There are two major theories about why Mitt Romney is dropping in the polls. One is that Romney is a lousy candidate, unable to connect with people or make his case. The other is that Americans are finally beginning to see how radical the GOP has become and are repudiating it.Most Republicans hold to the first view, for obvious reasons. And their long knives are already out.Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan called the Romney campaign “incompetent” and “a rolling calamity.” Republican guru Will

OSAKA ― Japan is now confronting challenges at home and abroad that are as serious as any it has had to face since World War II’s end. Yet the Japanese public is displaying remarkable apathy. The country’s two major political parties, the governing Democratic Party of Japan and the Liberal Democratic Party recently chose their leaders, yet ordinary Japanese responded with a collective shrug. But Japan’s political system is unlikely to remain a matter of popular indifference for much longer.The D

WASHINGTON ― While the overlooked war in Afghanistan grinds on, a group of officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad are exploring a bare-bones strategy that would narrow each side’s demands to a set of minimum conditions for escaping the current diplomatic dead end. The aim is to create a pathway for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from a war that almost nobody sees as “winnable” by military force alone. The goal is a framework for political transition where each side’s demands are bo

NEWPORT BEACH ― It sounded like a really clever idea: Use a very public and sizeable threat to get bickering politicians to collaborate and compromise. Well, it has not worked so far, and the already-sizeable stakes just got bigger.No, I am not talking here about Europe’s debt crisis, decisive resolution of which still requires greater cooperation and shared responsibility, both within individual eurozone member states and between creditor and debtor countries. I am referring to the complex fisc

BERKELEY ― The first two components of the euro crisis ― a banking crisis that resulted from excessive leverage in both the public and private sectors, followed by a sharp fall in confidence in eurozone governments ― have been addressed successfully, or at least partly so. But that leaves the third, longest-term, and most dangerous factor underlying the crisis: the structural imbalance between the eurozone’s north and south.First, the good news: The fear that Europe’s banks could collapse, with

South Korean officials have recently realized that the United States is likely to try to forbid them from enriching uranium and expanding their country’s missile range, rather than leave these issues on the diplomatic back burner. Indeed, recent discreet talks, in which the U.S. has disregarded South Korean efforts to supplement the controversial U.S.-South Korea Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, which expires in March 2014, suggest that there are reasons to be deeply worried about the alliance’s f

As we enter the fourth quarter of 2012, two influential commentators have questioned whether Germany should exit the eurozone. Earlier this month, George Soros argued that Germany must either lead or leave the eurozone. This week, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf also considered the question and argued that Germany will have to pay a high price for her mercantilist policies. The fact that German Chancellor Merkel has come out openly to overrule the Bundesbank president on commitments to the