Who would have thought that the evil team bent on destroying the world would be composed entirely of people of color? In the imagination of Hollywood, after all, the bad guys are now white guys like the scientists gone bad in Spiderman or those jokers in Batman or the military privateers of Avatar. Occasionally, scriptwriters… Continue reading Shades of Evil
In espionage, as in sports, we generally see the heroism of our side and the perfidy of the opponent. The latest spy scandal involving the Russian “sleepers” is a case in point. The coverage of the Russian spy ring has been full of intriguing and salacious details: forged passports, fake identities, and secret coded texts… Continue reading Spy vs Spy
Anti-government rhetoric is all the rage these days. And “rage” is the operative word here. Small-government enthusiasts are like the drivers of Hummers incensed at all the difficulties they encounter on the roadway — pesky speed limits, red lights, construction-related delays. Fuming at these restrictions on their liberty, they suddenly have a profanity-laced meltdown and… Continue reading Hummer Rules
Aside from the occasional asteroid and volcanic outburst, human beings are responsible for the greatest messes on the planet. We’ve polluted the air and water, punched holes in the ozone, and pumped enough carbon into the atmosphere to overwhelm the global thermostat. Nor is this merely a modern attribute of homo sapiens. As Jared Diamond… Continue reading BP and Sado-Messochism
According to the business plan of the 10,000 Women project, an investment of $100 million over five years will create 10,000 female entrepreneurs in the developing world. The money goes to business education – MBAs – for women in the global south who, in turn, are expected to create businesses that employ people and grow… Continue reading The Talented Tenth
In this age of Amazon recommendations and Kindle downloads, I still rely on the old-fashioned services of a book buyer. My personal book buyer has an uncanny ability to anticipate my tastes. He has introduced me to out-of-print novelists, obscure playwrights and classic philosophy tracts. I’ve enjoyed nearly all of his choices, though quite a… Continue reading My Backlogged Pages, New York Times
The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduate insisted. Rather, the future is in China. If a multinational corporation doesn’t shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic… Continue reading Pax Ottomanica
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has been going back and forth on the Okinawa base issue. As a candidate he pledged to close the Futenma air base and not relocate any of its personnel within Okinawa prefecture. But then, after Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan won the elections last year, the U.S. pressure campaign began.… Continue reading Okinawa and Obama’s Base Addiction
Last year, Lauren Rosenberg was walking across a four-lane highway in Utah when she was hit by a car. Now she’s suing Google for $100,000 in damages because Google Maps told her to take that route. The lawsuit is patently absurd. If she had come to an edge of a cliff that Google Maps said… Continue reading Blaming Turkey
The full-page ads in The Washington Post seem so reasonable. The military contractor Pratt & Whitney has been arguing that America doesn’t need to spend $485 million to develop a second engine for the F-35 jet fighter. It’s a compelling argument. We’re in a serious economic crisis, so why on earth would we build another… Continue reading The Trillion-Dollar Question
Kim Jong Il must work for the American Enterprise Institute. Or maybe it’s the Heritage Foundation. The North Korean dictator doesn’t talk much about his non-resident fellowship at a right-wing U.S. think tank. It might not go over well with the Politburo in Pyongyang. But actions speak louder than words. North Korea’s sinking of the… Continue reading Kim Jong-Il: Right-Wing Mole?
“I need a little space.” When lovers utter these words, it’s usually a bad sign for the relationship. They feel suffocated. They’re reexamining their commitment. They’re checking out other options. But they don’t have the courage to make a clean break. Britain is the latest country to question its “special relationship” with the United States.… Continue reading The Break-Up
The bubble is bursting. I’m not talking about the Greek economy, the collapse of which has bankers and finance ministers trembling from Athens to Antarctica. Nor am I talking about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which reminds us once again that our current energy security rests on shaky foundations. I’m talking about… Continue reading Terrorism in a Teacup
North Korea and Israel have a lot in common. Neither is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and both employ their nuclear weapons in elaborate games of peek-a-boo with the international community. Israel and North Korea are equally paranoid about outsiders conspiring to destroy their states, and this paranoia isn’t without some justification.… Continue reading The Israeli Exception
Social workers are fond of saying that they must start where their clients are. This basic principle of social work is not theoretical. It comes from decades of practice. Simply telling people what they should do rarely translates into their actually doing “the right thing.” So instead, social workers have turned the tables by beginning… Continue reading Starting Where North Korea Is, 38North
Earth Day was a big event this year. Sting sang on the Mall here in Washington. The citizens of Qatar turned off their power for an hour. The U.S. Navy rolled out its new biodiesel-fueled Green Hornet fighter jet. Okay, maybe the Earth was not so impressed with all the events held in its honor.… Continue reading Allied Regime Change
If the Russian army makes the bold decision to invade Germany, we can just nuke those damn communist soldiers into oblivion with the 200 tactical nuclear weapons we deploy in Europe. Oh, they’re not communists any longer? Oh, Germany and Russia have excellent relations at the moment? Oh, the Cold War has been over for… Continue reading Nuclear Follies
Let’s imagine that the Cold War was a detour. The entire 20th century, in fact, was a detour. Since conflicts among the 20th-century ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) cost humanity so dearly, it’s hard to conceive of World War II and the clashes that followed as sideshows. And yet many people have begun to do just… Continue reading The Really, Really Long War
In the Mayan game of pitz, the first team sport in human history, two sets of players squared off in a ball court that could stretch as long as a football field. The object of the game was to use hips and elbows to keep the ball in the air and, if possible, get it… Continue reading Blood Sport
The survivors of the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are still scrambling to deal with the damage. Here, however, pundits are still scrambling to explain the dramatic difference in impact. Haiti’s quake on January 12 came in at 7.0 on the Richter scale, leveled the capital city, and left more than 200,000 dead. Chile’s… Continue reading Earthquake Olympics
I’m not a big fan of Dana Rohrabacher, the grandstanding Republican congressman from California. But last week at a congressional hearing on U.S.-Japan relations, he ably cut through the Pentagon’s doublespeak. The hearing’s topic was the current conflict between Washington and Tokyo over the military bases on the Japanese island of Okinawa. The United States… Continue reading Velvet Imperialists
On February 18, 1977, a thousand Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Kalakuta Republic and burned it to the ground. As republics go, Kalakuta wasn’t very large. Only 100 or so people lived there. But the immensely popular musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had created this compound, in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, as a joyful and democratic space… Continue reading Music Is Still the Weapon
In the popular virtual game Civilization, you can build an empire and take over the world in a matter of hours. In other words, you can compress thousands of years of history into one long session in front of your computer. This is the gaming equivalent of time-lapse photography, which allows us to watch the… Continue reading Time-Lapse Foreign Policy
For a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for U.S. military power. We couldn’t have fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally.… Continue reading Can Japan Say No to Washington
In the blockbuster 2000 film JSA, two South Korean soldiers accidentally find themselves on the North Korean side of the Joint Security Area, at the border between the two countries. They meet their North Korean counterparts. But instead of fighting, the four soldiers become friends and arrange several midnight get-togethers. At the height of their… Continue reading Choco Pies vs. Cold Noodles
The Dutch government is the latest casualty of the Afghanistan War. Over the weekend, the Labor Party in the Netherlands walked out of the ruling coalition government to protest the extension of the Dutch deployment in Afghanistan. The Taliban is rejoicing. Oh, perhaps you thought I meant the Taliban in Afghanistan. No, I meant the… Continue reading Our Taliban
He’s a long-serving, unpredictable dictator. He’s invaded countries, sponsored terrorism, trained insurgents, and tried to develop nuclear weapons. His recent debut UN speech went 75 minutes over his allotted time, highlighted several conspiracy theories, and called for President Obama to be installed as president for life. He recently said that civil society has no place… Continue reading The Strange Case of Libya
It’s 1961. William Stockton, a well-respected doctor, is having a birthday dinner with family and friends. They toast his service to the community and joke about all the late-night work he devotes to his hobby. Dr. Stockton has just finished building a bomb shelter for his family. Before the guests can repair to the living… Continue reading Rugged Collectivism
By one estimate, China has been at the top of the global economy for 18 out of the last 20 centuries. That’s an impressive track record, whatever you might think of imperialism, communism, and all the other systems that have prevailed in that vast country over the centuries. Even President Obama made a nod in… Continue reading The Next Great Transformation
When I traveled through Eastern Europe in the wake of the 1989 revolutions, I carried a computer and a portable printer. I typed up my dispatches, printed them out, and sent them back to my employers by air mail. Even with the lag time of a week or more, my reports on conversations with activists,… Continue reading Will Facebook Remake the World? Harvard International Review