National Interest

More Americans hunted, fished and watched wildlife in 2011 than five years earlier, according to final statistics released last month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is good news for our lifestyles and our economy," said Dan Ashe, director of the service. The results are from the 2011 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, an outdoor participation survey the agency has conducted since 1955. The survey results are released every five years.

More Americans hunted, fished and watched wildlife in 2011 than five years earlier, according to final statistics released last month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is good news for our lifestyles and our economy," said Dan Ashe, director of the service. The results are from the 2011 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, an outdoor participation survey the agency has conducted since 1955. The survey results are released every five years.

A war for control of U.S. foreign policy rages in Washington -- and the first casualty could be the Clinton presidency. But the ultimate loser may be America's ability to come to terms with global change and remain the world's most dynamic society.Last month, the House of Representatives passed GOP-sponsored legislation that would reorganize the foreign-affairs bureaucracy, cut overseas aid, limit U.S. involvement in U.N. peacekeeping operations and redirect U.S. policy toward Bosnia and a host of other countries.

There have been a number of hopeful signs recently regarding the public's recognition of the value of reaching beyond partisan disagreement ("Nostalgia for the age of statesmen," Oct. 23). One comes from "the greatest generation," the other from a college student. The first was a commentary in The Washington Post by former senator and Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole, who wrote movingly of the late Democratic Sen. George McGovern as "the man who never gave up. " Mr. McGovern and Mr. Dole shared the experience of battlefield service during World War II, but they disagreed sharply over the wisdom of the Vietnam War. Yet they both believed in acting to meet human needs as members of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, where they worked together to expand domestic school lunch programs and reduce international poverty and hunger.

With another war past, the national interest leads onward, changing faces and directions, drawing frustrated followers down uncharted paths. That is the way of the national interest. All leaders of democracies, especially, search for it and pursue it as they understand it. To many geopoliticians, that's the beginning and end of it; you win some and you lose some, and you pay the price of the losses. But in practice the whole ideal of the national interest is far more complex than that.A constant danger is that leaders even in democracies will confuse national interest with personal interest.

THE SENATE vote Tuesday to pay $819 million of what the United States owes the United Nations is welcome and overdue but imperfect.It comes in a deal to confirm the nomination of Richard C. Holbrooke to be ambassador to the United Nations, also overdue. But a string attached would reduce U.S. contributions from one-fourth to one-fifth of the U.N. budget. That is a worthy goal of negotiations but not something Congress should try to legislate as if the United States unilaterally decides.The worst aspect of the bill is that this is only the Senate.

CONDOLEEZZA Rice, who will be President-elect George W. Bush's national-security adviser, describes herself as a foreign-policy "Realist." The word has for her, a Stanford University political science professor, a specific academic meaning - one that potentially signals significant changes under a Bush administration foreign policy. Realism is a theory of international politics. It states that power is the ultimate arbiter among states in an anarchic world. Power is defined as a state's material capability to fight and win wars.

Someone better tell those Tontons Macoutes that just because Somalia is not an important U.S. national interest doesn't mean Haiti isn't.In case you were wondering why the U.S. kept the Guantanamo naval base, it never prevented Cuba from going bad but it might prove useful with Haiti.Bobby Neall is getting out. It's just no fun if you don't have Kurt Schmoke to run against.

The fervor to bring the boys home from Somalia dooms the Muslims of Bosnia.The U.S. has no national interest in Somalia, as it had none in Manchuria in 1932, Ethiopia in 1936 or Czechoslovakia in 1938.Bill is determined to go down in history as a domestic affairs president, as was Woodrow Wilson.Yeltsin muzzled the opposition press in the interest of democracy and free speech.

It is no longer fashionable to die for one's country. Contemporary society honors the living. The last war fought to save America, World War II, was under way 50 years ago. The boys who were 20 then are now 70 if they survive.The United States has fought wars since then, in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Iraq. Each was defended as in the national interest, but in none was that interest stated to be national survival. It is a long time since a young

Why would anyone wish to become President of the United States? The responsibility of leading a nation of over 330 million souls, the burden of sending our brave and finest into harms way, the fortitude to withstand the barbs of the opposition are but a few items in the job description. With this in mind in the current election cycle, I have observed President Barack Obama and his all-but-certain opponent Gov. Mitt Romney, their utterances and their body language while on the stump throughout the nation.

When former general manager Jim Bowden tweeted this afternoon that the Washington Nationals are interested in Adam Jones, I instantly thought the same thing as everybody else. Who isn't? It's not news that Jones is a well-regarded center fielder, but if he were being shopped, you'd have a lot more than one team saying publicly that they are interested in him. Nats GM Mike Rizzo apparently said on MLB Network Radio that his staff has “done our homework” on Jones and would be interested in him. Again, who wouldn't?

WASHINGTON - President Bush, delivering a televised farewell to the nation last night, attempted to summon a collective sense of "gratitude" for years of safety following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that shaped his presidency. In a measure of the impact the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had on his administration, Bush touted one signal success during his time in office: No further attacks occurred. The president acknowledged that his anti-terror policies had prompted "legitimate debate."

ARLINGTON, VA. -- To be born black in Okolona, Miss., in 1935 was to have two strikes against you and a fastball coming at your head. Unless, that is, you are William Raspberry, the syndicated columnist who has announced his retirement from column writing after 40 years, but not retirement from life after 70 years. Mr. Raspberry tells me his greatest inspirations were his parents. "They loved each other and all of us," he said of himself and his siblings, "and they instilled in us a love of learning and a sense that we could do it."

What marks this century as one of unprecedented upheaval is not primarily the emergence of new centers of power like China or India; that has happened before, though not on this global scale. Nor is it the fact that significant states are losing control over all or part of their territory. The unique aspect is that when state power weakens, non-state terrorist groups fill the vacuum for the purpose of threatening the state system itself. The challenge is not simply to re-establish the international system but to prevent vacuums that, like black holes, suck into themselves the nihilistic elements trying to destroy order altogether.

THE IMPORTANCE of the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions on affirmative action yesterday is the court's view that diversity matters in higher education. A diverse student body is important enough to justify using race in admissions decisions. "A compelling state interest," the court said in ruling on the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action program. A compelling interest indeed! If universities are the training grounds for America's future leaders, as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggested in the court's 5-4 ruling, schools must strive to create a diverse educational environment for students.

Is Boris Yeltsin as important to the United States and the world as the Clinton administration thinks he is? Or are Americans once again exaggerating the effects of a man on the politics of his time?Henry Kissinger has written that he thinks it unwise to gear American policy ''so totally'' to an individual, ''whatever his merits.'' It is mistaken to see the political struggle in Russia as ''a clear-cut contest between democracy and a return to the old system.''Tying the United States so closely to a single leader, Mr. Kissinger argues, involves us in a complex power struggle we may not fully understand and on whose outcome we can have only marginal influence.

WASHINGTON - Eighteen months ago a relatively obscure academic named Condoleezza Rice published a prescription for U.S. foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, a bimonthly journal in New York. Titled "Promoting the National Interest," the article included a pointed warning against "symbolic" treaties and urged American diplomats to focus on big powers such as Russia and China. Although Rice had recently joined Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the piece attracted little notice, blending into a background of "Rwanda in Retrospect" and other items in the same issue.

Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is collecting a significantly greater share of her campaign contributions from out of state than Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., according to an analysis of fund-raising reports. Almost 40 percent of the $6.7 million raised by Townsend in her campaign for governor came from contributors who live outside Maryland, compared with about 11 percent of the $3.7 million raised by Ehrlich. Campaign finance reports filed yesterday also show that during the past nine months, the average Townsend contributor gave $468 - about $100 more than was donated by the average Ehrlich supporter.

PRESIDENTS Bush and Putin did not make a disarmament agreement at their three-day summit. They aligned unilateral policies in a way that President Bush says makes agreements unnecessary, while Russia's president still wants them. Each had campaigned in his own country for reducing nuclear warheads, for cost savings. Now they have come together. If the number of U.S. warheads goes from something like 4,000 to the neighborhood of 2,200, the United States could still destroy all the targets the Pentagon has identified in Russia or any other country, with nuclear explosives launched from air, sea and land.