Donald Trump has a plan to solve America’s drug crisis: kill the drug dealers. “We have pushers and drugs dealers, they are killing hundreds and hundreds of people,” Trump said at a recent White House summit on opioid abuse. “Some countries have a very, very tough penalty — the ultimate penalty — and by the way, they have much… Continue reading Trump to the International Community: Drop Dead
Five hundred years ago, a popular test to flush out witches was called “ordeal by water.” Dunk an alleged witch into a lake. If she sinks, she’s innocent. If she floats, her guilt is plain for all to see and she can be safely burned at the stake. By this ancient form of waterboarding, witch… Continue reading Hunting Witches in Washington
In a surprise announcement in early March, President Donald Trump said that he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un within two months. The preparations for the meeting were hampered by the lack of North Korea expertise within the administration, the short-staffed State Department, and the mercurial temperament of the president. The North Korean… Continue reading How Those Trump-Kim Talks Might Go: A Transcript
In the Stockholm syndrome, the victim starts to identify with the captor. In one of the most famous examples, the heiress Patty Hearst took up arms on behalf of the radical group that abducted her. She denounced her old friends and began to make speeches in praise of the Symbionese Liberation Army. To a certain… Continue reading A Nobel for Donald Trump over Korea?
When an epoch ends, as the Cold War did between 1989 and 1991, it takes some time to come up with a name for the new order. For some years, the world lived in a “post-Cold War” era. That phrase was supposed to capture the optimism of a new beginning as well as the uncertainty… Continue reading The New New Cold War
Welcome back, Gog and Magog. I can’t say that I’ve missed you. You might remember the Gog and Magog story from 2003, when George W. Bush was making plans to invade Iraq and assembling a “coalition of the willing.” French President Jacques Chirac was quite unwilling, so Bush went to great lengths to break down… Continue reading Oh, Magog!
Washington and New Dehli are having a mutual lovefest these days. Donald Trump is popular in India — where only 17 percent of the population considers the president “intolerant,” compared to a global average of 65 percent — and he has warmly welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House. Both leaders are eager to bump… Continue reading Trump’s Majoritarian Dream
The United States has not yet appointed an ambassador to South Korea. This shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as an insult. A number of other important places still lack U.S. ambassadors: the European Union, Germany, Turkey. The Trump administration has been notoriously slow in filling these top diplomatic slots. In some cases, as with Germany, Democrats… Continue reading No Diplomacy for South Korea
When it comes to the Russiagate scandal, progressives usually take one of two positions. They either dismiss the scandal as a lot of hooey, a “nothingburger,” just a way for warmongers and the “Deep State” to revive a cold war between Washington and Moscow. Or they treat the scandal as just a means to an… Continue reading Russiagate or Deep State?
The discussion of the Russia file these days sounds like the review of a fast-food restaurant. Echoing that infamous catchphrase of Wendy’s that became a political meme in the 1984 presidential elections — Where’s the Beef? — the charges of cooperation between the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign have either been dismissed as a “nothingburger” or embraced… Continue reading Russiaburger: The Trump-Russia Scandal Unwrapped
As a candidate, Donald Trump enjoyed pillorying the globalists. “We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism,” he said in his first major speech on foreign policy in April 2016. By globalists, he first of all meant rival Hillary Clinton, who represented the face of American internationalism as a… Continue reading Big Surprise: Rich Globalists Love Trump
Evil is a popular topic in Hollywood, from The Evil Dead franchise to Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies. But evil makes only the occasional cameo in the U.S. policy realm. In the early 1990s, the topic of evil became buzz-worthy in the wake of the Cold War’s collapse as pundits and policymakers tried to understand the unfolding… Continue reading Dr. Evil’s First Year in Office
The United States has never invaded Norway. It has never bombed Oslo. It has never rounded up Norwegians and thrown them in Guantanamo. Perhaps some U.S. diplomats have referred to the country as a “shithole” — because the food’s rather bland and the nightlife rather staid — but the important thing is that the United… Continue reading A Foreign Policy of Sticks and Stones
In talks this week at the DMZ, South Korea welcomed the participation of North Korea in the upcoming Winter Olympics. The two countries also discussed restarting reunions of divided families and reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula. Earlier, both sides reestablished their hotline. All of this adult conversation is a welcome change from the war… Continue reading Walking Back War in Korea
The last time Iranians went out onto the streets in large numbers, they were protesting what they thought was a stolen election. It was 2009, and hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had convincingly won the presidency with roughly 63 percent to reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s approximately 34 percent. Adopting their campaign’s green color, Mousavi’s supporters thronged the streets… Continue reading Trump and the Iran Protests
Review of Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader, edited and translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 210 pages In his novel An Artist of the Floating World, the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro explores the moral conflicts of a painter who places his talents in service of the Japanese imperial… Continue reading Sunset: A Ch’ae Manshik Reader (Review)
Review of North Korea’s Juche Myth, B. R. Myers (Busan: Sthele Press, 2015) With his latest book, Brian Myers attempts to prove that North Korea’s juche ideology is not an ideology at all. Because it does not actually drive North Korean policy, Myers argues, juche is nothing more than a myth that North Korean… Continue reading North Korea’s Juche Myth (Review)
President Donald Trump now finds himself, not even two years into his term, besieged by congressional opponents, a special investigator, numerous lawyers, the mainstream media, protesters in the street, and even anonymous critics within his own administration. Many of these opponents hope that the president will resign, be impeached, or be rendered politically impotent by… Continue reading House of Trump, House of Putin (Review)
Review of Nuclear Blues, Bradley Martin K. Martin (Great Leader Books, 2017, 321 pages) It’s not easy to write about North Korea. It’s tough to get there, and it’s even tougher to talk to North Koreans freely if you do manage to visit. A good deal of material about the country is speculative, anecdotal,… Continue reading Nuclear Blues (Review)
Donald Trump is contemplating wars that would dwarf anything that his immediate predecessors ever considered. He has dropped the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan, and he’s considering the mother of all wars in the Middle East. He is abetting Saudi Arabia’s devastating war in Yemen. Many evangelicals are welcoming his announcement of U.S. recognition of Jerusalem… Continue reading North Korea: The Costs of War
Don’t kid yourself: 2016 was a revolutionary year in the United States. Yes, I know, the United States is a deeply conservative country. Americans don’t engage in periodic attempts to overthrow the system. There is no viable political party that threatens the status quo. When protesters gather in Washington, they have no intention of storming… Continue reading The Insurrectionists
After 1989, Eastern Europe became the poster child for liberal democracy. One after another, the countries in the region replaced their Communist systems with new market economies, alongside democratic structures. After many years of difficult “transition”—high unemployment, industrial collapse, rural dislocation—the countries in the region all began to stabilize as they approached the close of… Continue reading Eastern Europe Marches Right
He was a rich businessman, an outspoken outsider with a love of conspiracy theories. And he was a populist running for president. In 1990, when Donald Trump was still beyond the furthest outskirts of American politics, Stanislaw Tyminski was trying to become the new president of post-communist Poland. He shared something else with the future… Continue reading Welcome to the Birthplace of Trumpism
In November, the Charles Koch Foundation announced that it would provide nearly $4 million in grants to Harvard University and MIT to train the next generation of foreign policy professionals. It’s part of the foundation’s effort to steer U.S. foreign policy away from its emphasis on military intervention and big Pentagon budgets. Yes, that’s right: Charles Koch.… Continue reading What Happens When Bad Money Supports Good Foreign Policy
As an ethnically homogenous and already divided nation, Korea might seem to be immune from all the fragmentation that seems to be happening around the world today. Far from the Korean peninsula, the European Union is negotiating the British exit and facing a possible withdrawal by the Spanish region of Catalonia. The Middle East is… Continue reading Korea and the Geopolitics of Division
As a candidate, Donald Trump rallied voters against a variety of enemies. He vilified Mexicans. He stereotyped Muslims. And he went after the Chinese for “raping” the United States. President Trump still wants to build that wall along the border with Mexico. He’s still trying to keep out Muslim immigrants. As for China, all signs have pointed… Continue reading Trump’s New Blame Game
There’s been precious little good news from Asia these days. Washington and Pyongyang continue to trade threats of war. Right-wing nationalist Shinzo Abe won reelection as prime minister in Japan last month. Major storms have hammered several countries in the region, most recently Typhoon Damrey in Vietnam. And now, in the wake of those typhoons… Continue reading Building On The Good News From Asia
North Korea has the worst human rights record of any country in the world except perhaps Eritrea and Syria. There is, however, a curious exception to this record: disability rights. This case offers a powerful counter-example of successful engagement in an arena where the country normally experiences nothing but universal condemnation. For nearly two decades,… Continue reading Engaging North Korea Successfully on Human Rights
When the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published his bestseller The Disuniting of America in 1991, he didn’t seriously entertain the worst-case scenario suggested by the title. At the time, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were imploding, while separatist movements in Quebec, East Timor, Spain’s Basque country, and elsewhere were already clamoring for their own states. But when… Continue reading Donald Trump and the Fourth Great Shattering
The Middle East today is enduring a replay of World War II — with the Islamic State in the role of Nazi Germany. Having seized much of Europe and parts of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany reached the peak of its expansion by the fall of 1942. Then, stopped at Stalingrad and unable to overwhelm… Continue reading The Fall of the House of ISIS