My first trip to Washington, DC to do something other than protest on the streets was to interview for a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship, which brings young people to the nation’s capital to work on arms control and disarmament. It was 1987, around the time that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range… Continue reading A Farewell to Arms Control?
If you’re in the market for a troika of tyranny, Donald Trump, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo certainly fit the bill. Or, if you’d rather focus on countries not individuals, you might single out Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt as the three most likely candidates. Perhaps, if you’re in a confessional mood,… Continue reading Bolton and the Troika of Tyranny
Two major public figures lost their protected status last week. British authorities dragged Julian Assange, the co-founder of Wikileaks, out of the Ecuadorian consulate and into custody. Meanwhile, months of public protests finally dislodged Omar al-Bashir, the long-serving authoritarian leader of Sudan. On the face of it, Assange and Bashir couldn’t be more different. Bashir… Continue reading The Dictator and the Nihilist
The deputy assistant under secretary general of the United Nations has given the United States a one-year warning. If the country doesn’t clean up its act and become a responsible world citizen, Ithell Colhoquon announced yesterday, the international community will impose sanctions on U.S. government officials and tariffs on U.S. goods and services. This announcement… Continue reading World Gives America One Year to Stop Trump or Face Sanctions
If Donald Trump goes to church regularly, he’s kept it a pretty good secret. He and his wife have made sure to alert the press on the few times he does attend services, for instance on Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day. Otherwise, the president seems to worship regularly only at the Church of the Hole… Continue reading Ayatollah Trump
In horror movies, the monster can usually be dispatched in only one way. A werewolf requires a silver bullet. A vampire will only stay dead with a stake through the heart. The Blob shrivels in contact with the icy cold. For many opponents of Donald Trump, the report by special counsel Robert Mueller was supposed… Continue reading Mueller, RussiaGate, and the 2020 Elections
Donald Trump has shaken up U.S. foreign policy. Most of what he has done has been disastrous, like pulling America out of the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. He has been erratic, unprincipled, aggressive, and unilateral. And yet, he has also created some interesting opportunities, sometimes inadvertently, that progressives should seize. The… Continue reading After Trump
In the beautiful and terrifying novel The City of Devi, communal hatreds escalate in India and Pakistan until the two countries feel compelled to threaten each other with nuclear weapons. At least, it starts out as a threat. Pakistan vows to take out Mumbai, and India will level Karachi. But everyone involved knows that nuclear… Continue reading The World’s Most Dangerous Divide
Of all the bizarre things that Donald Trump utters — the lies, the garbled words, the fanciful stories — his comments on his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are in a category by themselves. “I was really tough and so was he, and we went back and forth,” Trump told a crowd… Continue reading Summit Interruptus
It’s become a common trope of the Trump era for columnists and commentators to attack the lunacy of the far right at the same time as castigating the “loony left.” These pundits, who usually place themselves in a comfortable “moderate” position, adopt a tone of consummate reasonableness. The president is certainly an idiot, they say,… Continue reading Answering the Attacks on the Green New Deal
Geopolitics, like thermodynamics, has its laws of conservation. If a wall comes down in one place, you can bet that it will go up somewhere else. It wasn’t long after the Berlin Wall fell that different kinds of walls went up in Eastern Europe. New borders separated the Czech Republic from Slovakia, and then, after… Continue reading The Psychology of the Wall
In the TV show Designated Survivor, Kiefer Sutherland plays a neophyte president, Tom Kirkman, who tries to bring decency and common sense to the Oval Office after a terrorist attack has wiped out most of the U.S. government. In one episode in the second season, President Kirkman is dealing with the loss of someone close… Continue reading Trump’s War on Intelligence
Thousands of people, mostly women, protested the food shortages in their country by banging on pots and pans as they marched in the streets. They loudly opposed the socialist policies of the government. The police eventually dispersed the protestors, but pressures on the government were mounting. In response, the government complained loudly about a U.S.-led… Continue reading Venezuela: No to Intervention, No to Maduro
It’s not in the text of Dante’s Inferno, but I suspect that those residing in the upper circles of hell regard their neighbors in the bottom circles with a mixture of pity and relief. Cleopatra, buffeted by strong winds in the second circle for her lustful behavior on earth, glances down at the traitor Judas,… Continue reading Deal, No Deal: Britain’s Fearful Future
The second meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un is scheduled for next month. The most likely location will be Vietnam. The agenda is much the same as before: how to get North Korea to denuclearize and the United States to dismantle its sanctions regime. The question remains: which side will make the first substantial… Continue reading The Next US-North Korean Summit
Donald Trump wants to pull U.S. troops out of Syria as quickly as possible. Well, it’s Wednesday, so that’s what the president wants now. Tomorrow, who knows, maybe he’ll insist that Syria pay for the pullout. Maybe Trump will decide to hold a summit with Bashar al-Assad after deciding that the Syrian leader’s not such… Continue reading Trump Punts on Syria
Review of Un-Su Kim, The Plotters (Doubleday, 2019), translated by Sora Kim-Russell Assassination has been an integral part of Korean history. So many leading political figures have been felled by assassins – or, at the very least, threatened by them – that you might think that plotters are constantly at work behind the scenes of… Continue reading The Plotters (Review)
Review of The Great Successor, Anna Fifield (Public Affairs, 2019), 308 pages North Korea is a notoriously unchanging place. In its nearly 75 years of existence, the country has had only three leaders – and they were all related to each other. The Kim dynasty has presided over the closest thing to a totalitarian… Continue reading The Great Successor (Review
Review of BG Muhn, North Korean Art: Paradoxical Realism (Seoul Selection, 2018), 80 pages Americans, if they have seen anything of North Korean art, have probably caught glimpses of the propaganda posters that occasionally appear in newspaper photographs of North Korean street scenes. The more knowledgeable North Korea watcher might be familiar with the… Continue reading North Korean Art (Review)
The Republican Party, since its takeover by Reaganauts in the 1980s, has long favored shrinking the federal government to the point at which it can be “drowned in the bathtub,” to use Grover Norquist’s colorful phrase. Tax cuts reduce the federal budget. Budget cuts weaken social programs. Even cutting remarks have their effect. Reagan got… Continue reading Will Trump Rule by Decree
As he nears the end of his second year in office, Donald Trump has reached the high point of his influence and power. For the last two years, the president has relied on a Congress controlled by the Republican Party. He took advantage of this congressional control to appoint two Supreme Court justices. He also… Continue reading Peak Trump
You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want your democracy. They’re hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They control the media and Wall Street. They’ve burrowed into a deep state that stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath America’s fragile government institutions. They want to replace the United States… Continue reading The New World Order Is Here
Popular culture is full of alternative histories. Mackinley Kantor wrote a famous article in Look magazine in 1960 about what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America imagines a world where Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 elections and ushers fascism into the… Continue reading The Importance of the New Netflix Dystopia
Even popular series can hit rough spots in their second seasons. Take The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the Amazon breakout about a young Jewish housewife in the late 1950s who improbably establishes a connection with Lenny Bruce and becomes a hilarious, foul-mouthed stand-up comedian in her own right. The first season sparkled. The second season brings… Continue reading Review: Trump Presidency Season Two
“Get me outta here.” At the recent G20 meeting in Argentina, Donald Trump was on the world’s stage when he muttered this aside to an aide. He was supposed to be getting ready for a photo op with the other global leaders at the conclusion of the meeting. And, after some confusion, Trump eventually did… Continue reading Trump Turns the G20 into the G19
Nation-states: what a quaint notion. As a means of organizing territory, they seem to be a brief transition period between large empires and an even larger, borderless world. Sure, nation-states might live on in the form of anthems and flags and independence days, but the idea of fixed borders just doesn’t make sense in a… Continue reading It’s a Borderful World
Remarkable changes are taking place on the Korean peninsula. The two Koreas are actually starting to demilitarize the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Just in the last couple weeks, they have taken down 22 guard posts, demined the Joint Security Area, and established a no-fly-zone about the peninsula’s dividing line. They’ve pulled back from confrontation along their… Continue reading Is Korea’s Cold War About to End?
You’ve done enough escape rooms to know the drill by now. You are escorted into what seems like an ordinary room. There’s a table and a chair. On the table is a book. As soon as you step across the threshold, the door closes behind you. You hear the lock click into place. You are… Continue reading Welcome to the Ultimate Escape Room
In the week before the mid-term elections, Donald Trump returned to his bread-and-butter issue: immigration. He knows that the only thing that will turn out his base, and possibly swing some independents over to his side, is fear. Economic indicators are in reasonably good shape (for now). Hillary Clinton is nowhere near power (for now).… Continue reading Trump’s Only Electoral Strategy Was Racism
In his recent speeches and articles, Bernie Sanders has been talking about forming a Progressive International. It’s about time. The alt-right, thanks in part to Steve Bannon, has formed an international network centered in Europe on the National Front in France and the Northern League in Italy. Authoritarian leaders from Vladimir Putin in Russia to… Continue reading Bernie Sanders and a Progressive International