Central Europe

The outrage in Poland over Obama’s passing remark is hard to exaggerate

Roger Cohen, in the New York Times, wonders whether Tehran this year, or Tiananmen 20 years ago, could have worked out the way a dozen popular uprisings ended across Central Europe in that miraculous autumn of 1989 did: with the good guys winning. He draws no hard conclusions — he’s musing aloud, not browbeating his readers — but it’s a thoughtful and typically eloquent piece by the columnist who is, this year, consistently running rings around other U.S. foreign-policy writers.

Twenty-one two Central and East European politicians of a certain (largely mid-90s) vintage, including eight former heads of state or government (including Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Mart Laar) and six former foreign-affairs ministers, write a letter to Barack Obama whose message can perhaps be summed up as, “Hey! Look over here!”