The war in Afghanistan is ugly. The conflict in Iraq is still seething. The prospect of Pakistan’s collapse is terrifying. But the real nightmare scenario, or so the media headlines suggest, involves North Korea. Its leader is wacko. It’s adding to its nuclear arsenal. It’s making preparations for a missile launch aimed at Hawaii. The… Continue reading Pearl Harbor Part II?
It’s been nearly a decade since the leaders of South Korea and the United States have been on the same wavelength. Kim Dae Jung and Bill Clinton saw eye to eye on North Korea. But the Nobel Prize-winning Kim and George W. Bush had an infamously testy relationship. And Bush and Roh Moo-Hyun were not… Continue reading The Obama-Lee Summit: Dangerous Consensus?
Wars usually end with talking. With the blood still fresh on the battlefield, politicians sit down at a negotiating table for peace talks. Words, after all, are their currency. Just as psychoanalysts apply a “talking cure” to resolve deep-seated conflicts, politicians sit across from each other to talk things out. But what about soldiers? Their… Continue reading The Dancing Cure
The United States has basically thrown up its hands in the current crisis with North Korea. Washington has mounted an aggressive campaign at the UN to further isolate the world’s noisiest nuclear aspirant. But no one thinks that UN actions will have much effort. There is no greater indication of frustration than the revival of… Continue reading Outsourcing North Korea Policy
In 1697, five years after the judges of Salem, Massachusetts sent 20 suspected witches to the gallows, one man stood up in front of his congregation and apologized. Samuel Sewall was one of the nine judges that gave official sanction to the hysteria of the witch trials. In a remarkable act of contrition, Sewall took… Continue reading America’s Sorry Policy
On June 4, 1989, history forked. In Poland, voters went to the polls to give the anti-communist opposition a sweeping victory in the country’s first, partially free elections in ages. It was the first sign of the revolutionary changes that would sweep through Eastern Europe that year, knocking down the Berlin Wall and changing the… Continue reading Twenty Years Later
North Korea’s second nuclear test and the death of former South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun have thrown the Korean peninsula into a period of acute crisis and mourning. Hopes for Korean reunification and regional peace have become very dim indeed. It would seem that the extraordinary experiment that Kim Dae Jung initiated in the 1990s… Continue reading Korean Tragedies
Horror movies usually follow the same script. The monster — whether genetically modified, abused as a child, or flown in from Alpha Centauri — picks off the frightened teenagers one by one. After many thrills and chills, the hero drives a stake through the heart of the beast. Finally, just as we’re finishing off the… Continue reading Nightmare on Cheney Street
Future historians will view the Bush administration’s assertion of unilateral U.S. power and authority as the last gasp of the American empire. The imperial overstretch that historian Paul Kennedy diagnosed near the end of the Cold War is finally hitting us: the banking crisis, the recession, the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,… Continue reading The G-2 Paradox
What would it look like if Quakers ruled the world? The World Bank would be renamed the International Frugality Fund. All political institutions would run on the principle of consensus. And there would be meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. It would be like living in a huge group house. Some people love process, agendas,… Continue reading Quaker Utopias