Epstein Secrets

state isn't what it used to be. Frightening problems still flourish. There's always the danger of being sucked into hellholes like Iran, Syria, and North Korea. The Middle East seems more explosive than ever. China now looms as the challenging superpower. At seminal moments in American history, the secreta

depended to help protect its interests. They were constant, if not always agreeable, companions. Egypt's Mubarak, Jordan's King Hussein, Tunisia's Ben Ali, Yemen's Ali Saleh, Morocco's King Hassan II, Saudi Arabia's kings Fand and Abdullah. The PLO's Yasir Arafat rounded out the group photo. America'

China Precision is also subject to sanctions from the United States =or selling technologies that the United States says could help Iran, Syria=and North Korea develop unconventional weapons. A State Department spokesw=man said this month that American officials had expressed to the Turkish g=vernment "ser

y a desire for an Islamist system. In Egypt a=d Tunisia, Islamist movements capitalised on the fall of presidents Hosni =ubarak and Zine al- Abidine Ben Ali. However, even in these countries (espe=ially Egypt), their popularity declined rapidly. As the impact of the Arab uprisings reverberated through th

to isolate regimes that defy the international community in specific ways. Along with most of the world, the E.U. has imposed sanctions on Iran and North Korea to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it has been standard practice to maintain diplomatic and trading relations wit

nt was authoritarian but also determinedly secular and pro- Western. The cracks, however, were larger than anyone thought: President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali had carefully hidden the extent to which illness had weakened his control of the government; his ties with other centers of power, such as the mili

9 Right now, nobody has a successful formula for helping Pakistan — with its 100-plus nuclear weapons - arrest its systemic decline; or for coercing North Korea to slow its growing nuclear weapons and missile capabilities. So the administration gets the benefit of the doubt on those two perplexing problems. O

st. It's over: Enough of the nameless graves that whisper of horror, enough of the 20th-century police states in the 21st-century. Yes, it's over for Ben Ali and for Mubarak. It's over for Qaddafi, yes it is. How far it's over for the other Arab despots and autocrats, whether of the oxymoronic "republics"

gether. To be sure, Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali neither ran police states on the terrifying scale

ble to hard ones, even if the process takes some time. A moral argument can be made that monsters like Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and Kim Jong-il in North Korea should be overthrown any way they can, as fast as we can, regardless of the risk of short-term chaos. But that reasoning quickly loses its appeal whe