Latin America

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice deepens a diplomatic rift by skipping Argentina on her trip to Latin America.

The "carnal relations" that former Argentine foreign minister Guido di Tella helped to inaugurate between his country and the United States in the 1990s have long since cooled. Condi can't be bothered to give new President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner a peck on the cheek, much less do the tango -- just as President Bush didn't drop by to see outgoing President Nestor Kirchner on his trip to the region last year. It's easy to blame the break-up on the Kirchners' anti-American rhetoric and their embrace of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But that ignores the ripple effect of the Bush administration's decision seven years ago to pull the plug on an International Monetary Fund rescue package for Argentina, prompting the country to default on its debts and paving the path to power for the Kirchners. MORE

After Colombian forces killed a rebel leader on Ecuadorian soil, Hugo Chavez cut off diplomatic ties with Colombia and massed Venezuela's military along its border.

Venezuelan megalomaniac Hugo Chavez's dispatch of troops to the Colombian border is meant not just as an affront to the Colombians but to Colombia's ally, the United States. Chavez must have deep sense of inferiority, because Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez is everything Chavez is not. Indeed, handicapped for size and importance of the country, Colombian President Uribe is the most impressive and successful ruler in the democratic world. A quiet, workaholic, he is the opposite of a demagogue. If Pakistan or Iraq had an Uribe, they would both be increasingly out-of-the-news success stories.

Bush's foreign aid legacy

Institutions born of so-called "bipartisan efforts" should be judged guilty until proven innocent, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation is a bipartisan baby.  Four years ago, Congress created the MCC to revolutionize foreign aid by parceling it out countries that showed progress in political and economic reform.  In his State of the Union address last Monday, George W. Bush praised this hulking sloth of a bureaucracy, quite rightly, as one of the legacies of his administration. MORE