The marching chant by Chilean sailors in the video above is the kind of thing that probably worked better in the pre-YouTube era. CNN translates:

"Argentineans I will kill; Bolivians I will shoot; Peruvians I'll behead."

The government has opened an investigation into the incident after the video surfaced, prompting complaints from the Argentinian, Bolivian, and Peruvian governments. The chant is likely to be particularly offensive to Bolivians, who are locked in a long-running dispute with Chile over the coastline they say was taken from them during a war in the late 19th century.

Veterans say the chant has been around for decades. 

While the debate over the use of drones overseas plays out in Washington, some groups in the U.S. are pushing for action on the local level. On Monday, the city of Charlotteville, VA became the first municipality in the country to pass legislation restricting the use of drones:

The resolution means that Charlottesville will be a no-drone zone and the use of drones for surveillance and other uses will not be allowed.

The law is based on model legislation prepared by the Rutherford Institute, a libertarian group based in the city. According to the Institute's website, the law places a 2-year moratorium on the use of drones in the city limits and "urges the Virginia General Assembly to prevent police agencies from utilizing drones outfitted with anti-personnel devices such as tasers and tear gas and prohibit the government from using data recorded via police spy drones in criminal prosecutions."

They didn't have long to wait. On Tuesday, the Virginia legislature passed a bill that would bar state and local agencies from using drones for two years. Governor and rising GOP star Bob McDonell, who has supported the use of drones by law enforcement in the past, has not yet decided whether he will sign the bill.

The obvious comparison here is to the "nuclear-free zone" ordinances passed by many left-leaning cities, including my old town of Oberlin, Ohio during the 1980s. The success of these was pretty mixed -- Berkeley's law, for instance, has done nothing to stop the nuclear research going on at the university in the city but has been criticized by some for putting onerous restrictions the city government's purchasing decisions.

Unlike nukes, of course, it's not hard to imagine applications for drones at a local level. The Virgina laws may be a prelude of political disputes to come. And in a state with stark political divisions, drone concerns also appear to be remarkably bipartisan.

NBC News has revealed a 16-page Justice Department memo laying out the conditions under which the government can authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen. Mark Ambinder has a good summary of the memo, which essentially says the person must represent an "imminent threat" of an attack in the United States and must be in a place where capturing them must be infeasible. Spencer Ackerman looks into the increasingly flexible definition of "imminence" here. 

Some readers might be confused about why American al Qaeda members such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan are still U.S. citizens. You may have noticed text on your passport noting that you  "may lose your U.S. citizenship" by "serving in the armed forces of a foreign state." Why isn't joining a terrorist organization and advocating attacks against the United States grounds for losing your citizenship?

Ironically, it's thanks to a 1967 Supreme Court case involving an Israeli-American artist.  In a 2011 explainer on a somewhat related topic, I wrote: 

In the 1967 case Afroyim v. Rusk, the Supreme Court ruled that under the 14th amendment, U.S. citizens cannot be involuntarily stripped of their citizenship. (That case involved a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen who had his U.S. citizenship revoked after voting in an Israeli election, but the precedent applies to military service as well.)  

Since Afroyim, it's been nearly impossible for someone to be involuntarily stripped of U.S. citizenship. Even if you join a foreign army fighting against the United States, the law says you will only lose your citizenship if you do so "with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality." That intention can be tough to prove, and in Awlaki's case, the administration made no effort to do so. 

GOP House members have introduced legislation to investigate whether joining a terrorist organization constitutes a renunciation of citizenship. But frankly, given that U.S. citizenship doesn't seem to provide much protection when a drone has you in its sights, I'm not sure there would be any point. 

The North Korean gulag, which popped up this week on Google Maps, has incited a smarty-pants insurgency. As Passport reported yesterday, the glib "user reviews" of locations in the isolated totalitarian state are rolling in. Consider what virtual tourists have written about the notorious Camp 14, whose image is now just a click away.

"Man, I loved this place! The public executions were amazing!" observed Patrick.

"Hands down best place I have ever visited! Definitely would recommend this place for anybody who wants to have the full North Korean experience," opined Bradley.

Satellite imagery, citizen cartography, and Google mapping technology have enabled everyone with an attitude and an Internet connection to rubberneck a human-rights catastrophe -- and leave behind an ironic apercu. I happen to have written a totally not ironic book about a boy who was born and bred in Camp 14. Guards chose his parents, ordered them to have sex and then raised Shin Dong-hyuk to be their disposable slave.

He was starved, tortured, and forced to witness the execution of his mother and his brother. He escaped in 2005, but he still struggles to understand what it means to be a human being. Western governments and human rights groups estimate there as many as 200,000 prisoners in five or six sprawling political labor camps in North Korea.

Shin finds nothing amusing about the gulag images now available on Google Maps (or in the far more detailed satellite photographs that Shin has annotated on Google Earth).

But he can put up with black humor. At least the easy and instantaneous availability of visual evidence on Google is helping to build momentum for an investigation into crimes committed in the camps over the past half a century. The images dovetail with the testimony of 60 former camp prisoners. Their stories -- and satellite photographs they have annotated -- have been published in a 200-page report called Hidden Gulag.

Policymakers seem to be paying more attention. Secretary of State John Kerry, in his confirmation hearing last week, said global leadership means "speaking out for the prisoners of gulags in North Korea."

More urgently, the chief human rights official at the United Nations, Navi Pillay, said in mid-January that the time has come for a full-fledged international inquiry.

"The highly developed system of international human rights protection that has had at least some positive impact in almost every country in the world seems to have bypassed [North Korea]," Pillay said. "I believe an in-depth inquiry into one of the worst -- but least understood and reported -- human rights situations is not only fully justified, but long overdue."

North Korea has for years flatly refused to cooperate with U.N. questions about the camps. It has refused to allow the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights to visit the country. In a recent statement, the official Korean Central News Agency described reports of concentration camps in the North as "fictions."

Pillay's demand for an investigation will soon go before the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council, which meets in Geneva in February and March. There is a good chance that it will actually go somewhere. China, Russia, and Cuba -- which have defended North Korea in the past -- will not be on the council this year. And Japan last week made clear that it would push for the inquiry.

An international investigation, of course, is unlikely to change the way North Korea does business. The country's young dictator, Kim Jong Un, seems in no mood to accept criticism. When the U.N. Security Council (with the support of China and Russia) approved new sanctions last week against Pyongyang for its launch of a long-range missile, Kim's government threatened to explode a third nuclear device.

But that should not matter. Anything that focuses public attention on the camps is worthwhile. Pillay noted that nuclear weapons and long-range missiles have for too long "overshadowed the deplorable human rights situation in [North Korea], which in one way or another affects almost the entire population and has no parallel anywhere else in the world."

Google Maps of the gulag have the potential to focus world attention on North Korea as never before -- even if some of that attention is snarky. Smart-aleck awareness is better than ignorance.

Blaine Harden, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of Escape from Camp 14.          

Said al-Shihri is dead again, maybe this time for good. As the deputy emir of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, he is the highest ranking official in AQAP to be killed since the organization emerged in January 2009. He's had some near misses since then, and sources in the Yemeni military have been known to jump the gun in claiming his death. This time the news has been issued by the Yemeni government and its state news agency, and been confirmed by Mohammed Albasha, a spokesman for the Yemeni embassy in Washington.

Shihri was last reported killed in September 2011. We wrote about him at the time:

Shihri, who went by the pseudonym Abu Sufyan al-Azdi, had fought in Afghanistan and Chechnya before being captured by U.S. forces in December 2001, soon after returning to Afghanistan. After several years of detention at Guantanamo Bay, Shihri went through a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia and was released in September, 2008. Four months later, he appeared in a video announcing the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an aggressive offshoot led by a former bin Laden aide Nasir al-Wuhayshi, which quickly gained the attention of Western journalists and the intelligence community with a series of high-profile attempted attacks and flashy online periodicals.

Shihri is believed to have helped plan a 2009 assassination attempt against Saudi prince Muhammad bin Nayif, then-head of Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism program and a proponent of the jihadi rehabilitation program Shihri underwent. He also worked to raise funds and recruits from Saudi Arabia. Some of his efforts were met with criticism from within the al Qaeda network. Documents recovered from bin Laden's safehouse in Abottabad include a letter from bin Laden criticizing Shihri's communiqués demanding the release of a Saudi fundraiser for AQAP, and suggesting that the al Qaeda franchise clear their press releases with al Qaeda Central.

AQAP, though, seems to have made it a point to assert its independence from al Qaeda central command. In the same letter, bin Laden also advised against trying to hold territory in Yemen to establish an Islamic emirate -- a suggestion the AQAP leadership pointedly disregarded. Bin Laden's reasoning that it would leave AQAP tied to targets and exposed proved true.

AQAP disregarded those instructions and -- in concert with a more locally-focused affiliate organization -- briefly occupied portions of Jaar and Abyan provinces, including the town of Zinjibar. They were driven out by a joint U.S.-Yemeni campaign in the spring of last year. Since then, the organization has been scattered. Airstrikes have targeted suspected AQAP members in Hadramawt, a large, sparsely populated province east of AQAP's former stronghold. Shihri was reportedly wounded in Yemen's northern Saada governorate, where AQAP has engaged in sectarian clashes with the Houthis, a tribal-religious group agitating for government autonomy.

Unconfirmed rumors of Shihri's death have been circulating for several days, and the circumstances of his death remain murky. According to the Yemeni government, Shihri was seriously wounded in Saada on November 28. The Yemeni government did not comment on the nature of the attack, and refrains from discussing clandestine U.S. operations on Yemeni soil. After the strike, Shihri then slipped into a coma and later died and was buried by AQAP. As with previous reports of Shihri's death, it should probably be taken with a grain of salt until confirmed by AQAP. Or denied by Shihri himself, as he has done before.

Back in December, after Queen Elizabeth attended a Cabinet meeting -- the first British monarch to do so since the American revolution -- I wrote a half-serious post wondering what's actually keeping her from taking back political power.  But according to a Guardian investigation, she may already have more than most people realized: 

Whitehall papers prepared by Cabinet Office lawyers show that overall at least 39 bills have been subject to the most senior royals' little-known power to consent to or block new laws. They also reveal the power has been used to torpedo proposed legislation relating to decisions about the country going to war.

The internal Whitehall pamphlet was only released following a court order and shows ministers and civil servants are obliged to consult the Queen and Prince Charles in greater detail and over more areas of legislation than was previously understood.

The new laws that were required to receive the seal of approval from the Queen or Prince Charles cover issues from higher education and paternity pay to identity cards and child maintenance. In one instance the Queen completely vetoed the Military Actions Against Iraq Bill in 1999, a private member's bill that sought to transfer the power to authorise military strikes against Iraq from the monarch to parliament. She was even asked to consent to the Civil Partnership Act 2004 because it contained a declaration about the validity of a civil partnership that would bind her.

Prince Charles has been asked for consent on 20 pieces of legislation. The law gives royal family power to review laws affecting their "hereditary revenues, personal property or personal interests of the Crown," though apparently those interests have been interpreted pretty widely, as the Guardian reports that the Queen's consent has been sought for bills dealing with subjects such as corporate manslaughter and child support payments.

For the past week or so, Beijing has suffered from some of the worst pollution it has seen in years. The pollution levels seemed to peak on Saturday when the U.S. Embassy in Beijing's popular @BeijingAir twitter feed, which uses standards from the Environmental Protection Agency, posted a reading of 755 on the Air Quality Index standard. The scale only goes up to 500. Ed Wong in the New York Times reported that "levels between 301 and 500 are ‘Hazardous,' meaning people should avoid all outdoor activity. The World Health Organization has standards that judge a score above 500 to be more than 20 times the level of particulate matter in the air deemed safe."

Three quick points:

1. What's different this time?

Besides the scale; which, though depressing, is not unprecedented, Chinese media is more openly reporting on the weather. This is cannibalized from an email from a friend in Beijing, who wants to remain anonymous:  

China's state broadcaster CCTV used to call pollution "heavy fog" (dawu) they're now using the term that means something close to "haze". (wumai) On Friday they dedicated a surprising amount of time to the issue, and a Jan. 12 article on the Chinese weather service website reported that the air pollution was higher than the index is designed to handle.

The friend in Beijing also mentioned changing attitudes among Chinese towards pollution:

"Before the outrage over the discrepancy between official statistics, American embassy PM2.5 statistics, and individual perceptions of pollution, I had not one example of someone using the Chinese word for haze in casual conversation nor in weather reports. With this first bout of bad winter pollution I am shocked by the level of coverage but more so that air pollution is no longer "heavy fog" but now "haze."

PM 2.5 refers to the smaller polluting particles that have not typically been included in government air quality statistics. This Wall Street Journal blog post offers a comprehensive explanation of the term and how it entered the Chinese lexicon, as well as further examples of state media referring to China's ivory skies.  

2. How do foreigners deal with the pollution?

Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a Beijing-based correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, writes about her family rules: "Above 100, and the air purifiers -- all four of them -- go on. Above 200, we wear face masks outdoors. Above 300 and no one exercises or plays outside, even with a face mask on. Above 500 and we try not to go out at all."

For my last 2+years in Beijing I lived in an apartment that, when I leaned out the window, had an unobstructed view of the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, a pair of roughly 100 feet high structures that were just over 2 miles away. When I could see the towers, I would run outside; otherwise, no deal.

3. What do you call pollution this gross?

Ed Wong writes of a day "when all of Beijing looked like an airport smokers' lounge," and cited Beijing residents online described the air as "postapocalyptic," "terrifying" and "beyond belief." The second worst day I remember in China, the skies were the color of gargled milk. The worst day the sky managed to turn colorless.

A 15-year-old Icelandic girl is suing the state for the right to use her own name:

In a country comfortable with a firm state role, most people don’t question the Personal Names Register, a list of 1,712 male names and 1,853 female names that fit Icelandic grammar and pronunciation rules and that officials maintain will protect children from embarrassment. Parents can take from the list or apply to a special committee that has the power to say yea or nay.

Blaer Bjarkardottir -- the girl filing the suit -- is a particularly good test case since her name comes from a female character in a novel by Halldor Laxness, the nationally beloved Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author. It's a bit like a French girl not being allowed to be named Cosette, and the government might be more receptive to Blaer than they were to the conceptual artist who wanted to be called "Curver" are few years ago.

Iceland has one of the stricter naming regimes, but it's not the only country where Apples, Suris, and Blue Ivys would not be tolerated.

Swedish children's names must meet with the approval of the country's tax authorities. Past offenders have included kids named Metallica, Ikea, and Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced Albin). Interestingly, they were OK with "Google."

German children "must be given names that clearly denote gender and they cannot be given family names as first names," and there are complicated restrictions on combining last names with hyphens.

Danish parents must pick a name from an approved list of "7,000 mostly West European and English names -- 3,000 for boys, 4,000 for girls." Recently, a few non-European names such as Ali and Hassan have been added to accommodate immigrants. 

It's not just the Northern Europeans. China has a law against names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages, and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages, which was bad news for the parents who tried to name their kid "@" in 2007.

As recently as the 1960s, French children had to be named after Catholic saints thanks to a Napoleon-era law. The regulation was eventually relaxed thanks to legal appeals from the Breton community. 

The rest of these countries will presumably loosen up eventually thanks to immigration, globalization, shifting gender norms, and pop culture. But perhaps not soon enough for young Blaer, who is still referred to unceremoniously as "stulka," or "girl," on her official documents. 

It's a little hard to believe now, but during the 1990s, Gerard Depardieu was probably France's biggest international star, representing a quintessentially French archetype for moviegoers around the world. But the legion d'honneur winner and Oscar nominee's legacy in his home country is a bit more complicated now after he announced he was renouncing his French citizenship and has now -- apparently -- been granted a Russian passport by order of Vladimir Putin himself. 

In the last month, Depardieu has become the public face of France's tax exiles, wealthy citizens who have moved to places like Brussels and Switzerland to flee the steep taxe rates -- up to 75 percent -- that President Francois Hollande is looking those with an income of more than more than €1 million. (In an FP piece last August, former governor Haley Barbour suggested Mississippi as a destination for France disaffected 1 percenters. Strangely, Depardieu doesn't seem to have considered the Hospitality State.)

Depardieu decided to take the extra step of giving up his French passport last month after Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called his decision to relocate to Belgium "shabby" and not "patriotic." During a televised press conference a few weeks ago, Putin -- seemingly joking -- suggested that Russia's arms would be open to Depardieu and the French actor apparently took him up on the offer:

[O]n Thursday, the Kremlin announced that Mr. Putin had kept his promise and had signed a decree making Mr. Depardieu a citizen of Russia.

A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri Peskov, said that Mr. Depardieu had recently applied for citizenship, and that it was granted in honor of his cultural achievements.

“The thing is that Depardieu has been a part of large film projects and has acted many parts, including the part of Rasputin,” Mr. Peskov told the Interfax news agency. Referring to a television movie about the mad monk, he added, “This film has not been shown here, but it is a very bold and innovative interpretation of the character.”

Depardieu is likely attracted by Russia's 13 percent income tax. There are places in the world with even lower rates -- some Gulf States and Carribean Islands have no income tax at all -- but they presumably wouldn't be as enthusiastic about making him a citizen. (Given the number of Russian billionaires who have fled the country since Putin came to power, he must relish the opportunity to claim a few well-heeled refugees from Western Europe.) The actor hasn't decided for sure on moving to Russia -- he's reportedly also considering staying in Belgium or moving to Montenegro.

Depardieu also likely has few objections to Putin's human rights record, as he has also appeared at the birthday of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov and has agreed to star in a movie written by Gulnara Karimova -- the president of Uzbekistan's socialite daughter. Given Depardieu's recent citizenship troubles, a post-Soviet remake of Green Card might be timely.

Christmas, it seems, came early for Western governments looking to strike a blow about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Following reports that former Syrian spokesman Jihad Makdissi had fled to Washington, a well-known activist released private Twitter messages that show Makdissi had been in contact for months with the opposition.

"Do you think that I am blind to the heroic actions of the Syrian people?" Makdissi wrote to Rami Jarrah, an activist who has worked to disseminate Syrian citizen journalism, on July 21. "The main problem that prevents me or I can say most Syrian diplomats from openly joining the movement are the opposition ‘representatives'."

Makdissi, a former diplomat at the Syrian embassy in London and a member of the country's Christian minority, had been the face of the Syrian regime to the English-speaking world. In early December, he abruptly disappeared from public view amidst reports that he had defected or, according to the Syrian government's narrative, taken a three-month administrative leave. On Dec. 24, the Guardian's Martin Chulov reported that Makdissi had indeed defected and was in Washington, where he was debriefing U.S. intelligence officials about the thinking within President Bashar al-Assad's regime as it attempts to crush the 21-month revolt.

The messages released by Jarrah show two conversations: His first conversation with Makdissi on July 7, and then a running dialogue that stretches from July 20 to July 22. Jarrah introduced himself as someone who had been arrested for attending peaceful demonstrations, and subsequently beaten and falsely told by Syrian intelligence agencies that his wife had been raped. Makdissi refused to endorse Jarrah's version of events in that first conversation, but his rhetoric was a far cry from the regime's hardline rhetoric.

"We are not perfect Rami but we need to have faith in new Syria," he wrote. "We need all to Support the political process."

By July 21, however, Makdissi was even more receptive to Jarrah's suggestions that he abandon the government. Between the two conversations, the regime had been shaken by a July 18 bombing in Damascus that had killed a number of figures in the regime's inner circle, including Assad's brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, and intelligence chief Hisham Ikhtiyar.

"When I see that I am not able to help stop the bloodshed from my position I will leave," Makdissi wrote on July 21. He followed that up with a message on July 22, saying that he would take Jarrah's suggestions "into consideration."

A recurring theme of the conversations is both Makdissi and Jarrah's frustration with the Syrian National Council, then the primary coalition of opposition groups. Makdissi assailed the opposition's "childish political behavior," and said that leaving his post would not mean joining their ranks.

The $1 million question is whether Makdissi solely corresponded with activists such as Jarrah back in July - or whether he also reached out to anti-Assad governments at the time. Makdissi visited New York in October for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly - while much of this tale remains murky, the trip could have presented him with a chance to reach out to the diplomats and intelligence officials who now seem to be benefiting from his defection.  

I think we can add Hugo Chavez to the list of Obama endorsements that Ohioans won't be seeing in the president's campaign ads: 

"If I were American, I'd vote for Obama," Chavez said in a televised interview that aired Sunday.

The Venezuelan leader called Obama "a good guy" and said if the U.S. president were a Venezuelan, "I think ... he'd vote for Chavez."

Not surprisingly, Romney supporters are gleefully publicizing the endorsement.

No other leaders have have been quite as blatant in picking a candidate in the U.S. election. After all, they're going to have to deal with whoever gets elected and generally duck the question when asked. (See Hamid Karzai's diplomatic answer to Wolf Blitzer: " It's for the American people to decide their president. I like them both and have worked well with both.") But a number of other leaders have dropped some hints about who they'd rather see in the White House in November. 

Probably leaning Obama:

Francois Hollande: The French president was not exactly subtle when asked about the U.S. election in New York last week. "I'm careful to say nothing because you can imagine if a Socialist were to support one of the two candidates that might be to his detriment," he said. He then quipped: : “So I suppose I should endorse Mitt Romney. But I won’t.”

Hollande may be a socialist, but Obama fandom seems to cut accross party lines in France. Nicolas Sarkozy set a precedent for this sort of thing, when he essentially endorsed Obama in 2008.  He also said of Obama's mideast peace efforts in March, "President Obama, who is a very great president, won't take the initiative before he's re-elected -- and I hope he will be."

David Cameron: Conservatives on either side of the pond hoping for Thatcher-Reagan II if Romney is elected might be disappointed. From all the signals we've gotten, Cameron seems to be an Obama man. Visiting the United States in March, Cameron praised the president for his  “strength, moral authority, and wisdom" as well as his "strong and beautiful words." The British tabloids had a field day over Cameron's "fawning" after taking in a basketball game with the president and U.S. conservatives complained about Camerons"unprecedented" Republican leaders while in Washington. Then came the GOP candidate's visit to London and the series of gaffes that came to be known as "Romneyshambles." Cameron, not surprisingly, differed with Romney's doubts about whether Britain could successfully come together to "celebrate the Olympic moment," saying, "We'll show the world we've not only come together as a United Kingdom but are extremely good at welcoming people from across the world." (London mayor Boris Johnson was a lot more blunt.)

Vladimir Putin: Putin was the only foreign leader mentioned by name in Romney's convention speech, so it makes sense that he takes the U.S. race a bit personally. The Russian president suggested in an interview with the satellite network RT that Obama would probably be easier to work with than the candidate who has described his country as America's "number one gepolitical foe." “Is it possible to find a solution to the problem, if current President Obama is re-elected for a second term? Theoretically, yes,”Putin said. He continued: "My feeling is that he is a very honest man, and that he sincerely wants to make many good changes. But can he do it? Will they let him do it?”

He has also paid a backhanded compliment to Romney: “I’m grateful to him for formulating his stance so clearly because he has once again proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems... The most important thing for us is that even if he doesn’t win now, he or a person with similar views may come to power in four years. We must take that into consideration while dealing with security issues for a long perspective.”

Probably leaning Romney:

Benjamin Netanyahu: Romney has made his support for Netanyahu, whom he has known since the 1970s, a centerpiece of his campaign. Anonymous sources close to Netanyahu say would prefer to see Romney in the White House. As Romney notes in his now infamous hidden camera fundraising speech, some of his campaign consultants also worked for Netanyahu and the two share a number of major donors as well. All the same, Netanyahu has denied that his recent comments asserting that Obama has no "moral right" to prevent Israel from attacking Iran were not meant to undermind the adminsitration. "What's guiding me is not the election in the United States but the centrifuges in Iran,"he recently told an Israeli newspaper. This hasn't really satisfied his American critics. 

Donald Tusk/Lech Walesa: As recently as 2011, despite past disagreements over issues like the planned missile defense system in Poland, Tusk told Obama  “We feel that you are one of us” during a visit to Poland. But this May, Tusk responded with rare vitriol to a reference made by the president to "Polish death camps" -- as opposed to Nazi death camps located in Poland -- during a White House ceremony. Tusk said the remarks smacked of " ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions" and rejected the White House's explanation that the president has simply "misspoke." Tusk met with Romney during the GOP candidate's trip to Poland in July but hasn't said anything that can be construed as an endorsement of either side.

Former Polish President and anticommunist icon Lech Walesa was not so subtle, telling Romney, “I wish you to be successful because this success is needed to the United States, of course, but to Europe and the rest of the world, too." Walesa had refused to meet with Obama in 2011. Romney has made confronting Russia a centerpiece of his foreign policy and has accused Obama of abandoning Poland in the name of the "reset" with the Kremlin. Though feelings toward the U.S. haven't really changed much in Poland in recent years. 

Leaning Robot:

Fidel Castro:Back in 2008, Castro called Obama  "more intelligent, refined, and even-handed" than John McCain. But this time around, he has argued that a robot would do a better job preventing "a war that would end the life of our species". (Jokes about his personality aside, Castro's no fan of Mitt Romney. He says Republicans have "more nuclear arms on their backs than ideas for peace in their heads.") Really, he just seems excited about the robot idea, writing,  "I'm sure 90 percent of voting Americans, especially Hispanics, blacks, and the growing number of impoverished middle class, would vote for the robot."

Am I missing any endorsements or near endorsements? Write them in the comments. 

At the Democratic convention in Charlotte on Thursday evening, Vice President Joe Biden recycled a slogan he's often repeated on the campaign trail. "Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive," he reminded a roaring crowd.

The line is more than just a crowd-pleaser. As Democratic pollster Jeremy Rosner notes, the fact that half of Biden's distilled pitch relates to foreign policy speaks to the rare advantage the Democratic Party has on national security in 2012, thanks to accomplishments such as ending the war in Iraq and killing Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. An Ipsos/Reuters poll last month found that 51 percent of registered voters believe Barack Obama is stronger on foreign policy than Mitt Romney, while 35 percent believe the Republican candidate has the edge. The president also has a 47-38 advantage on national security and a 50-35 advantage on the war on terror.

"This is not so entrenched in the DNA of the modern Democratic Party," Rosner tells Foreign Policy. He points out that when his firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, asked respondents at the end of 2003 which party would do a better job on national security, 54 percent selected the GOP, while 25 percent chose the Democrats (in the 2004 election, George W. Bush racked up double-digit leads over John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, on Iraq and terrorism). That 30-point gap narrowed at times during the 2008 election, Rosner adds, and now the balance has shifted in the other direction. 

Rosner says the last time a Democratic presidential candidate enjoyed such a foreign-policy advantage was 1964, when Lyndon Johnson argued that he was far more capable than Republican challenger Barry Goldwater of navigating the Cold War and averting a nuclear crisis. On the campaign trail, Goldwater had gotten himself into trouble for saying that America's intercontinental missiles were "not dependable" (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara claimed the comment was "damaging to the national security") and that NATO should amass a stockpile of "small conventional nuclear weapons" ("How 'conventional' was the 'small' weapon over Hiroshima?" retorted Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance).

The low point for Goldwater was the Johnson campaign's famous "Daisy" ad, in which images of a little girl picking petals gave way to a mushroom cloud, as Johnson warned of the deadly stakes of nuclear war and a sober announcer encouraged Americans to vote for the president. In his convention speech, Johnson made sure to trumpet his foreign-policy credentials:

I report tonight as President of the United States and as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces on the strength of your country, and I tell you that it is greater than any adversary. I assure you that it is greater than the combined might of all the nations, in all the wars, in all the history of this planet. And I report our superiority is growing....

There is no place in today's world for weakness. But there is also no place in today's world for recklessness. We cannot act rashly with the nuclear weapons that could destroy us all.

Just four years later, the Democratic advantage on national security had subsided as the Vietnam War soured. But the Democrats sure were brimming with confidence (and wisecracks) again on the final night of this year's convention. Just look at some of the rhetoric from Thursday's speeches. Here's Obama:

So now we have a choice. My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy.

But from all that we've seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.

After all, you don't call Russia our number one enemy -- not al-Qaeda, Russia -- unless you're still stuck in a Cold War mind warp.  

You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.

And Biden:

Bravery resides in the heart of Barack Obama, and time and time again I witnessed him summon it. This man has courage in his soul, compassion in his heart, and a spine of steel.

Kerry, meanwhile, chastised Romney for not mentioning the U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan in his convention speech, and called the GOP candidate and his running mate, Paul Ryan, "the most inexperienced foreign-policy twosome to run for president and vice president in decades." And that wasn't all:

Mr. Romney -- here's a little advice: Before you debate Barack Obama on foreign policy, you better finish the debate with yourself!

"President Mitt Romney" -- three hypothetical words that mystified and alienated our allies this summer. For Mitt Romney, an overseas trip is what you call it when you trip all over yourself overseas. It wasn't a goodwill mission -- it was a blooper reel.

Expect to hear much more of this rhetoric as we enter the final months of the campaign. But if 1964 has taught us anything, it's that a national-security advantage, once secured, can prove fleeting.

On Wednesday evening, former President Bill Clinton will issue a full-throated endorsement of Barack Obama at the Democratic convention in Charlotte. But as the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza recently pointed out, the frayed relationship between the two Democratic leaders -- tested by the bitter 2007-2008 primary contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton -- has never fully mended. 

Before Hillary Clinton dropped out of the Democratic primary, the former president did have the occasional good thing to say about Obama when it came to foreign policy. In July 2007, for example, he refused to be drawn into a dispute between Obama and his wife over whether the United States should meet with the leaders of hostile nations without preconditions. All the Democratic candidates, he noted, had "a vigorous agreement on the big question, which is, 'Should we have more diplomacy?' The answer is yes."

But Obama and Clinton clashed over  two of the defining issues of the campaign: the Iraq war and Obama's inexperience.

The spat over the war in Iraq began in November 2007, when Clinton told a crowd in Iowa that he had "opposed Iraq from the beginning," even though he was on record supporting the war in 2003. When asked about the comments, Obama quipped, "If he did [oppose it], I don't think most of us heard about it." 

Then, during a talk at Dartmouth College in January 2008, Clinton mocked the Obama campaign for celebrating the candidate's opposition to the Iraq war back in 2002 (that same year, Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq). 

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment ... and never got asked one time, not once, well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution, you said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war ... and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?" Clinton asked. "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

Obama had indeed expressed support for the ongoing war effort during the 2004 presidential election, but he had also reiterated his opposition to the original invasion. Obama criticized Clinton for repeating "this notion that somehow I didn't know where I stood in 2004 about the war. He keeps on giving half the quote. I was always against the war."

Clinton also attacked Obama's lack of experience in interviews with Al Hunt and Charlie Rose in the final months of 2007, arguing that Obama was ill-equipped to handle foreign-policy issues like terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Rose noted that experienced officials had orchestrated the war in Iraq, Clinton responded:

I remember the first time Senator Obama said that, said, you know, [former Vice President Dick] Cheney and [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld had a lot of experience. And that has great superficial appeal. But let me make the argument in another context. That's like saying that because 100 percent of the malpractices case, medical malpractice, are committed by doctors, the next time I need surgery, I'll get a chef or a plumber to do it.

Here's the full video (the discussion of Obama begins at 24:00, and the quote above comes at 35:00):

With the debate over the Iraq war, the hand-wringing over Obama's lack of experience, and the rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all things of the past, we'll hear Bill Clinton deliver a very different assessment of Barack Obama this evening. The question now turns to just how effectively he'll make the case for granting the president four more years in office.