On the occasion of their first summit, George W. Bush should have a private, one-on-one, conservative-to-conservative chat with Lee Myung-bak. In this chat, the U.S. President should tell the cautionary tale of how his administration did everything it could to repudiate the North Korea policy of its predecessor ― only to end up in the… Continue reading What Lee Can Learn from Bush
In 1935, the People’s Liberation Army swept through Tibet on the Long March to evade Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists. It was a grim time. Harassed by snipers, Mao’s armies faced a much greater challenge: cold and hunger. In the grassland plateaus of Tibet, the Communists died by the thousands. The wandering soldiers were not the only… Continue reading Trouble in Tibet
Northeast Asia heaved a sigh of relief at the latest news of a breakthrough in the nuclear negotiations with North Korea. The prospects of integrating North Korea into the international community and constructing a peace and security structure for the region have never been rosier. But the headlines of the United States and North Korea… Continue reading Talking Peace, Preparing for War
In 2002, Boston University established the lyrical-sounding Presidents in Residence program for former African leaders. The idea was to lure the dictatorially inclined away from their countries so that a new generation of democratic leaders could take their place. As a spokesperson for the program put it more tactfully, “The vision is that having a… Continue reading Executive Swap
Many of the most resonant images from the Iraq War are as deceptive as the Bush administration’s rationales for starting the war in the first place. Consider the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein on April 8, 2003. Photos of the event show what seems to be a crowd of Iraqis pulling down the… Continue reading Iraq in Pictures
Some of the most famous monuments have never been built. Vladimir Tatlin’s monument to the Third International, a tilted spiral that was to have been larger than the Eiffel Tower, never made it out of the design phase. Architect Louis Kahn toiled long and hard on a “Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs” for… Continue reading Memorializing Iraq
Tyrants are scared of poets. Osip Mandelshtam penned a poem about Stalin—one by one forging his laws, to be flung/like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin—that was eventually his ticket to the labor camps where he died. Poet Kim Chi-Ha wrote “The Five Bandits” to expose the corruption of military rule in… Continue reading Poet Power
Nationalism is once again getting a makeover. Associated with all manner of ills—Nazism, genocide, unsavory dictatorships—nationalism is being rebranded by the same political science community that largely ignored the phenomenon for so many years. The latest issues of both Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy feature articles that proclaim the virtues of nationalism. In both cases,… Continue reading Hooray for Nationalism?
The seas both divide and unite Japan and the United States. Caught between countering threat and promoting maritime cooperation, the two countries have worked together to build regional approaches to terrorism and piracy. At the same time, however, they have pursued less inclusive strategies such as a missile defence system, joint military operations in Iraq… Continue reading The Pacific and Not-So-Pacific Oceans
We are supposed to believe that adult supervision has returned to the White House. Our adolescent president – who for the last six years has been throwing tantrums, frightening the neighbors, and breaking the windows of houses on the other side of town – has now made it out of his terrible teens. He is… Continue reading Adolescent Tantrum