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
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