There is a divide within the Administration among those who essentially want to move towards a quiet and harder confrontation with the Pakistani intelligence service, and those who remain tethered to the attempt to, sort of, bring the Pakistanis around gradually by showering them with support.
The Islamic regime has been given the clearest sign yet that the Obama administration's tentative policy of engaging diplomatically has been unequivocally scrapped in favour of a reversion to the hard-nosed confrontation that has been standard fare between the two countries for the past 30 years.
There are no hard-hitting confrontations between representatives of opposing schools on nuclear policy, no editorial voice-over.
Hard-liners urged confrontation with the Defense Ministry workers who were sent to evacuate the residents, and a veteran settler leader had his tires slashed during a meeting over the weekend.
But the habits of confrontation are hard to break.
In 1994 the vogue threat changed, and hawks pressed hard for a military confrontation with North Korea.
But their tone is emollient expediency, not confrontation with hard truth.
But so long as there is no shared narrative among E.U. members, it will be hard to avoid a confrontation of national interests.
Unless your former cleaning lady turns up for work all blinged out in your granny's tiara, it's hard to imagine a confrontation helping here.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Cantor was the hard man in the confrontation over the debt ceiling; he was willing to endanger America's financial credibility, putting our whole economy at risk, in order to extract budget concessions from President Obama.
