During the presidential campaign, when he was still battling an array of Republican heavyweights for the party’s nomination, Donald Trump indulged in a bit of hubris that would have buried a more conventional candidate. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump said at a campaign… Continue reading Killer Presidents
James Mattis visited Asia this month on his first foreign trip as the new head of the Pentagon. It was less a get-acquainted visit than a damage control tour. His boss, President Donald Trump, had threatened to escalate tensions with China and prevent North Korea from launching a nuclear-capable ICBM. He’d accused Japan of currency… Continue reading Will Trump Complete the Pivot to Asia?
Donald Trump is holding up the severed head of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a striking image for a magazine cover. But it’s not the front of the Nation or the ACLU newsletter. It’s this week’s issue of Der Spiegel, Germany’s version of Time Magazine. To punctuate the point, one of Spiegel’s articles declares Donald… Continue reading Forget America First: It’s America Alone
The resistance to Donald Trump’s presidency has been strong, sustained, and multi-dimensional. The women’s march after the inauguration deluged DC in a sea of pink hats and generated companion protests in an extraordinary 670 cities around the world. My in-box has been full ever since with calls to converge on the White House to protest… Continue reading Dividing the Right and Conquering Trump
Donald Trump is a worldly fellow. He travels the globe on his private jet. He’s married to a Slovene and divorced from a Czech. He doesn’t speak any other languages, but hey, he’s an American, so monolingualism is his birthright. His fortune depends in large part on the global economy. He has business interests in… Continue reading Globalism of the One Percent
For Obama supporters, the last eight years have been a victory of wise leadership over the forces of darkness in Congress and the world at large. For critics of the outgoing president, Obama could do no right as he plunged the United States into the worst crisis in its 200-plus years of history. Between the… Continue reading Obama the Time Traveler
[I wrote this article about Russian efforts to cultivate Donald Trump as an asset last week for a Korean newspaper where it was published on Sunday. Little did I know that news would break this week of allegations that Russia has a file of damaging information it can use to blackmail President-elect Trump. In that… Continue reading The Russian Honeypot
Two days before the November elections, Elizabeth Moreno was driving to the Democratic Party headquarters in Manassas to pick up a list of addresses. She was planning to spend another day of canvassing to get out the vote for her candidate Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth had taken off a full week from her job at one… Continue reading Goodbye, Clinton!
On a wall in Boston, artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo is taking a quiet but historic step forward in U.S.-Iranian relations. His fanciful mural on an air intake structure in Boston’s Dewey Square represents a first. Ghadyanloo, who has completed more than a hundred surrealistic murals in downtown Tehran, is the first Iranian artist to do work… Continue reading The Art of Detente
Review of Robert Boynton, The Invitation-Only Zone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 271 pages The abduction of Japanese citizens by the North Korean government is so fantastical a story that it seems to be the stuff of magical realism. It’s not surprising that so many Japanese refused for so long to believe… Continue reading The Invitation-Only Zone (Review)
How I Became a North Korean, Krys Lee (Viking, 2016), 246 pages It has become harder and harder these days to define what it means to be North Korean. During the heyday of Kim Il Sung, it was much easier to conflate individual North Koreans with their leader, their state, and the country’s prevailing… Continue reading How I Became a North Korean (Review)
Review of John Dower, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two (Haymarket Books, 2017), 160 pages John Dower is one the most preeminent historians of World War II’s Pacific theater and the aftermath of the conflict in Asia. His book War Without Mercy (1986) described the racial component of the… Continue reading The Violent American Century (review)
Shortly after the November elections, a friend sent me a photo via Facebook. It was a sandwich board outside a bookstore in Massachusetts. It read: “Post-apocalyptic fiction has been moved to our current affairs section.” My friend added a note of her own: “Trump’s election should help with sales of your new book.” My gain,… Continue reading From Here to Dystopia
I didn’t vote in the pivotal American election of 2016. Thirty-five years ago, in that unseasonably warm month of November, I was in Antarctica’s Allan Hills taking ice core samples with a hand augur. The pictures I have from that time show my team drilling deep into the blue ice, but what we were actually… Continue reading How Donald Trump Changed Everything (2016-2020)
Shortly after taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon devised his “madman theory.” It was the height of the Vietnam War, and Nixon believed that he could end the conflict. It just required a bit of unpredictability. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop… Continue reading Trump the Predictable
Donald Trump might seem like a uniquely American phenomenon. The shape-shifting billionaire huckster reinvented himself first as a TV personality and then as a maverick populist politician. He rode to power on patriotic slogans – Make America Great Again – and tailored his policy prescriptions to specific American constituencies like West Virginia coal miners and… Continue reading What Europe Can Teach Us About Trump
The election of Donald Trump is not only a surprise for many American citizens. It’s a shock to the international community. In fact, the shock might be so severe that it will be the death of the international community. What has happened in the United States is not unprecedented. But, as with most things to… Continue reading The Death of the International Community
In my senior year of college, my Russian teacher pulled me aside. He told me that the CIA was recruiting on campus. I should consider applying for a job. It was 1986. Mikhail Gorbachev had taken the helm of the Soviet Union, but the Cold War was still very much in place. “The CIA?” I… Continue reading Bartleby the American
In the typical time travel story, an enterprising person from the future goes back to 1922 to assassinate young Hitler, or to 1963 to interrupt Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. This time, however, the smarter denizens of the future world didn’t save us from the horrors of the present.… Continue reading It Can’t Happen Here (But It Just Did)
Much has been made of the swing in political allegiances of neoconservatives in favor of Hillary Clinton. As a group, Washington’s neocons are generally terrified of Trump’s unpredictability and his flirtation with the alt-right. They also support Clinton’s more assertive foreign policy (not to mention her closer relationship to Israel). Perhaps, too, after eight long… Continue reading Clinton and the Neocons
When Barack Obama was running for office in 2008, he was determined to redirect U.S. military efforts away from the “bad war” in Iraq and toward the “good war” in Afghanistan. This commitment to extricate the U.S. military from the dismal aftermath of a botched exercise in regime change earned Obama the exaggerated designation of… Continue reading A Hawk in the Wings
The system is rigged. Let’s be clear: the American political system favors the two major parties and our economic system favors the wealthy. The global system is similarly rigged in favor of powerful countries (such as the United States) and powerful economic actors (such as transnational corporations). This is not, however, a conspiracy. No secret… Continue reading It’s Rigged: Takes One to Know One
The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the… Continue reading Trump the Arsonist
Imagine that Donald Trump wins the presidency. Then, as he has done throughout his career, he goes after his enemies. He purges the Republican Party of everyone who refused to support him. He initiates criminal proceedings against Hillary Clinton. And he shuts down The New York Times and The Washington Post. It sounds like an… Continue reading Stop the Presses!
The nuclear deal with Iran never went before the American people for an up-or-down vote. Nor did it require two-thirds support of the Senate, since it wasn’t technically a treaty. The effort to roll back Iran’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for the elimination of some sanctions faced a much more modest hurdle. It had… Continue reading Colombia: Disturbing the Peace
In a recent This American Life episode, investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses the perils of America’s segregated school system. She points out that there has been only one proven way to narrow the performance gap between African-American and white schoolchildren, and it has nothing to do with magnet schools, or Teach for America, or any of… Continue reading The Lost Language of Integration
When I was a kid, my extended family got together for the holidays. One of my uncles was a big, fat guy who looked like Santa Claus without the beard. He loved to laugh and tell jokes. When I was really young, I thought he was hilarious. As I got older, however, I began to… Continue reading The Damage Trump Does
Mehdi Saeedi turns words into art. The Iranian graphic artist has transformed Farsi script into posters, paintings, and other works. He has taken a traditional form, calligraphy, and made something even more startling and beautiful from it. In Saeedi’s posters, a line of script turns into a bird, with an olive branch in its beak.… Continue reading Iran: The Calligraphic Challenge
The war in Syria is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for all the civilians who suffer from constant aerial bombardment, who are trapped without food and medical assistance inside crumbling cities, who experience the retribution of either the Islamic State or the regime in Damascus. It’s a nightmare for those who try to escape and… Continue reading Syria as Metaphor