William Tucker is the author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey.

I'm hoping Republicans will soon wake up, stop fighting among themselves, and realize that Mitt Romney has the best chance of becoming the nation's next Ronald Reagan.

Everybody remembers Reagan for his single-mindedness in cutting federal spending and taking the government out of the central position in everyone's life. What they forget is that it was Reagan's temperament that made all this possible.

Think back to Reagan's famous rejoinder to Jimmy Carter in their first and only debate, "There you go again!" What was the significance of that? Carter had just finish a long, beady-eyed recitation about national health insurance, which, he said, promised "not inpatient care but outpatient care" with "an emphasis on hospital cost containment," and how Candidate Reagan, of course, was opposed to all this because he had opposed Medicare in 1964. Reagan stood shaking his head and laughing the whole time and when it finally came his turn, he sighed, "There you go again."

The audience laughed and why not? Carter's expressionless, robot-like recitation typified his whole presidency. He was obsessed with details. Reagan's genial response was that when he opposed Medicare in 1964 it was because he favored another piece of congressional legislation that relied less on government. But in a single moment, Reagan had also revealed Carter as a narrow-minded pedant while he was an affable, good-natured leader capable of keeping things in perspective. Voters liked what they saw and that ended Carter's Presidency.

Mitt Romney has a very similar temperament...

Steve Richards is chief political columnist for The Independent newspaper. 

At a time when many assumptions formed in the 1980s are being challenged, the Falklands is the source of renewed tension, another issue that can't just be confined to the recent past. The Falklands War was a defining event during that decade, the subject of instant mythologising and one of the few episodes in Margaret Thatcher's career highlighted in the film The Iron Lady.

What it defined is no longer quite so clear. As the ongoing economic crisis places an intense critical spotlight on the light regulation that began in the Thatcher era, there is a sudden wariness about the Falklands. What seemed to be a decisive military triumph for the Iron Lady is not so decisive as it seemed.

The tensions arise partly because the 30th anniversary of the conflict is only a few months away. In Argentina, the planned events here are seen as an act of provocation, so much so that the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has stressed they are a commemoration rather than a celebration. But in Argentina, other initiatives, such as the assignment of Prince William to the Falklands, are seen as part of a pattern in which the UK becomes more assertive while Argentina – with indications of robust support from nearby countries – feels the need to renew its claims to the islands...

Janet Daley is an American-born, British-based freelance journalist.

The air is filled with noisy outrage about the moral emergency of the day. We are, according to the leaders of every major political party, in the midst of a crisis of capitalism. However bountiful the free market system may have been at its best, it is now in such deep disrepute that any politician who wishes to remain credible must join in the general vilification.

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.

My, how the times have changed.

In 1992, ten years after Britain beat back an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and two years after the two sides resumed diplomatic relations, Argentine President Carlos Menem delivered a speech on the anniversary of the bloody conflict. "Sooner or later, maybe before the year 2000, we will recover the Malvinas Islands without shedding a drop of blood," he pledged, using his country's term for the South Atlantic islands off Argentina's eastern coast, which Britain has controlled since 1833. The Los Angeles Times observed at the time that both Britain and Argentina seemed eager to "negotiate patiently" on everything from trade to petroleum exploration to the conservation of fisheries around the Falklands.

Fast forward to 2012, the 30th anniversary of the war. Prince William, a Royal Air Force helicopter pilot, is flying to the Falklands tonight to begin a six-week mission as Britain prepares to dispatch an advanced warship to the islands, prompting Argentina's Foreign Ministry to declare that Britain is "militariz[ing]" the conflict and sending Queen Elizabeth II's grandson "in the uniform of a conquistador."

The row comes after Argentina persuaded a South American trading bloc to prevent ships flying the Falklands flag from docking in their ports, threatened to cut the only air link between the islands and South America, and started a "squid war" by instructing Argentine fishermen to catch the creatures (which, along with sheep, are critical to the archipelago's economy) before they reached the Falklands. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to these actions by accusing Argentina of "colonialism" since Falkland Islanders "want to remain British."

So what explains this bellicose, nationalistic behavior by both sides regarding a territory with a mere 3,000 inhabitants?..

Margaret Weiss is a research associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She wrote this commentary for The Daily Star.

The foreign policy of the United States is not a top concern for most Americans, who are struggling to make ends meet and are afflicted with growing election fever. However, in the Arab world Washington’s foreign policy has many feeling disappointed and abandoned as they continue to struggle more than a year into the Arab uprisings. Despite the initial enthusiasm for President Barack Obama, the administration’s reactive, incoherent policies toward the Arab uprisings have some Arabs reminiscing about the Bush years.

During a recent trip to Egypt, I heard the deputy head of a Cairo-based nongovernmental organization that champions racial, religious, gender and political tolerance mention that he and his friends made John McCain T-shirts before the 2008 U.S. presidential election. He explained that he evaluated U.S. presidents based on their efforts to spread democracy, and believed that President George W. Bush had put more pressure on the Egyptian government than Democratic presidents, because the Democrats were more concerned with maintaining good relations with Cairo. My source added that most Egyptians indisputably disliked Bush, but there was no love lost for Obama either. Furthermore, he believed a survey of Egyptian democracy activists would find that most preferred Bush to Obama.

Indeed, Egyptian human rights democracy advocate Hisham Kassem has been quoted saying that the Bush administration was the first to seriously address democratization in Egypt. According to Kassem, “The year 2005 was the best year my generation has seen. I am openly saying that without the [U.S.] pressure, there was no way that this progress would have happened.” And it is not just Egyptian liberals who hold this view. Muslim Brotherhood members have spoken about the benefits of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion, as well.

This sentiment exists elsewhere in the region…

Garland S. Tucker III is president and CEO of Triangle Capital Corporation and author of The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election.

On November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.

Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”...

Walter Zelman has a doctorate in American politics and is chairman of the Department of Public Health at Cal State Los Angeles.

Campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney continues to assert that his private-sector experience makes him particularly suited to the office of president. That experience, he emphasizes, would be central to his unique capacity to turn the economy around, keep it growing and create jobs. He may be right. But a review of recent U.S. history offers little evidence that private-sector experience is linked to presidential success.

Since 1901, 21 men have served as president; 16 had no real experience as a businessperson in the private sector. That latter group included the following: Theodore Roosevelt, who operated a cattle ranch in the Dakotas; Woodrow Wilson, who served as president of Princeton University; Harry Truman, who owned a haberdashery (he went bankrupt) for a few years in Kansas City, Mo.; and Ronald Reagan, who served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and as a spokesperson for General Electric. But none of these positions qualify as major private-sector business experience. None of the men ran a large business organization.

What most marks the pre-presidential careers of these 16 presidents is extensive public-sector experience, much of it in elective office. Some, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower(military), John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnsonand Bill Clinton, had pre-presidential careers that were almost exclusively in the public sector.

As a predictor of presidential success, public-sector experience has a mixed record...

Stephanie Coontz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."

As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now.

Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly....

True, there are more divorced people in the population than in 1960, but divorce rates have been falling for 30 years. It also appears that more individuals than in the past will remain unmarried all their lives — perhaps 15%, compared with the historical norm of 10%. But with more people marrying for the first time as late as their 60s, we can't even be sure of that. As gays and lesbians gain marriage rights, the proportion of married young adults may rise.

Still, the last half-century has seen a momentous change in the role that marriage plays in organizing lives. Marriage used to be almost mandatory, one of the first things people did when they left home. It was not a decision that required much deliberation or even deep knowledge of one's prospective partner. In the 1950s, the average bride and groom had known each other for only six months....

Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and a columnist for the NYT.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States....