Judging from the reaction it received on Salon’s website, I suspect this profile of former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson may be the most-read article I’ve written in quite a while. Although the profile appeared back in May, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf gave his own take on Johnson, keying off the Salon article, last week.

Also for Salon, I looked at how Louisiana Senator David Vitter has remained in a strong position, despite being tainted by scandal. Soon afterwards, I added another, shorter piece, suggesting that the excitement being expressed by Vitter’s foes about the last-minute entrance of Chet Traylor into the Republican primary was overdone.

Keeping the focus on the Republican Party, another piece for Salon asked the question: what does South Carolina senator Jim DeMint want — for himself and for his party?

I published my first piece in The New Republic last month. In it, I argued that Barack Obama’s tendency to downplay race is ill-suited to discussions about the HIV/AIDS issue.

Finally, just this past weekend, I wrote about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy for The Irish Times.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

For Salon, I wrote about Charlie Crist’s floundering Senate campaign back in early March and, later, about the search for a GOP presidential candidate — maybe John Thune or Mitch Daniels — who might appeal to the party’s intellectuals. (There is another Republican-themed Salon piece in the works, and it should appear within the next week or so.)

For the Daily Beast, I took a contrarian stance on British prime minister Gordon Brown’s allegedly bullying behavior and also gave my thoughts on the end of an era in Northern Ireland. Both articles appeared in February.

Finally, I defended the education policies of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan from the criticisms of the teachers’ unions in a March piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

In the unlikely event that anyone cares why I am supplying links rather than reprinting the articles in their entirety, as I have done in the past, a simple explanation: Most of the articles I have previously reprinted originally appeared in newspapers or magazines. I’ve decided — not withstanding the fact that I reprinted a previous Daily Beast column on Hillary Clinton on this site — that it is probably fairer to web-only outlets like Salon or the Daily Beast to simply provide the links.

Thanks for reading…

Some liberals worried that such a surprising accolade could ultimately weigh negatively upon a president still grappling with a host of domestic concerns. Over half a million new jobless claims were filed in the US in the last week in September, and it is hard to imagine many of the claimants popping champagne corks upon hearing the news. Others on the left could not resist satirising Obama’s apparently limitless “rock star” appeal. Liberal commentator Michael Kinsley suggested Obama must now be considered a shoo-in for an Oscar.

Despite these unusual voices among the chorus of concern, and despite the sheer vitriol of the reaction from the American right – radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh insisted Obama’s overseas popularity stemmed from “trashing his own country” – perhaps the most perplexing criticism came from one of Ireland’s Nobel peace laureates.

Mairéad Corrigan-Maguire, who won in 1976 along with Betty Williams for her involvement in the North’s Peace People organisation, was “very sad” to hear of Obama’s victory. “The Nobel committee is not meeting the conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will because he stipulated that the award is to be given to people who end militarism and war and are for disarmament,” she said.

As Maguire should know, the committee has a tradition of selecting winners as much as an act of encouragement towards their goal as a celebration of the miles already travelled. Even some of the most revered peace laureates of the modern era were anointed at a time when their aspirations were unfulfilled, including South African bishop Desmond Tutu, Iranian women’s rights activist Shirin Ebadi and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. As for Nobel’s will, while the Swedish scientist did encourage giving awards to people involved in “the abolition or reduction of standing armies”, the first qualification he laid down for those who would be awarded a prize was that they should “have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations”.

Those words prove that selecting Obama to be not a defensible decision but the right one. Think of Obama’s achievements to date: setting in motion a US withdrawal from Iraq; renewing his nation’s focus on matters that demand international co-operation, including climate change and nuclear non-proliferation, and the tentative but encouraging advances that have come due to his emphasis on negotiation rather than sabre-rattling with adversaries like Iran.

Add to this the concerted push to reinvigorate the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and the respectful but candid speeches delivered to audiences in the Middle East and Africa and it becomes hard to argue with the Nobel committee’s assertion that “Obama has, as president, created a new climate in international politics”.

These factors may have clinched the prize for Obama, but he evidently vaulted into contention much earlier. His detractors have pointed out that nominations for the award closed on February 1st, by which time the new president had been in office less than two weeks.

Again, they miss the point. By that stage, Obama had outlawed the use of torture by US forces, banned the use of secret prisons overseas and announced his plan to close Guantánamo Bay.

Lest we forget, he had achieved something of enormous significance even before making those moves: He got elected. The victory of a young, smart, internationalist Democrat – who thereby became his nation’s first African-American president – in and of itself nudged the political world into a different era.

Symbolic and substantive change are more intimately intertwined than Obama’s critics have acknowledged. His election and early months in power represent the kind of nascent emergence from darkness that the committee has celebrated in other nations. They were right to honour it in America’s case too.

First published in The Irish Times, October 12, 2009

Nick Hornby’s novel “Juliet, Naked” is set in a fictional and downcast English seaside town called Gooleness, where we meet a fractious and downcast couple, Annie and Duncan. They live together, unmarried and joyless. Mr. Hornby nimbly evokes Annie’s frustration, both emotional and sexual: “Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who’d come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years.”

A third person is spectrally (and later literally) involved in the couple’s relationship. Tucker Crowe is an American musician who, though once a critics’ darling, appears to have lived in seclusion since abruptly retreating from the spotlight in 1986. Duncan is utterly fixated on Crowe, becoming one of the leading lights—a “Crowologist” and “scholar” in his own words— on a Web site dedicated to minute analysis of the singer-songwriter’s life and work.

We are, in other words, deep in Hornby country. As a memoirist and novelist, Mr. Hornby has pursued a few recurring themes, including the challenge of finding a masculinity that is sensitive without being wimpy, and the attraction of obsessive fandom, especially regarding sports or music. His style—whether in “Fever Pitch,” the soccer- supporter’s memoir that made his name in 1992, or the music-saturated novel “High Fidelity” (1995)—blends dry humor, a dash of sentimentality and immense readability. He has sold more than five million books to date, even as some critics have complained that his pop-culture enthusiasms and guys-and-their-problems focus make his work the male equivalent of chick-lit.

“Juliet, Naked” will neither win over his detractors nor disappoint his admirers. The title refers to an unreleased album by Crowe, an acoustic, barebones version of his most famous work, “Juliet.” A copy of the hitherto-unknown album falls into Duncan’s hands, and he soon writes a rhapsodic online review. Annie, who respects Crowe’s music but has none of her partner’s fanaticism, is so irked by Duncan’s hyperbole that she posts her own lukewarm appraisal.

To Annie’s astonishment, she receives an admiring email reply from Crowe himself. It turns out that he is not the semi-crazed recluse that his dwindling band of diehard fans imagine. He is a middle-age man living a relatively normal, if domestically messy and financially straitened, life in Pennsylvania. The correspondence between Crowe and Annie, and their eventual meeting, provides much of the novel’s narrative.

Mr. Hornby’s humorous touch is very much intact. Annie’s visits to her inept and priggish therapist, Malcolm, are comic gems. She becomes convinced that the goal of analysis is to torture patients with silence until they “eventually shout out ‘I slept with my father!’ and everyone could go home.”

Elsewhere, Crowe ponders the role that his professional inactivity has played in the collapse of several relationships: “All of these women had known that he hadn’t done anything since 1986; that, it seemed to him, was his unique selling point, and it was a never-ending source of fascination. But when he’d continued to do nothing, there was outrage. Where was the justice in that?”

Even peripheral characters, like a bluff local councilman and a couple of aging lotharios named Gav and Barnesy, are well-drawn and sometimes poignant. Mr. Hornby’s casual turns of phrase can be especially telling, as when Crowe realizes that he has wasted two decades waiting for the muse to return. The wait, he reflects, has “felt like one long flick through a magazine.”

“Juliet, Naked” is solid but lacks the punch of the superb “High Fidelity.” Minor but irritating flaws crop up, particularly the tendency of all three main characters to dwell at odd moments on matters of syntax and grammar. In a scene when Duncan confesses to cheating on Annie, for instance, she asks: “Who are you sleeping with?” He replies: “It’s not . . . I wouldn’t use the present continuous.” At other points, Annie pronounces herself surprised by “the combination of Gooleness and an active verb,” and Crowe, when Annie asks him if he might be interested in her, answers: “The conditional is unnecessary.” This sounds less like characters speaking than an author letting the curtain slip. More seriously, the book’s final chapters have an underdeveloped feel as the narrative begins to dawdle before a rather contrived intervention from a minor character hastens its conclusion.

Still, “Juliet, Naked” is a rich and perceptive novel, with a keen sense of the lives led by the trio at its core. Duncan gradually realizes that his ardent consumption of every morsel of Crowe-related information is a way of compensating for his stunted emotional life. Crowe struggles, usually unsuccessfully, with the question of how to marry his freewheeling artistic spirit to the demands of adult life. And Annie is a case study in how caution can lead, just as surely as recklessness, to a lifetime’s worth of regrets.

First published in The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2009

Part of the issue is Palin herself. She has a good claim to the title of America’s most divisive politician. After all, this is a woman whom a large swathe of conservatives adore, but whom an even larger chunk of the US population considers to be manifestly unqualified for high office.

In Going Rogue, touching portraits of family life are again and again revealed as mere diagrams to illustrate the correctness of Palin’s political beliefs.

As a child, she gets stopped while out for a holiday ride on a snow machine with her brother, is irked with the policeman who hinders their fun and solemnly informs the reader that “maybe that was my first brush with the skewed priorities of government”. A conversation a generation later with her own daughter, Bristol, about the younger Palin’s goal of opening a coffee shop, includes the advice: “Don’t do this until this [Obama] administration understands government’s role in private business. Or wait until they’re out of office.”

The prose style of Going Rogue — which is, for the most part, fluent though uninspired — tells us little or nothing about the former Alaska governor, since it is the work of a ghost writer. But what Palin has chosen to emphasise reveals plenty.

Perhaps most jarring to European readers will be the frequent references to God. On this side of the Atlantic, even believers sometimes feel queasy about public protestations of faith from politicians — hence the famous remark by Tony Blair’s erstwhile spin doctor Alastair Campbell that “We don’t do God.”

Palin most definitely does God. Indeed, he keeps a close and nurturing eye on her political ambitions. He is apparently in favour of her 2002 run for lieutenant-governor of Alaska (“I knew that God was working on something significant in our small-town life”); her later bid for governor (“I thought of a passage from the book of Jeremiah 29:11-13: ‘“For know that I have plans for you,” declares the Lord’”); and for the vice-presidency itself (“When God presents those doors, we think, ‘Yes. This is right. This fits’”).

When not contemplating celestial matters, Palin propagates her most cherished image of herself: the ordinary mom-politician, bravely doing the people’s business yet assailed by influential enemies on all sides. The media, political opponents, purportedly inept aides — all get it in the neck, and always in a way that presents Palin as the embattled heroine.

The problem here is two-fold.

Firstly, a petty, churlish air permeates much of the book. No stranger to innuendo, Palin refers to two public figures in her home town base of Wasilla “who it was rumoured were good friends”; a later political opponent is an “effete young chap.” Elsewhere, pointless jibes are made at her supposed opponents in the despised mainstream media. “Well, I like his mom,” she remarks drily about one CNN anchor.

Secondly, many of the targets of Palin’s ire have come out since the book’s publication to say that certain details are simply untrue.

Steve Schmidt, the manager of last year’s McCain-Palin campaign, is portrayed as her foul-mouthed nemesis. But he has called many of her allegations “total fiction”. Sources within the campaign have said that an episode described at length in the book, in which Schmidt apparently erupted in rage on a phone call with Palin, simply never happened.

Another campaign advisor, Nicolle Wallace, has alleged the book is “based on fabrications” and that Palin’s depiction of a conversation in which Wallace sought to persuade her to do a TV interview, which proved to be a disaster, “is fiction”.

This is serious for its own sake, but it also erodes the only reason any nominally neutral person would have for reading Going Rogue.

Political junkies might be lured by Palin’s apparently willingness to dish the dirt on what went on behind the scenes of the presidential campaign.

If a cloud hangs over those descriptions, however, there is little left.

Palin-lovers will lap Going Rogue up. For the rest of us, this is a hollow, occasionally nasty and oddly dispiriting book.

First published in The Sunday Business Post, December 6, 2009.

What is it about Hillary Clinton and conflict zones?

The secretary of State committed a major gaffe last year by giving a largely fictional account of a dangerous landing under gunfire on a Bosnian airstrip. Now, doubts have arisen over comments she made this week relating to Northern Ireland.

Although the new episode is unquestionably both less clear-cut and less significant than the Bosnia fiasco, it nonetheless has the potential to resurrect questions about whether Clinton has a tendency to overdramatize her foreign endeavors.

Her description seemed to illustrate just how far Northern Ireland had come from the first, fragile days of its peace process. The only problem is that it isn’t quite true.

In a speech to members of the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday, Clinton talked about her first visit to Belfast, which she made with her husband in November 1995. “We stayed at the Europa Hotel, as I have again this time, even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs,” she said.

The description seemed to illustrate just how far Northern Ireland had come from the first, fragile days of its peace process, and how long Mrs. Clinton had been a witness to its travails. The only problem is that it isn’t quite true, according to both the hotel’s manager at the time and the managing director of its parent company, who spoke independently of each other to The Daily Beast.

Howard Hastings, the managing director of Hastings Hotels, which owns the Europa, said that the secretary of State’s description was “not strictly accurate.” John Toner, the hotel’s general manager at the time of the Clinton visit, was more blunt, “I don’t know where she’s getting that from,” he said.

Hastings and Toner both noted that the last explosion to damage the hotel—which was once, infamously, the most bombed in Europe—occurred in May 1993, some two-and-a-half years before the Clinton visit. Hastings Hotels, a Northern Ireland group founded by Howard Hastings’ father, Sir William, bought it shortly afterward. A multimillion-dollar refurbishment followed and the hotel reopened in February 1994.

Toner and Hastings say that the then-first lady may have been confused by the fact that there was some work going on around the time of her visit, 21 months after the re-opening. But both men insisted that this work was, in Hastings’ words, the kind of “repair and refurbishment” commonplace at any hotel undergoing an overhaul, and was “not because of a recent bombing.”

Contemporaneous press accounts seem to give further credence to the idea that the hotel was in better shape than the secretary of State’s war-scarred description this week suggested. A Los Angeles Times report published on November 28, 1995, on the cusp of the presidential visit, referred to “a new beauty parlor in the oft-bombed but now refurbished Europa Hotel.” A story by the legendary, and now-deceased, New York Times reporter R.W. ‘Johnny’ Apple, published on December 1, 1995, mentioned that “the often-bombed Europa Hotel, where Mr. Clinton stayed tonight, has been refurbished.”

Neither of the men connected with the hotel has any ax to grind with the Clintons. The room in which the then-president and first lady stayed during their visit still bears the name “The Clinton Suite.” Toner said he was “impressed with [Hillary Clinton’s] genuine concern and interest in Northern Ireland” in a brief, private conversation with her at the time.

P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, insisted that there was nothing inaccurate in Clinton’s statement this week. “There was a renovation in progress that stemmed from the bombing and a change in ownership of the hotel. The secretary of State was not suggesting she was dodging bombs when she arrived at the hotel,” he said, recalling the May 1993 bombing. “We’ve talked to two people who were with the Clintons in 1995, and they say they were shown an area that was still restricted, where the bombing had been.”

Hastings said the only restrictions on access to parts of the hotel during the time of the Clinton visit would have been imposed by the presidential security team. But he said it had nothing to do with any bomb damage, and added that there were no “rooms with holes in the walls or no glass in the windows or anything like that.”

Clinton’s past accounts of her involvement in Northern Ireland have been the subject of heated debate. During her bid for the presidency last year, she told NPR that she had been “instrumental” in the peace process. She also claimed during a CNN interview that “I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland.”

Critics accused her of exaggerating her role, insisting that her involvement had been largely symbolic. The heavy lifting, they claimed, was done by her husband and by George Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader who, as U.S. Special Envoy, chaired the multiparty talks that eventually led to the 1998 peace accord known as the Good Friday Agreement.

David Trimble, who signed up to the agreement as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, told London’s Daily Telegraph last year that Hillary Clinton was a “wee bit silly” for inflating her involvement. “I don’t want to rain on the thing for her, but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player,” he added.

That flap was superseded by the Bosnian story. In March 2008, then-candidate Clinton told a dramatic tale of arriving in Tuzla 12 years earlier. She landed “under sniper fire,” she said, and her party “just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

News footage from the day was duly unearthed, showing no evidence of sniper fire and no apparent hurry to get Clinton or her daughter, Chelsea, who was accompanying her, to a less-exposed location.

“I made a mistake. That happens,” Clinton said during the resultant furor. “It proves I’m human—which, you know, for some people is a revelation.”

First published at The Daily Beast, October 14 2009

I remember two things above all: the cold and the crowds.

On January 20 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. The skies of Washington were clear and the air was frigid. People talked  about how much it all meant to them, but they did so through chattering teeth.

In the American capital and around the world, the excitement was intermingled with relief. The US had suffered precipitously as the administration of George W Bush squandered the global sympathy that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001.

The decline in the nation’s standing was not wholly attributable to an unpopular and poorly-executed war in Iraq. Bush’s overall approach mixed conceit and negligence in equal, disastrous measure. From the flagrant erosion of civil liberties to the dismal response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush had come to seem, to adapt Winston Churchill’s phrase, an immodest man who had much to be modest about.

Then, as the second term of his presidency wound down, something different began to stir. A little over a year before Obama’s inauguration, I stood in a hall in Des Moines, Iowa and watched American politics change before my eyes.

Iowa’s caucuses were the first contest in the Democratic primary process. The young and not-so-young, fired by an idealism that many people thought politics had lost forever, delivered a huge victory for Obama over Hillary Clinton.

Iowa’s population is largely rural-dwelling and white; African-Americans account for less than three per cent of the state’s people. But Iowa’s Democrats voted for a young, black first-term senator to be their standard-bearer. They tore down a racial wall that could never be re-erected. Obama’s first line to the ecstatic crowd that night was just about perfect: “They said this day would never come.”

The words echoed in my head as I watched him take the oath of office. During his speech, I turned around to look back down the National Mall. The crowd was two million-people strong. It stretched all the way to the Lincoln Memorial, about two miles in the distance. Cheers and applause rolled up the steps of the Capitol in great waves.

The national exuberance could not last, of course. So many problems were pressing that even Obama, in his inaugural address, talked about “this winter of our hardship.” Now, eleven months later, unemployment is over 10 per cent. The national debt is enormous and getting bigger.  The battle to force change through a sclerotic and dysfunctional body politic is hard.

Yet, for all that, much of the current, increasingly pessimistic conventional wisdom about Obama is wrong. The critics point to the decline in his poll ratings since his inauguration. But they fail to mention that the proportion of Americans who approve of his performance in office remains almost identical to the number who handed him his convincing election win last year.

He has brought forth substantive change in some areas, and planted the seeds of it in others. The writer Jacob Weisberg took on the nay-sayers in the online magazine Slate late last month: “This conventional wisdom about Obama’s first year isn’t just premature — it’s sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on January 20.”

But what lies on the other side of that anniversary, and in the years farther ahead?

Many of the changes Obama has already put in train should come to fruition in the near-future, helping the US and its natural allies regain an even keel.

It is perhaps a mark of success for the new president that the war in Iraq, for so long the dominant story in the international sphere, has tumbled down the public agenda. The US withdrawal from the country, announced by Obama in February, is well underway.

All front-line US combat troops will be out of Iraq by the end of August next year. A total withdrawal will take place by the end of 2011. When that happens, it will end a conflict that has cost America dearly in lives lost (almost 4,500) and dollars spent (well over $700 billion).

The end of the Iraq war will also begin to close a sore that had festered since 2003, poisoning US relations with the rest of the world.

If Iraq has receded among public concerns, the economic malaise is as central as ever.

Experts continue to worry about underlying trends but, for now, the worst appears to be over. The US recession was brought to an official end during the third quarter of this year. Recessions are defined as two or more successive quarters of negative growth. The US economy grew by 2.8 per cent between July and the end of September. When Obama pushed his $787 billion stimulus package through Congress earlier this year, he took flak from both the right and the left. Next year should bring further vindication.

Just as vitally for America’s prospects in the medium-term, Obama is on the cusp of a truly historic achievement. The prize of universal health care has shimmered just out of the reach of every Democratic president of the past sixty years. Obama has already got further along the road than anyone in a generation — including Bill Clinton, whose efforts on the issue failed ignominiously in 1993.

The final details are still to be hammered out, but it seems a better-than-even-money bet that the New Year will see legislation passed that will bring health coverage to 94 per cent of America’s legal residents. That achievement alone would earn Obama a prominent place in the history books. It would be the biggest breakthrough since President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 created Medicare, the government program that provides health care to the elderly.

Setting Iraq aside, the outlook on foreign affairs remains hard to forecast. Part of Obama’s international appeal has always been rooted in the belief that he would change the tone of America’s engagement with the rest of the world. He has already done so — in his landmark speech to the Muslim world in Cairo in June, for example.

But he has also displayed a puzzling lack of sure-footedness on the specifics of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. It will be several more years before the effectiveness of his approach can be properly judged in relation to foes like North Korea and Iran.

There are some reasons for real foreboding as the US looks to the future. The view that Obama and his economic team adopted upon taking office — that major government intervention was required to avert a second Great Depression — is backed up by many analysts. But the bill for the crisis — covering not just the stimulus, but the bail-outs of various major firms and the consequences of years of financial irresponsibility — is of a scarcely-conceivable magnitude.

The US national debt is now in excess of $12 trillion. Approximately $2 trillion of that was added this year alone. The New York Times noted last month that the US will spend $202 billion — equivalent to about three-quarters of Ireland’s entire GDP — merely servicing its debt this year. Even if fiscally conservative policies are adopted from here on, these interest payments are projected to rise to $700 billion a year by 2019.

The historian Niall Ferguson wrote in a recent issue of Newsweek that a failure to get the nation’s finances back under control could ultimately pose a bigger peril than anything else.

“If the United States doesn’t come up with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to ten years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power,” he wrote.

Not that military adventuring exactly lightens the load. Obama’s decision to significantly increase troop levels in Afghanistan — announced at a speech at the West Point military academy on December 1 — could yet come to determine his fate.

Obama has made a big wager that the war in Afghanistan can be won. Can it? What would such a victory look like? How will America succeed in a land that has consistently rebuffed outsiders, from the British in the 1840s to the Soviet Union’s Red Army in the 1980s? And, at a per annum cost of approximately $1 million per soldier, how will the economy take the strain?

To some, the biggest threat to American power in the medium-term does not come in the quasi-militaristic form of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but from economic competitors. None looms nearly so large as China.

China is by far America’s biggest creditor, its holdings amounting to around $1.5 trillion. The figure has risen vertiginously since the start of the decade when it was below $100 billion. The US may make noises about wanting China to improve its grim human rights record, but it is hard to stay on the moral high ground when you’re talking to your nation’s bank manager and your overdraft is sky-high.

China’s economic might continues to multiply at disconcerting speed. Its economy was one-eighth as large as that of the US in 2000. Now it is one-third of the size.

Not all of the growth is strictly indigenous. China’s advance has come in part because it has opened itself up as an outsourcing location after years of being effectively off-limits to international corporations. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the share of China’s exports that came from foreign-owned companies rose from a mere 1.9 per cent to 58.2 per cent in the twenty years to 2006. It is still rising.

Some Americans may take a kind of lukewarm comfort from the fact that their companies — and their consumers — are so central to China’s fortunes. If nothing else, these factors make it much less likely that the Chinese will call in their debts and capsize the American economy.

But the ramifications for Ireland are potentially huge and negative. Our boom was enormously dependent upon inward investment. Corporations were lured to our shores by an educated, tech-savvy work force and low corporate tax rates.

How will Ireland compete with China and other emerging powers like India? Those nations increasingly boast everything that Ireland has to offer — together with dirt-cheap labour.

From a broader perspective, we Europeans have grown accustomed to a world where the US is at the epicentre of power and the transatlantic relationship is therefore all-important. Are we ready — economically, culturally and psychologically — for a scenario in which China is rapidly ascending and the US is in slow, sad decline?

As the nation that dominated the 20th century peers into the second decade of the 21st, many details of the picture look ominous.

The author David Rothkopf admitted in Foreign Policy magazine recently: “For the first time in my life…I can see how America could be entering a period of irreversible decline in terms of its relative influence in the world. The deficits are too great. Demographics are creating a headwind. The economics of the global era are different from those of the industrial era and they don’t favour us.”

Perhaps the fears are overblown. America’s decline has, after all, been predicted before. In the 1980s, Japan was spoken of in the same way as China is now. It was going to consign American dominance to history’s dustbin.

It never came close. The Japanese economy atrophied while the US underlined its hegemony.

Perhaps the Chinese challenge will implode in the same way Japan’s did. Perhaps, as happened during the tech boom under Bill Clinton, the US economy will bounce back with a muscularity that surprises even the most bullish analysts.

But perhaps not.

In Barack Obama, the American people at least have a man at the helm who is worthy of the myriad challenges that face them. In the short term, despite what his detractors say, he is well-placed to be an effective, successful president.

But it will take another decade, and possibly longer, before the biggest questions can be put to rest. Does it lie within the power of Obama — or any president — to pull the United States back onto an upward trajectory? Or will his political epitaph ultimately be a tragic one: that he was the right man, but that he arrived too late upon the stage?

In fact, Stewart David Nozette (52) was allegedly trapped in an FBI sting. The person he believed to be recruiting him on behalf of Mossad was an undercover FBI agent. Mr Nozette was arrested on Monday. Prosecutors claim he twice deposited secret information in a post office box in return for several thousand dollars.

Court documents allege the undercover agent called Mr Nozette in early September and arranged to meet him at a Washington hotel. The meeting appears to have been covertly taped. Mr Nozette allegedly boasted “I had all the nuclear clearances.”

At the conclusion of another meeting the following day, Mr Nozette is said to have asked “repeatedly” when he would begin receiving payments, and was insistent “they don’t expect me to do this for free”.

In a statement announcing the arrest, the department of justice noted “the complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offence under US laws”. However, a number of questions still remain. From 1998 to 2008, Mr Nozette worked as a consultant for a state-owned Israeli aerospace company. Once a month, he answered questions from the company and received $225,000 in that period.

During the FBI sting, Mr Nozette reportedly told the man he believed to be a Mossad agent that he was surprised Israeli intelligence had not sought to recruit him earlier. He allegedly added: “I thought I was working for you already. I mean, that’s what I always thought, [the foreign company] was just a front.”

The company is believed to be Israel Aerospace Industries, though there is no evidence it is a front. Phone calls and e-mails to its representatives in the US and Israel were not returned yesterday.

The complaint filed against Mr Nozette also referred to a trip he made to an unnamed foreign country – not Israel – in January of this year. It stated a security officer noticed Mr Nozette had two “thumb” drives – small data storage devices also known as “flash” drives – among his belongings as he left Washington DC’s Dulles airport. When he returned three weeks later, a “thorough search” of his belongings did not turn up the thumb drives.

Such close attention, eight months before the FBI sting that resulted in Mr Nozette’s arrest, suggests he had been of interest to the authorities for some time.

Mr Nozette, a native of Chicago, ran a not-for-profit group called the Alliance for Competitive Technology. Through the company, he worked on research and development for a range of security-sensitive US agencies, most notably the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Darpa’s stated mission is “to maintain the technological superiority of the US military” and to “create technological surprise for our adversaries”. A Darpa spokesman declined to comment yesterday.

Mr Nozette also worked with the US Naval Research Laboratory and Nasa. Earlier in his career, during 1989 and 1990, he worked at the White House on the National Space Council, part of the executive office of ex-president George Bush snr.

The complaint against him states he held “security clearances as high as ‘top secret’” from 1989 until 2006, when he stopped working for the government. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

First published in The Irish Times, October 21 2009

Seán O’Neill (49), who lives in Pennsylvania, was sentenced on Wednesday on three counts of immigration fraud, one count of tax fraud and one count of illegally possessing a firearm silencer. In addition, O’Neill has been ordered to pay almost $400,000 (€266,000) in restitution to US tax authorities and a $60,000 fine.

It represents a precipitous fall for a man who seemed to have everything just three years ago. At the apex of his success, O’Neill was estimated to be worth about $13 million. He owned 17 properties across the US and in Ireland. His fortune was built primarily on a construction business; he also owned a restaurant and bar.

Unfortunately for O’Neill, his apparently charmed life was founded on a lie. In order to receive a green card from US immigration authorities in the 1980s, he concealed that he had been convicted of membership of the IRA’s youth wing, Fianna Éireann, in the North in 1977. He now faces deportation after he has served his time in jail.

The unravelling of O’Neill’s life began in an unusual and tragic way. He was regarded as an upstanding member of his community in a prosperous area on the outskirts of Philadelphia until 2006. That year, on a night when he and his wife were away, his son, Sean jnr, held a drink-fuelled party. The son, then 17, at one point produced a pistol owned by Mr O’Neill from beneath a mattress. In the ensuing horseplay, the gun was discharged, shooting a classmate in the face. The school friend, Scott Sheridan, also 17, died from his injuries.

It was during a search related to this incident that police discovered additional firearms and documents that referred to O’Neill’s arrest in the North.

O’Neill initially faced firearms charges in state court, which were dismissed in February 2008. But federal agents raided his 14,000sq ft home in the early hours of June 27th, 2008, handcuffed him in front of his wife, and set in train the series of events that led to this week’s sentencing.

Meanwhile, another tragedy took place. In September 2008, O’Neill’s daughter, Róisín, driving on the wrong side of the road and with a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit, crashed into a vehicle driven by a 63-year-old grandmother, Patricia Waggoner. Waggoner died at the scene.

Ms O’Neill’s lawyer, Vinvent DiFabio, said she would appear in court next month, most likely pleading guilty and receiving her sentence on the same day. The sentence, he said, was likely to be “something in the region” of five years.

“If ever my family needed me, it’s today,” O’Neill told the judge during his sentencing hearing. The sentence the judge imposed was significantly lighter than the prosecution had sought. They wanted O’Neill jailed for around three years and total financial penalties of more than $900,000 to be levied.

First published in The Irish Times, 23 October 2009