Cold War

In an indie scene where fashion, drugs, attitude and hair can determine one's authenticity, there is apparently zero tolerance for Christ. That seems to be the message coming out of a dustup over the Cold War Kids, a Long Beach, Calif.-based quartet performing before a sold-out crowd tonight at Washington's 9:30 Club. If you go The Cold War Kids perform at a sold-out show at 8 tonight at the 9:30 Club, 815 V St. N.W., Washington. 930.com.

"Predicting" the past as if it were the future has long divided historians. A new debate about it is bubbling up now in Britain. Can it be done? Is it even worth trying? Or is it just silly? I would answer those three questions: Yes, sometimes. Yes, very much. Yes, sometimes.British historian Niall Ferguson reignited the old debate about history that asks what if...?, and especially about history that claims to be able to answer that question. He believes it is possible in many instances to demonstrate that if historical characters had made different decisions, great changes would have occurred in subsequent developments.

WASHINGTON -- For Strobe Talbott, who has spent the past six weeks shuttling from Washington to Moscow and European capitals trying to end the Kosovo war, more is at stake in his mission than peace in the Balkans.Since his old friend Bill Clinton tapped him as an adviser on the former Soviet Union in 1993, Talbott has been a consistent -- and at times lonely -- proponent of the idea that Russia can be a responsible U.S. partner in world affairs.Now, with Serbian troops poised to pull out of Kosovo after 11 weeks of NATO airstrikes, Talbott's idea is gaining renewed respect.

WASHINGTON -- Missile defense has cost the United States tens of billions in research dollars, soured relations with Russia and China and roiled congressional and presidential politics.All this from a high-tech Pentagon system only in the testing phase, beset by numerous and embarrassing malfunctions.Since March 1983, when President Ronald Reagan envisioned an elaborate space-based shield of sensors and weapons that would protect the entire nation from a Soviet nuclear attack, missile defense has enthralled many Republicans and some Democrats.

WHEN HE became President of the United States in 1953, Dwight David Eisenhower had more prior experience with national security affairs than any incoming 20th-century president.As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II, he led a multi-national force to victory in Europe. In the aftermath of Germany's surrender, he was up front for the beginning of the Cold War, a struggle that dominated his subsequent careers as chief of staff of the Army, as informal chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as NATO's first Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

I WAS in the presence the other day of a 101-year-old woman with silver hair and creamy blue cataracts. Her eyes sparkled despite the opaque gauze, evidence that lights still burned within her mind and her heart. She had a strong chin, perfect features and the embracing smile of a woman who must have been the queen of her senior prom -- around the time, I figure, of the Great War.She sat at a round table by a window filled with afternoon light, dressed in a handsome green suit that nodded to her Irish ancestry and the approach of another St. Patrick's Day. As a large party swirled about her, she seemed engaged and happy, and completely up to speed on the various developments in the lives of everyone with whom she spoke.

PARIS -- The Clinton administration enters its own and the century's final year with a foreign policy record of few major accomplishments, and serious miscalculations.On the positive side are the intervention to end the war in Bosnia, a weighty contribution to peace in Ireland (both prompted by domestic political pressures), measures to stabilize Macedonia, the (insecure) Kosovo cease-fire and mediation in the Cyprus affair.The failures include Russia, an Iraq policy that has steadily worsened the Middle Eastern situation, a destructive failure of nerve and political courage in dealing with Israel and Palestinian peace, a business and trade-driven China policy that has foolishly and perhaps fatefully damaged U.S. relations with Japan, a politically hyped African initiative without substance, which has already vanished, and an implicitly hegemonic approach to Europe, NATO expansion and NATO policy redefinition, which may produce a trans-Atlantic crisis as early as this spring.

NEW YORK -- The visitor shows up a couple minutes early for the morning appointment in Greenwich Village; Tony Hiss is still shaving.He comes to the door in khaki slacks, T-shirt and partially lathered face, displaying the friendliness one comes to expect from him. He's a gentle, 57-year-old man with light eyes and mostly gray hair who bears a resemblance to his father, Alger Hiss, the Baltimore native infamous for his conviction in a Cold War spy case,...

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration unveiled a budget for the Defense Department yesterday that includes the first real spending increase since the Cold War heyday of 1985, with $12.6 billion in new money to cover the sharpest military pay increase in 17 years and more research into building a national missile defense system."

LOS ANGELES -- The 40th president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, recently turned 88 years old, and a lot of the old gang gathered out in the Simi Valley here where his neo-Taco Bell library dominates a landscape of rolling and totally arid hills.It is so easy to make fun of Mr. Reagan, the cowboy actor become cowboy president. I did it deliberately in these first sentences, as I used to do it regularly when he was in power. Attacking him was simple, wounding him difficult, forgetting him impossible.

HEYWARD ISHAM, 82 Key Cold War diplomat Heyward Isham, 82, a career Foreign Service officer and a Russian scholar who held key posts during the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, died Thursday at a hospital near his Long Island home. He had complications from an infection and pulmonary fibrosis. During the Vietnam War, Isham served in the early 1970s as a leader of the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks and was directly involved in negotiations with the Vietnamese. The talks led to the accords that ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying with them. Over the weekend, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Mr. Rodman, the American foreign policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Mr. Rodman and liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Mr. Rodman was one of the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign policy establishment.

What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any other time since the end of World War II? Why, without a sophisticated military opponent in sight, is the United States spending trillions of dollars on the development of high-tech weapons systems that lost their purpose with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago? The 2009 defense budget commits the United States to spending more (again, in real dollars)

When it comes to the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues, Republicans like to hark back to the stalwart presidents of the Cold War. Sen. John McCain has invoked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as kindred spirits, and so has George W. Bush. Which raises the question: Why do they embrace those leaders while rejecting their policy? The centerpiece of the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union was captured in a famous 1947 essay by American diplomat George Kennan, who rejected either war or retreat in favor of "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

WASHINGTON -- What the CIA couldn't do with exploding seashells, poison cigars and chemicals to make his beard fall off, Fidel Castro has done alone. He removed himself from a world stage that he seemed to dominate for nearly 50 years. So compelling was this 6-foot-3-inch, Jesuit-trained former lawyer that he inspired and drove revolutionary movements across Central America and Africa. He twisted American policymakers into such awkward knots that the United States has maintained severe economic sanctions against Cuba, and at the same time a naval station on the island's southeastern tip, housing the most notorious alleged terrorists in captivity at Guantanamo Bay. "He survived paramilitary invasions, assassination attempts, trade embargoes, travel bans, diplomatic isolation.

If you're reading this Tuesday morning (or any time thereafter), then scientists were right: An asteroid the size of a city block did not crash into the Earth as we slept. OK, there was never any danger of that. Asteroid 2007 TU24 swept by the planet at 3:33 a.m. EST at a safe distance of 334,000 miles - roughly one-and-a-half times the distance from Earth to the moon. But it was the closest an asteroid this size has come since 1985, and the closest one we know about until 2027. Had Earth been in the bulls-eye, TU24 would not have burned up harmlessly.

When Rep. Clarence D. Long served Maryland's 2nd Congressional District for 22 years, he probably had no idea he'd be immortalized in a Hollywood movie. But about halfway through the film Charlie Wilson's War, you hear that a House of Representatives subcommittee chairman named "Doc" Long holds the key to funding the mujahedeen rebels' covert war against Soviet troops in 1980s Afghanistan. "Doc" was Long's nickname. Before he graced the halls of Congress, he was an economics professor at the Johns Hopkins University.

YULI VORONTSOV, 78 Russian diplomat Yuli Vorontsov, who served the Soviet Union and Russia as ambassador to Afghanistan and the United States in a career spanning the Cold War and the Gulf War, died Wednesday in Moscow, the Foreign Ministry said. He also served as ambassador to the United Nations, France and India, and as the U.N. envoy overseeing the return or repatriation of the remains of Kuwaitis and others missing after the first Gulf War.

This month, there was another parliamentary parlor game in Congress over the Iraq war. The occasion was the debate over the 2008 defense budget, which offered opponents of the war the opportunity to offer amendments for withdrawal timetables. But intentionally lost in the debate was a larger discussion of the budget itself. Before adjourning for the Columbus Day holiday, the Senate quietly passed a $460 billion defense appropriations bill. Add to this figure the nearly $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and the cost of nuclear weapons activities in the energy bill - and we're talking about $700 billion for defense.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said the Army needs more money, not just to make up for the losses suffered in Iraq but also for chronic underfunding since the end of the Cold War. But Gates suggested that rather than using additional money to rebuild conventional war capability, the Army should ensure that it does not again forget the painful lessons it was forced to relearn in Iraq about fighting against an insurgency. Gates argued in a speech yesterday that after the Vietnam War, the Army "relegated unconventional war to the margins" of its training and spending priorities.