I never much liked the idea of arms control. During the Cold War, we managed our nuclear arsenals rather than reduced them. We treated our nukes like huge, dangerous animals. We restricted their movements but gave them ample care and feeding. Until recently, getting rid of the animals altogether was not part of the political… Continue reading Carbon Disarmament
The Vietnam War ruined everything. It not only destroyed Vietnam and killed a huge number of its inhabitants. It not only killed so many American soldiers and destroyed the futures of so many veterans. It not only spread into Cambodia and Laos and wrecked those countries for generations. The Vietnam War also killed the Great… Continue reading Good War vs. Great Society
Last week, I inadvertently found myself back in second grade. This is how it happened. I recently published an essay on the tradition of suicide missions in the West that generated a lot of letters, some of them negative. But even the detractors generally respected the norms of polite discourse. Then, last week, several conservative… Continue reading Lies and Misdemeanors
At the edge of Europe, in Ireland’s Shannon Airport, they conduct surveillance on the U.S. empire. ShannonWatch, a group of a dozen or so peace activists led by a former Irish commandant and peacekeeper, scrutinizes the commercial and military planes that pass through Ireland to bring troops and hardware to Afghanistan. Such transports take place… Continue reading Europe 3.0
Last November, shortly after Election Day, I met with a legislator from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Kuniko Tanioka was in town to see the usual Washington types. But she also wanted a front-row seat to watch Barack Obama’s historic win. After all, Obama was the reason she’d thrown her hat in the ring… Continue reading The Other Democratic Party
Japan has been a one-party oligarchy for a very long time. This may not be a polite thing to say about a democracy and a U.S. ally. But Japan has been ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for the last 54 years, except for a few nanoseconds after the Cold War when the ruling… Continue reading Revolution in Japan
To: Leon Panetta, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, Shanghai office Re: Memo XE1250 Leon: I just received the memo on the latest Blackwater scandal. Talk about embarrassing! Why did we outsource assassination to those bozos? Remember in 2006 when a Blackwater guy, drunk as a skunk, killed the Iraqi vice president’s bodyguard? And we were… Continue reading Chinese Assassination Squads
The “sunshine generation” is coming to an end. In South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung’s death comes hard on the heels of Roh Moo-Hyun’s suicide. In North Korea, meanwhile, Kim Jong-Il has been planning for his own succession. These three men were responsible for two inter-Korean summits and a host of agreements, exchanges, and political breakthroughs. As… Continue reading After the Sunshine Generation
We endure, ignore, or fall prey to as many as 20,000 ads a day. That’s one ad every three seconds of our waking hours. We wear ads on our shirts, forward commercials via email, sing jingles with our friends, and even brand corporate icons on our bodies. We’ve developed vaccines to address this particular virus.… Continue reading Global Spin Doctors
The end of the Cold War ushered in a new period of unipolar American power. In this country, liberals and conservatives alike celebrated the triumph of market democracies under the leadership of the United States. The Clinton administration attempted to consolidate America’s geoeconomic power. The Bush administration attempted to consolidate America’s military and geopolitical power.… Continue reading Review: The Future of Global Relations
Jimmy Carter, the saying goes, was destined to be a great former president. The jury is still out on Bill Clinton, but he certainly accomplished his mission to Pyongyang quickly and successfully. Last week, Clinton flew to North Korea, met with Kim Jong Il, and brought home Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two journalists… Continue reading Bill’s Excellent Adventure
The actor Will Smith is no one’s image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a horde of hyperactive vampires at the end of that film, Smith… Continue reading Their Martyrs and Our Heros
Young people who want to receive phone calls but don’t want their teachers or parents to catch on can download high-frequency “mosquito” ringtones. After a certain age, the older set loses its ability to hear these higher frequency tones. In this way, older people literally become tone deaf to the way younger people communicate. Talk… Continue reading The Geopolitics of Facebook
Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia. By Richard J. Samuels. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. ix, 277 pp. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Grand strategy is all the rage in Tokyo these days. The Japanese political and military establishment senses a new world of possibilities now that it has… Continue reading Review: Securing Japan
In a mountain overlooking a village, a dragon has found a cozy lair and a steady supply of villagers to eat. Idealistic young men and women periodically ride out to the mountain to slay the dragon, only to be scorched by its hot breath or eaten like tasty snacks. The best and the brightest in… Continue reading Slaying the Dragon
The two pariahs of Asia, North Korea and Burma, often get mentioned in the same breath. With no one else to depend on, these two countries would appear to be natural partners. Indeed, the Obama administration has been gathering circumstantial evidence that North Korea is providing Burma with nuclear technology so that they can both… Continue reading Asia’s Axis of Evil
For the last decade, highway fatalities in the United States remained relatively constant, at 42,000 deaths a year. Every year, in other words, we lose more people on American roads than we did in the three-year-long Korean War. But in 2008, when oil prices spiked, Americans drove a lot less. And that saved lives. In… Continue reading Gassed to Death
When I was a boy, I devoured the great work of escape fiction, Papillon, which chronicled the astonishing life of Henri Charriere. The French courts sent Charriere to a series of penal colonies off the coast of South America, for a crime he didn’t commit. Nicknamed Papillon (butterfly) for the tattoo on his chest, Charriere… Continue reading North Korea’s Papillon
When he travels abroad, Barack Obama is the consummate pitchman. He tells stories, he cracks jokes, he delivers mini-lectures with a light touch — all in the service of selling product. It’s not an easy job. Imagine trying to sell GM cars after Ralph Nader’s attack on its Corvair in the 1960s, or shilling for… Continue reading The Cost of Empire
Pakistan has one of the largest, most sophisticated militaries on the planet. Its army is as large as the U.S. Army. It’s among the top 25 largest military spenders in the world. On top of the billions of dollars of weapons provided to Pervez Musharraf’s authoritarian regime, Washington is promising another $3 billion a year… Continue reading Af-Pak Blowback
Japan and South Korea are allies. That means they are constrained from going to war with one another. Despite a long history of conflict — including Japan’s colonization of Koreaduring the first half of the 20th century–the two countries have had to make nice as part of their anti-communist alliance with the United States. For… Continue reading Japan-ROK Relations on the Rocks
SEOUL – If the Obama administration needed a rogue nation to demonstrate its foreign policy resolve, Central Casting couldn’t have supplied a better candidate than North Korea. The government in Pyongyang routinely promises to unleash destruction of biblical proportions on its enemies. It has pulled out of international agreements, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty… Continue reading Playing the Hawk with North Korea
Democracy is taking a beating. The Honduran military has sent its leftist president into exile. The Iranian government is suppressing the Green Revolution. China arrested prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo. And Governor Mark Sanford decided that he could best serve the interests of his South Carolinian constituents by hightailing it after his Argentinean mistress. So, what… Continue reading Democratic Shocks
The war in Afghanistan is ugly. The conflict in Iraq is still seething. The prospect of Pakistan’s collapse is terrifying. But the real nightmare scenario, or so the media headlines suggest, involves North Korea. Its leader is wacko. It’s adding to its nuclear arsenal. It’s making preparations for a missile launch aimed at Hawaii. The… Continue reading Pearl Harbor Part II?
It’s been nearly a decade since the leaders of South Korea and the United States have been on the same wavelength. Kim Dae Jung and Bill Clinton saw eye to eye on North Korea. But the Nobel Prize-winning Kim and George W. Bush had an infamously testy relationship. And Bush and Roh Moo-Hyun were not… Continue reading The Obama-Lee Summit: Dangerous Consensus?
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
The United States has basically thrown up its hands in the current crisis with North Korea. Washington has mounted an aggressive campaign at the UN to further isolate the world’s noisiest nuclear aspirant. But no one thinks that UN actions will have much effort. There is no greater indication of frustration than the revival of… Continue reading Outsourcing North Korea Policy
In 1697, five years after the judges of Salem, Massachusetts sent 20 suspected witches to the gallows, one man stood up in front of his congregation and apologized. Samuel Sewall was one of the nine judges that gave official sanction to the hysteria of the witch trials. In a remarkable act of contrition, Sewall took… Continue reading America’s Sorry Policy
On June 4, 1989, history forked. In Poland, voters went to the polls to give the anti-communist opposition a sweeping victory in the country’s first, partially free elections in ages. It was the first sign of the revolutionary changes that would sweep through Eastern Europe that year, knocking down the Berlin Wall and changing the… Continue reading Twenty Years Later
North Korea’s second nuclear test and the death of former South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun have thrown the Korean peninsula into a period of acute crisis and mourning. Hopes for Korean reunification and regional peace have become very dim indeed. It would seem that the extraordinary experiment that Kim Dae Jung initiated in the 1990s… Continue reading Korean Tragedies