In addition to being credit negative for Cypriot banks, the willingness to impose losses on bank depositors signals that burden-sharing for senior unsecured bank debt, and potentially deposits, is a viable and realisticpolicy option for governments in the euro area and perhaps elsewhere in Europe to limit the financial and political costs of bank bailouts.
We at the Center for Security Policy believe that a realistic appraisal of the potential risks to U.S. national security argues for a level of defense expenditure at least as high as that sought by President Bush.
If pressed, Israeli officials will admit that relying on U.S. troops to provide filtered intelligence according to timetables subject to U.S. policy is not a realistic alternative for Israel, whose survival hinges on early warning and rapid mobilization of reserve forces.
The Senator -- who is rapidly emerging as one of the Senate's most authoritative voices on issues critical to American foreign policy and national security -- also provided a principled and realistic assessment of the steps that must be taken in the Middle East in order to achieve real peace in the region.
It makes for unhappy but realistic reading for the US economy and it provides a starting point for a fantasy-free policy response to American decline as well as for the British.
These establishment foreign policy types claim to be "realists" - yet they advocate prescriptions that have no realistic chance whatsoever of durable success (see a powerful op.ed. in today's Wall Street Journal by Michael Rubin on the past and pending failures of their worldview).