Harry Truman’s presidency illustrates the lasting impact of first impressions. For many Bush officials, Truman is a comforting role model—another wildly unpopular wartime leader who aimed big and is now viewed as one of the presidential greats. As Rice reflected, “When you’re at the beginning of a big historical transformation, it doesn’t look like you’re doing much right.†Bush himself invoked Truman at his 2006 West Point graduation speech, comparing the struggle against Communism to the war against Islamic radicalism and noting that “Like Americans in Truman’s day, we are laying the foundations for victory.†No one disputes that Bush’s aims are sweeping or that, like Truman, he seeks to transform international relations for a new enemy in a new era. Bush’s second inaugural proclaimed American foreign policy to be nothing less than spreading “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.†The difficulty of the task, he said, “is no excuse for avoiding it.†Ending tyranny would be “the concentrated work of generations.†As Rice noted, the president does not just defend the status quo.

When it comes to vindication, however, the Truman parallels fall short. History’s judgment of Harry Truman came early, not late. His greatest cold-war policies were recognized as triumphs from the start, and his failures remain failures to this day. Truman’s March 1947 containment speech to Congress was met with a standing ovation and press reports that instantly hailed it as a historic landmark in U.S. foreign policy. His European economic-recovery program, the Marshall Plan, also attracted widespread public support (thanks in large part to the administration’s own public-relations campaign) and produced impressive and fast results. In 1953, just five years after it began, the Marshall Plan formally ended, Europe was well on its way to economic recovery and Secretary of State George Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. At the same time, history has not reversed judgment about Truman’s foreign-policy failures. Nixon may have opened China, but Truman still lost it. For starving North Koreans or anyone who worries about Kim Jong-il’s nuclear weapons and crackpot tendencies, the Korean War is still searching for a happy ending.

Truman, like Bush, did face stormy opposition and plummeting public approval during his presidency. But his low popularity had many causes, and foreign policy was not the primary one. Postwar economic reconversion, high taxes, government spending, labor disputes, the firing of General Douglas MacArthur, the anti-Communist hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy and salacious corruption scandals including influence peddling with fur coats and deep freezers all helped to sour the public’s mood by 1952. In January, Truman’s public disapproval hit a whopping 67 percent, a record surpassed only by the current president. Notably, the same poll asked Americans what they believed were the most important issues in the 1952 presidential election. More said government waste and corruption than the Korean War. Republican Party leaders agreed, ranking corruption and wasteful government spending their top two campaign issues by overwhelming margins in a November 1951 Gallup poll. The Korean War ranked a distant fourth (behind taxes), and other foreign issues were even lower. Domestic policy, not foreign policy, was the administration’s greatest weakness and the Republicans’ best hope. Combating the “mess in Washington†became one of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s central campaign themes. The Republican presidential nominee made headlines and scored one of the biggest ovations of the campaign when he assailed the Truman administration as “barefaced looters†during an Indianapolis stump speech. The notion that Truman was drummed out of office for foreign-policy failures that were subsequently judged successes might be comforting, but it is not correct.

The euphoria that followed the destruction of Georgian’s $2 billion Army and the humiliation of President Saakashvili has dissolved. And for the first time since Vladimir Putin – and his muscled, uncompromising, and vindictive world view – came to power in 1999, serious voices are expressing doubts about his judgment.

They clearly feel that Russia has not emerged onto the world stage quite so authoritatively as Mr. Putin may have thought; the country has instead stumbled into a dangerous and debilitating trap.

A number of prominent Russian foreign policy analysts saw the recognition of the disputed territories coming and warned urgently against it. They include a highly experienced diplomat and former government minister, Alexei Adamishin. “Russia has every moral right to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” he wrote in an opinion piece beforehand. But the consequences will be “catastrophic.”

A couple of weeks earlier, Sergei Karaganov, of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations, urged the Kremlin to think carefully before recognizing the two secessionist states. Equally grim analyses have followed the announcement, and there are indirect signs of concern in the business community…. 

[Putin] trusts very few people. Aides say he makes policy on key issues – Georgia, Ukraine, NATO – himself, along with a small circle, and tends to improvise. He shows little interest in the Russian stock market, which has taken a battering since the outbreak of the Georgia crisis, while most of the mega-rich, many of them close associates, have attained their fortune by obeying one rule: Do exactly what Putin says.

In the past, everybody obeyed this rule, and many in the ruling elite were genuinely convinced that he was the right leader for these times. Now, doubts are creeping in, and people are bracing themselves for tense years. The strong man has started to show his weaknesses. 

The International Working Group of Sovereign Wealth Funds had to bridge significant differences between funds with different histories, domestic political environments and mandates.

People familiar with the discussions say some funds are more sophisticated and politically savvy than others, with differences surfacing between more established funds and relative newcomers. Some funds were also more resistant to financial transparency than others, a divide that did not necessarily tally with how long the funds had been in operation.

Some saw value in formalising transparency regimes in order to reassure their domestic audiences that the money was being wisely invested and accounted for. Others wanted to retain a greater degree of secrecy.

Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, pledged to introduce free-market measures by the beginning of next year in an unprecedented speech extolling the virtues of capitalism.

“After four months, everything will be in your hands,†he told Libyans. “Do not be scared … begin discussing this issue and prepare yourself … because this is a crucial and inescapable matter.â€

The leader, who on Monday celebrated the 39th anniversary of the coup which brought him to power, has presided for almost all these years over an economy controlled by the state, allowing only a small private sector which often came under pressure to limit its growth….

Mr Gaddafi appears to be preparing his country’s people for a smaller state role in the provision of services such as health and education.

“The money that we put in the education budget, I say let the Libyan people take it,†he said. “Put it in your pockets and teach your kids as you wish, you take responsibility.â€

He also said consumers would be able to demand better services from the private companies which will now provide telephone and electricity services.

IVAN:  OK, so how did this happen, Sergei? 

SERGEI:  Look, we had him in the back of the car, but then he was complaining about this spring that pokes out of the seat cushion… he had a point, that thing drove all the other accidental shooting victims really crazy.  Hits you right in the sciatica.  So we stopped the car and switched seats so he could sit in the front passenger seat.  And then I was doing that thing with my gun, you know, where I do my Sipowicz impersonation?

IVAN:  That always kills….

SERGEI:  Right!!  He was laughing, I was laughing, and then we hit that darn pothole on the road out of the Narzan airport, and BANG!  Just like in Pulp Fiction.   

IVAN:  OK, but you hit the pothole twice, right? 

SERGEI:  Oh, sure, because we retraced our steps to figure out what the heck happened the first time.

IVAN:  (snaps notebook shut) That’s good enough for me!

There are Republicans who are unhappy about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. Many are insiders who highly value — who overly value — “experience.†There are also sensible strategists who nervously note just how big a gamble McCain has taken.

But what was McCain’s alternative? To go quietly down to defeat, accepting a role as a bit player in The Barack Obama Story? McCain had to shake up the race, and once he was persuaded not to pick Joe Lieberman, which would have been one kind of gamble, he went all in with Sarah Palin.