Horror movies usually follow the same script. The monster — whether genetically modified, abused as a child, or flown in from Alpha Centauri — picks off the frightened teenagers one by one. After many thrills and chills, the hero drives a stake through the heart of the beast. Finally, just as we’re finishing off the… Continue reading Nightmare on Cheney Street
Future historians will view the Bush administration’s assertion of unilateral U.S. power and authority as the last gasp of the American empire. The imperial overstretch that historian Paul Kennedy diagnosed near the end of the Cold War is finally hitting us: the banking crisis, the recession, the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,… Continue reading The G-2 Paradox
What would it look like if Quakers ruled the world? The World Bank would be renamed the International Frugality Fund. All political institutions would run on the principle of consensus. And there would be meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. It would be like living in a huge group house. Some people love process, agendas,… Continue reading Quaker Utopias
The Obama administration has started off on the wrong foot with North Korea. In the wake of Pyongyang’s April rocket launch, the new administration decided to push a statement of condemnation through the UN Security Council. It has subsequently decided to largely ignore North Korea. According to one U.S. diplomat, the administration believes that it… Continue reading North Korea and Malign Neglect
St. Augustine fooled around a lot as a young man. At one point during his philandering, according to his Confessions, the future Church Father uttered the immortal lines: “Give me chastity. But not yet.” President Obama has taken a very Augustinian approach to nuclear weapons. He has identified a desired goal. But at the same… Continue reading Abolition Follies
Think about the term “money laundering” for a moment. It suggests that the more often dirty money changes hands, the cleaner it gets. Globalization operates according to the same imagined principle. If we tear down the barriers to the free flow of capital, our economies will cleanse themselves of protectionist impurities. The faster that money… Continue reading Capitalist Pigs
One hundred days isn’t enough to judge a presidency, the cautious pundits say. “It takes time for a president to put his team in place, formulate policy, steer legislation through Congress, and conduct foreign negotiations,” history professor Allan J. Lichtman writes in The Washington Post. Look instead, he says, to the next 100 days. But… Continue reading 100-Day Dash
Editor’s note: This article appears in Thirsting for Change: Obama’s First 100 Days, a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies. The Bush administration transformed the way the United States dealt with the world. It invaded two countries, began a war on terror that had no geographic or time limits, boosted military spending, acted… Continue reading Obama’s First Hundred Days: Foreign Policy
The current “war against piracy,” which is spilling into Kenyan and U.S. courthouses after months of simmering off the coast of Somalia, is only the latest in a long series of U.S. actions against non-state actors in the service of empire. The “Global War on Terror,” which the Obama administration recently replaced with the vaguer… Continue reading Piracy and Empire
It’s a time of war and depression, and populist leaders have emerged in Latin America. The U.S. president declares a new era of friendship and equality. The Monroe Doctrine appears to be on its last legs. Take your pick: the 1930s or today. In yet another parallel between Barack Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the… Continue reading Great Neighbor Policy
North Korea’s recent rocket launch received few congratulations and many condemnations, including the recent UN censure. Although Pyongyang did not manage to put a satellite into orbit, it did succeed in getting the world’s attention. It has sustained this attention by kicking out nuclear inspectors, vowing to restart its plutonium processing program, and declaring an… Continue reading North Korea’s Sunshine Policy
He nicknamed himself “The Killer” because he was tired of all the stereotypes about the Balkans. “It was a reaction to the typical perception of internationals to the Balkans, to balkanization, and to the wars and the people here,” Ranko “The Killer” Milanović-Blank explains. “Wherever I went after the war, in Europe, in the United… Continue reading Balkan Myths
Institutions almost never vote themselves out of existence. They just plug along, inventing new missions if the old ones disappear. Last week, two summits tried to inject new life into fading institutions. At the NATO summit, defense ministers gathered to figure out how an institution tied so intimately to the Cold War could still function… Continue reading Mouth-to-Mouth Summitry
Reply to John Feffer by Ed Herman: John Feffer uses the word “revisionism” or “revisionist” 16 times in his critique of my work on Yugoslavia. This is curious, as IPS and FPIF are supposedly dedicated to offering “unconventional wisdom,” which clearly ought to “revise” conventional and established opinion. But Feffer’s own analysis is hard to… Continue reading Strategic Dialogue: Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia, though you cannot find it any longer on maps, is still very much with us. The wars and political turmoil that convulsed this multiethnic country in the 1990s continue to reverberate today. These aftershocks can be felt in the standoff around Kosovo’s independence, the political fragmentation in Bosnia, the conflict between Macedonia and Greece,… Continue reading Why Yugoslavia Still Matters
When North Korea declared that it was planning to launch a satellite, the United States should have shrugged and gone about its business. Instead, the Obama administration has exaggerated the importance of the launch by treating it as a national security threat. There’s little reason to doubt North Korea’s claim that it simply wants to… Continue reading A Need for Restraint Over N. Korea’s Satellite
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why North Korea just launched another rocket. The country wants attention. It craves the prestige of putting a satellite into orbit. It hopes to gather information for its missile program. And it’s angling to up the ante in the great poker game called the Six Party… Continue reading What’s Up with North Korea?
The elderly gentleman had a remarkable history. He’d worked in the State Department in Latin America and Afghanistan. And, 60 years ago, he served as a translator in Tokyo in connection with the war crimes trial that resulted in 25 guilty verdicts and seven executions of Japanese war criminals just after World War II. Given… Continue reading Never Again (Maybe)
The deliberations that took place in Tokyo after World War II, which led to 25 guilty verdicts and the execution of seven Japanese, helped shape the international law around war crimes. The arguments made in the proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic and the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, as well as the recent indictment of the… Continue reading Japan: On Trial, 60 Years Later
Let’s say that China sends a ship 75 miles off San Diego to do a little surveillance. Those are international waters, after all, and Beijing is interested in the latest developments in our submarine warfare capabilities at Naval Base Point Loma. And it wants to do some reconnaissance for its own expanding fleet of subs.… Continue reading Naval Gazing
Consider the Bush administration’s preferred garb. George W. Bush favored the flight suit look when he landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003 for his premature enunciation that the Iraq War was over. The press went wild. “Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal,” Chris Matthews said, turning “nonverbal” for the first… Continue reading Foreign Policy in Fashion
It might seem like the worst possible time for Tokyo to think big. The global economic crisis is hitting Japan hard. The current government of Taro Aso is scraping the bottom of public opinion polls. And with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party poised to suffer a game-changing defeat in the upcoming elections, the domestic political… Continue reading Thinking Big in Crisis Time
Let’s say that President Barack Obama appointed me as his Karl Rove. My advice: Don’t move on. The best way to tie the opposition on the right into a pretzel is to go after the Bush administration for all of its high crimes and misdemeanors. The radical right will fall back to defend its conduct… Continue reading Don’t Move on Yet
With the United States on the verge of another Great Depression, the Know-Nothing opposition to the Obama administration should be worried that we are about to slip into the Third World. Instead, it’s fretting about the United States becoming an annex of Western Europe. TV pundit Sean Hannity has called the stimulus package the “European… Continue reading Turning European
Particularly over the last eight years, the United States was one big mouth. We lectured the world. We berated the world. We threatened and wheedled and roared. From the world’s perspective, however, the United States was like the teacher in the Peanuts comic strip: an incomprehensible wah-wah sound in the background. You generally ignored this… Continue reading Listen: Afghanistan
Editor’s Note: This essay is a condensed version of a paper originally commissioned by the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) for its Academic Paper Series. South Korea is currently engaged in a large-scale, expensive modernization of its military that aims to provide the country with a more robust and self-sufficient defense. The timing of this considerable… Continue reading Ploughshares into Swords
Just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was arriving in Asia this week, Pyongyang was threatening to test a long-range missile. That’s its way of saying, “Don’t ignore us!” North Korea’s nuclear program is not in the top tier of foreign policy issues facing the Obama administration. The new team in Washington believes it has… Continue reading North Korea Sends Message: ‘Don’t Ignore Us!’
The neoconservative movement thrilled to what it called the “unipolar moment.” After the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union followed suit, the United States was the last superpower standing. America faced a choice. It could use the unprecedented opportunity to help build a new international system out of the rubble of the Cold War.… Continue reading A Multipolar Moment
You might have missed the news: China is now No. 3. Statisticians have finally crunched the 2007 numbers and discovered that China surpassed Germany that year to become the third-largest economy in the world. With its gross domestic product (GDP) at $3.32 trillion, the Chinese economy is now poised to overtake No. 2 Japan at… Continue reading What’s the Matter with China
The global economy is taking a beating from the latest crisis. The United States, EU, and Japan expect growth of only 1.5% or so in 2009. The International Labor Organization forecasts a “global jobs crisis” that will add 50 million people to the ranks of the unemployed and cast 200 million workers into extreme poverty… Continue reading The Risk of Military Keynesianism