Welcome to the thirty-sixth edition of the Pivot Points and Pivot Points blog e-newsletter, by Ed Crego, George Muñoz, and Frank Islam...

The Best Foreign Policy

With Benghazi, Syria, and the AP scandal all on the front burner, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, is making a trenchant case that the best foreign policy begins at home...

TIME article: http://bit.ly/best_foreign_haass
His new book:  http://bit.ly/haass_book

...raising the natural question: how does our domestic policy look in the light of the latest so-called "scandals"?

What We're Reading: Gerson, Ignatius, Dionne, Ourselves

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson argues these latest dust-ups reveal the same government heavy-handedness and overreach that Haass finds has infected our foreign policy...

http://bit.ly/gerson_heavyhand

...meanwhile Post reporter David Ignatius contends that what's really frightening about the AP and IRS imbroglios is not government's power but its impotence...

http://bit.ly/ignatius_impotence

...and columnist E.J. Dionne laments that the real scandal is the way "narrative" has been allowed to distract us from addressing much larger and more concrete problems our nation and its people are facing...

http://bit.ly/dionne_falsenarrative

...as for us, we're re-reading our pre-election column on foreign policy, struck by how little has been changed by events since then...

http://bit.ly/diplomacyforce

Happy Memorial Day, everyone--really!


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