In 1948, the village of Tantura fell within the borders of the newly created state of Israel. It was a small, seaside village of approximately 1,200 residents, most of them Arab farmers and fishermen. As the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors escalated, Tantura became an important transit point for smuggling supplies to a… Continue reading Asking the Hard Questions about Israel
The new spring season is just around the corner, and it looks as though the new “in” color is brown. That’s brown as in “brown shirts.” Perhaps you thought that fascism went out of fashion in the 20th century. But there’s nothing like a lingering economic crisis to bring out the vintage ideologies. The far right… Continue reading Brown Is the New Black
For the long eight years of the George W. Bush administration, progressives decried the over-militarization of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon’s budget doubled, and U.S. military exports surged. Instead of deploying international law against Osama bin Laden, the United States deployed troops in Afghanistan. It went on to invade Iraq and threaten Iran. The Bush… Continue reading If I Didn’t Have a Hammer
It’s not easy for North Korea to grab headlines these days. Over the last couple weeks, Pyongyang launched several short-range missiles and rockets. They barely caused a ripple. The world has been focused on the showdown in Ukraine, the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and the Oscars. North Korea also barely registers on the U.S. policymaking… Continue reading My Strategic Impatience
The people have spoken. They have elected a government. No, wait, I hear the angry shouts of a demonstration in the streets. “We are the people,” they are crying. The crowd is getting larger and larger. They are pressing against the gates of parliament and the presidential palace. And now the government has fallen. The people… Continue reading Who Are the People?
As the fate of Ukraine hangs in the balance, U.S. politicians from both parties have been scrambling to take advantage of the crisis. Republicans in Congress have slammed President Barack Obama for his “trembling inaction.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has revived the hawkish approach of her pre-secretary of state years by comparing Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s… Continue reading The Standoff in Ukraine (and also in Washington)
The Cold War is history. For those growing up today, the Cold War is as distant in time as World War II was for those came of age in the 1970s. In both cases, empires collapsed and maps were redrawn. Repugnant ideologies were laid bare and then laid to rest, though patches of nostalgia persist.… Continue reading Ukraine: The Clash of Partnerships
In the end, the street triumphed over the elite. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych tried to hang on to power, and failed. Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to maintain Russian influence, and failed. The EU tried to mediate, and failed. And the United States tried to…well, I’ll get to that in a moment. Over the weekend,… Continue reading Ukraine: Out of the Frying Pan
Olivia Pope wears the white hat. Or, as fans of the TV show Scandal know, she desperately wants to believe that she wears the white hat. Olivia Pope is a Washington fixer. She has assembled a team of “gladiators” who do whatever necessary — bending the law, breaking the law, tearing the law into tiny little shreds… Continue reading The Scandal of Syria
Ten years ago I visited Slovenia to do a report on organic farming for the Bay Area-based organization Food First. I was drawn to the former Yugoslav republic because it had recently joined with several neighboring Italian and Austrian provinces to create the world’s first organic bioregion – the Alpe-Adria. Organic farming made a lot… Continue reading Going Organic
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. Today, Europe has left war behind. In place of jostling empires, there is the European Union, a modern family beset by the usual bickering but nothing that a smothering bureaucracy can’t handle. Even Sarajevo, where the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked world… Continue reading The Greatest Threat to Europe
Last year was a tough time for President Obama. The health care roll-out was plagued by website malfunctions. His ambivalent approach to intervening in Syria satisfied neither hawks nor doves. Congress stalled on major legislation like immigration reform. And the leaks by Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was spying on American citizens,… Continue reading Has Obama Already Forgotten about Asia?
Policy analysts, pundits, and politicians have long predicted that the North Korean government will go the way of East German Communism. Just as the seemingly impregnable Honecker regime rapidly disintegrated along with the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Kim dynasty in North Korea has been expected to collapse at any minute. This minute, of… Continue reading Why North Korea 2014 Is Not East Germany 1989
I played for Green when I was growing up. That was my soccer team. We were divided up by color: Green vs. Red, Gold vs. Blue. The teams were chosen at random, but we became fiercely attached to our color. Friendships across color lines became strained. We talked of “Purple power” and the “Gold tradition.”… Continue reading The Color Wars
Some years ago when I was fielding complaints from authors through the National Writers Union — about not getting paid, about their work being spiked — I received a phone call from an irate woman. She told me that her best ideas were being stolen. She’d be watching television and a favorite drama would suddenly… Continue reading The Surveillance Blitz
On the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Europe is at peace. There are no major border disputes. The countries form a unified economic bloc instead of a patchwork of jostling alliances. In the last 70 years, the only large-scale violence took place during the unraveling of Yugoslavia, which ended 15 years… Continue reading Asia: The Ghosts of 1914
In a future update of The Devil’s Dictionary, the famed Ambrose Bierce dissection of the linguistic hypocrisies of modern life, a single word will accompany the entry for “Pacific pivot”: retreat. It might seem a strange way to characterize the Obama administration’s energetic attempt to reorient its foreign and military policy toward Asia. After all, the president’s… Continue reading The Empire’s New Asian Clothes
In 2006, a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England accidentally became an artwork. Let’s call him Dude Descending a Staircase in honor of that merry prankster Marcel Duchamp. This particular visitor tripped over his feet as he was going down the museum stairs. As he fell, he knocked into three large Qing Dynasty vases that… Continue reading Iraq: Revisiting the Pottery Barn Rule
I passed through an enormous tori, the traditional gate in front of Shinto shrines. In the courtyard, white-clad Shinto priests walked quietly back and forth. A flock of white doves, specially bred on the site, pecked at the ground and then took wing at the prodding of a photographer. I visited the strolling garden and… Continue reading The Sun Also Rises
The beginning of a new year is when optimism courses through the blood. Even in the foreign policy realm of dreary realism and apocalyptic musings, January is when pundits and policymakers entertain temporarily vaulted hopes that wars can be stopped, deals negotiated, reputations salvaged, and the planet saved. This year, though it marks the 100th anniversary… Continue reading Reasons to be Cheerful
Several years before William Shakespeare wrote his first play, England was rocked by a bloody political scandal. Queen Elizabeth, the virgin monarch who had been on the throne for nearly three decades, was in a battle of wills with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. England’s religious future was at stake. Would it stay Protestant,… Continue reading Kim the Third
I’ve had arguments with some Korean friends about the National Security Law (NSL). They tell me that the law may not be perfect, but I should remember that North Korea still harbors a desire to reunify the peninsula by force. It continues to send its agents to the South, sometimes in the guise of defectors.… Continue reading McCarthyism in Korea?
With the death of South African leader Nelson Mandela, many have mourned the passing of a brave activist, a far-sighted statesman, and a compelling moral force in the fallen world of global politics. His passing has touched hundreds of millions of people around the world. They are grieving his death, of course. But they may also be… Continue reading The Twilight of Leadership
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wrapped up his finger-wagging tour of Asia on Friday, with a busy week of lecturing the Chinese, trying to get the South Koreans and Japanese to play nice with one another, and damning North Korea with faint praise for releasing an 85-year-old American after more than a month of detention.… Continue reading U.S. Still Playing Catch-up in Asia
They’re the last three hunger strikers standing. Actually, they’re sitting—just outside the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The weather is turning cold, and they’re bundled up against the wind. The three men are legislators. Two of their number have already collapsed and ended up in hospital. In November, the government attempted to ban their… Continue reading Korea’s Domestic Cold War
I was at a wedding not long ago of two dear female friends. The ceremony mixed together various religious traditions, including a Quaker meeting where people in the audience could stand up and speak spontaneously. After a number of people had already spoken, an old man made his way to the front of the space.… Continue reading Running Off to War
I thought it was a fad, and it would die out. Three years ago I read Daniel Drezner’s piece inForeign Policy about his search for an “international relations theory of zombies,” which he subsequently expanded into a full-length book. Really, this was on the order of devoting an entire university class to the lyrics of Madonna. If I just… Continue reading The Undead and Us
In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Poland. It was an official visit, the invitation extended by the Communist government. The pope—once known as Karol Wojtyla, an actor-turned-priest from a small village outside Krakow—managed to pull off the impossible. He gave speeches about economic justice that one of my Polish friends told me were more… Continue reading The Audacity of Pope
To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, undisclosed location Re: Memo XP1476 Greetings from the tropics! I apologize for not writing to you earlier. As you probably know, if you have my file in front of you, I wrote to your predecessors with various modest proposals:outsourcing targeted killings to the Chinese, turning our drone program… Continue reading NSA and TMI
In his 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to roam. It’s an optimistic vision of the future—if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or… Continue reading The World Without U.S.