a massive rejection of Republicans across the board. Republicans lost huge ground in urban and rural areas, even in their few redoubts in the South.

In 1936, FDR won re-election by a slightly larger margin, but with a different coalition. The rural and small town North returned to its long Republican allegiance, while Democrats made further big gains among immigrants and blue-collar workers in big cities and factory towns.

The New Deal historians attributed these gains to Roosevelt’s economic redistribution measures. The problem with the historians’ claims is that the shifts in the electorate apparent in 1936 also are apparent in the 1934 off-year elections. Democrats won big that year, but compared to 1932, they lost ground in rural areas and small towns and gained much ground in cities....

So why should voters be leery of economic redistribution in times of economic distress? Perhaps because they realize that they stand to gain much more from a vibrantly growing economy than from redistribution of a stagnant economic pie. Redistribution edges toward a zero-sum game....

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50^th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge.