The bottle looks beautiful. It sports an old-fashioned spring-top stopper. The red, diamond-shaped label features an elegant font. From a distance, the silhouetted landscape on the label looks exotic. It is, like all fine gourmet water, “bottled at source.” Even the French name of the water suggests elegance: B’eau Pal. But wait: B’eau Pal? That… Continue reading Lords of Misrule
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
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
The deliberations that took place in Tokyo after World War II, which led to 25 guilty verdicts and the execution of seven Japanese, helped shape the international law around war crimes. The arguments made in the proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic and the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, as well as the recent indictment of the… Continue reading Japan: On Trial, 60 Years Later
Consider the Bush administration’s preferred garb. George W. Bush favored the flight suit look when he landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003 for his premature enunciation that the Iraq War was over. The press went wild. “Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal,” Chris Matthews said, turning “nonverbal” for the first… Continue reading Foreign Policy in Fashion
Mladen Miljanovic, who won the prestigious Bell Award in 2007 as the best young visual artist in Bosnia Herzegovina, grew up during the wars that split apart Yugoslavia. He lived in the area of Bosnia that became Republika Srpska. His home was near one military base, his school near a second. More than once he… Continue reading Postcard from Banja Luka
The United States is the largest exporter of arms in the world. Imagine what would happen if we became the largest exporter of the arts instead. This is just one of the ways that an art stimulus package could be used to change the way America relates to the world. By turning swords into paintbrushes,… Continue reading From Arms to Art
The pictures from Abu Ghraib have achieved iconic status. The hooded man on the box, his arms outstretched, has superceded the image of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. The Bush administration will forever be remembered as “the administration that tortured.” Iconic images have a concentrated power. The Abu Ghraib pictures convey, in visual shorthand,… Continue reading Art of Torture
[Daniel Heyman, “They Put me in an Animal Cage,” gouache on nishinoushi paper, 2008.] Daniel Heyman is a visual artist from Philadelphia who has been capturing the images and words of Iraqi victims of torture from U.S. facilities like Abu Ghraib. Here he talks with Foreign Policy In Focus co-director John Feffer about how he… Continue reading Interview with Daniel Heyman
Aaron Hughes spent the spring of 2003 transporting supplies from Kuwait to Iraq as a soldier in the Army National Guard. Today, he is an outspoken anti-war activist. “I didn’t have an epiphany,” Hughes says of his turnabout. “I just continually hoped that I could help the Iraqi people, that my fellow soldiers would be… Continue reading The Way to a Just Foreign Policy
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
Americans have an almost fetishistic attitude toward leadership. Like a magic wand, “leadership” is to be waved over the problems that affect the body politic as well as the seemingly intractable flaws of U.S. foreign policy. We search the horizon for a magical leader in the same way that the hapless clowns of Beckett’s play… Continue reading Picturing the President
They look like portals that deliver people from one planet to another, as in a science fiction movie. You turn a corner in Manhattan and there they are: full-sized figures in full military uniform emblazoned on graffiti-laced walls. The faces of the U.S. soldiers appearing in these arresting images are blurred as if in great… Continue reading Art as Jujitsu
The North Korean film projectionist is thinking back on her earlier life. When she was younger, she tells the camera, she dreamed of acting. She wanted to play a heroic role on the screen. Her eyes take on a wistful look. And there is a hint of pain in her voice. In any other country,… Continue reading Screening North Korea
I’m from Jersey. So whenever the Boss sings, I listen. He’s always sticking up for the little guy, the Tom Joads, the downsized, and the downtrodden. He’s patriotic, but it’s a bittersweet patriotism. You remember: when the Reagan campaign in 1984 and then the Dole campaign in 1996 wanted to use the song “Born in… Continue reading Listen to the Boss
Thousands of young people with long hair and studded tongues pay good money several dozen times a year to listen to lectures about genocide. Well, “lecture” is perhaps not the best way to describe Serj Tankian’s delivery. The tall lanky Tankian, who has cascades of curly hair and looks like the long-lost offspring of Frank… Continue reading Headbangers against Genocide
The controversial musical Yodok Story played for three nights in the Washington, DC area. I saw a performance only a couple days before Pyongyang announced its nuclear test. It might seem that these two events occupy the opposite ends of the North Korean experience. The North Korean government has defied the international community and tried… Continue reading Yodok Story and the Bomb
FPIF, November 13, 2006
The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes about foreign policy with the flair of a poet. He also writes poetry with the geopolitical knowledge of a foreign policy analyst. His one-volume treatise on the colonial pillage of Latin America (Open Veins of Latin America) is a must-read classic, and his three-volume literary meditation on the continent’s… Continue reading Fiesta!