Today, U.S. intelligence officials will give closed-door briefings to members of Congress about North Korea’s role in building a reactor in Syria. (Israel, it’s been confirmed, destroyed that nuclear facility with their air-strikes last September.)

Why are the briefings taking place now? This morning the New York Times’s David Sanger speculated that Vice President Cheney is trying to scuttle the six-party disarmament talks by highlighting Pyongyang’s proliferant behavior. Others have floated more intriguing theories. For example, Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks the Bush administration is releasing the information at this time to rescue its tentative deal with the North Koreans by letting them off the hook. “If it turns out we have them dead to rights -- that we have enough information on our own -- then we can eliminate this as a point of contention,” he says. “Maybe we don’t need to negotiate transparency with North Korea because we already know enough.” 

Perhaps it is in light of the Logan Act that White House Press Secretary Dana Perino emphasized, “The president believes that if president Carter wants to go, that he is doing so in his own private capacity, as a private citizen, he is not representing the United States.” It is all well and good for the White House to distance itself from the behavior of Jimmy Carter, but there is a limit to how far any American government can go in condemning the actions of a former president.

The station of ex-president carries a diplomatic heft, and no one has used it with more inelegance and opportunism than Jimmy Carter, whose sabotage of American foreign policy has not been limited to Republican presidents (see Bill Clinton and North Korea). By calling on the United States to include Hamas in peace talks, and by meeting with the leader of said terrorist group in the capital of a country with which the United States does not even maintain diplomatic relations, Carter undermines a crucial plank in America’s Middle East policy.

It's not to say we should forget the past, but an apology for slavery is a major distraction, given the dismal state of affairs -- lost jobs, home foreclosures, struggling minority students. Rather than apologize, we ought to do more about the plight of young African-American males, who seem more prone to crime, joblessness and hopelessness.

While some legislators sound supportive of the slavery apology resolution, it can easily be exploited by those on the fringe. It can be divisive. Already I can hear the arguments: "My ancestors never owned slaves. We didn't benefit from slavery, so we have nothing to apologize for. It's time for black folks to get over it."

They might be right this time. The timing is odd. Here we have a black man getting serious consideration for the White House. If Sen. Barack Obama were to become president, imagine how that might affect the wave of apologies for slavery. His election would mean so much symbolically to black people around the world, yet he has no ancestral link to slavery.

In the heart of the most ardent internationalist there now grows the feeling that it might just be good for Europe or South Korea to defend itself -- and for once take the flak that concrete action, not armchair moralizing, invites. Americans of every persuasion are beginning to think that a reduction in our global profile might be both profitable for ourselves and also good medicine for our friends -- like when 30-something-year-old children are finally asked to move out of the house and make their own car payments.

Still, the new isolationists and protectionists do not answer how the Westernized world would deal with China without American leadership and power. Who would contain lunatic regimes rising in South America, or Islamic terrorism, or petro-rich Middle Eastern autocracies seeking the bomb? What would be the global consequences of curtailing the lucrative, wide-open American market for India, China, and other emerging powers?

But then isolationism and protectionism never do evoke such long-term worries. They have always followed short-term outbursts of emotion that may feel good in the here and now but are sorely regretted later.

Ma Ying-jeou's victory in Taiwan's presidential election Saturday promises to usher in a period of relative calm in the island's turbulent relations with mainland China. Mr. Ma's Kuomintang Party is determined to end the bold and provocative policies that President Chen Shui-bian has pursued toward Beijing over the past eight years. Beijing and Washington will both be relieved to have a government committed to preserving the status quo in the Taiwan Strait rather than pushing the envelope on a transition from de facto to de jure independence.