As Barack Obama assembles his foreign policy team, he appears to be drawing from two primary sources: the Clinton faithful and Republican renegades. These old dogs might be up for some new tricks, but one risk of relying on such “experience” could be the triumph of conventional thinking in Washington — when the world expects,… Continue reading The North Korean Conundrum
The United States, so obsessed with policing its own borders, shows precious little concern for those of other countries. When it comes to waging war, the Pentagon is like a little kid with crayons and a coloring book. It has great difficulty staying within the lines. Last week, for instance, Special Ops carried out a… Continue reading Bombers without Borders
Americans worship guns. We stockpile nuclear weapons, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on conventional weapons, and we keep handguns under our pillows. Not me, you might say: never touched a gun, never will. But you can still be part of the religion without visiting the church. Consider all the video games that involve… Continue reading The Religion of Guns
One of the most profound migrations in history is taking place today. Cities are swelling all over the world with the influx of farmers and peasants. But it is in China, the world’s most populous country, that this great migration has the potential to remake geopolitics. The numbers are staggering. There are 182 Chinese cities… Continue reading A Floating City of Peasants (Review)
The pictures from Abu Ghraib have achieved iconic status. The hooded man on the box, his arms outstretched, has superceded the image of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. The Bush administration will forever be remembered as “the administration that tortured.” Iconic images have a concentrated power. The Abu Ghraib pictures convey, in visual shorthand,… Continue reading Art of Torture
[Daniel Heyman, “They Put me in an Animal Cage,” gouache on nishinoushi paper, 2008.] Daniel Heyman is a visual artist from Philadelphia who has been capturing the images and words of Iraqi victims of torture from U.S. facilities like Abu Ghraib. Here he talks with Foreign Policy In Focus co-director John Feffer about how he… Continue reading Interview with Daniel Heyman
The breakfast that greeted me at my San Francisco hotel last week was bright, cheerful, and utterly appalling. The hotel management, with typical euphemism, called it a “continental breakfast.” But only the denizens of the great continent of sugar — which encompasses a large swath of America and some of its overseas dependencies — could… Continue reading Bittersweet Economy
A little over a decade after a terrifying genocide left a million people dead, Rwanda has recovered enough to become a tourist destination in central Africa. As veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer reports in his new book A Thousand Hills, Rwanda is an orderly, peaceful, and economically developing oasis in an otherwise strife-torn region. Kinzer points… Continue reading A Thousand Hills (Review)
Comedian Boris Johnson is now the mayor of London. Comic Beppe Grillo has emerged as an important political force in Italy. Here in the United States, comedian Al Franken has moved into the lead for one of Minnesota’s Senate seats according to one recent poll. Inadvertent comic Arnold Schwarzenegger is still the governor of California.… Continue reading What’s So Funny?
An army in retreat often destroys the land so that it can’t be used by the adversary. This scorched earth policy began in agricultural times when retreating armies burned the fields to deprive their opponents of food. Later, the militaries would level entire cities, as the Nazis did to Warsaw before they left it to… Continue reading Scorched-Earth Presidency
As part of our special investigation “Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide,” we asked a host of military thinkers to contribute their two cents on topics relating to global Pentagon strategy. (You can access the archive here.) The following dispatch comes from John Feffer, codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy… Continue reading Surrounding China’s String of Pearls
Behind every great economic bubble lies what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance.” Greenspan had in mind the tendency of people to pay more and more for the same thing: a tulip, real estate in the South Seas, a share in Widget.com, a one-bedroom apartment in downtown DC. This exuberance isn’t… Continue reading Of Coffee and Capitalism
When pundits talk about the U.S. elections and foreign policy, they focus on Iraq and Iran. But the third member of the infamous “axis of evil” may prove to be just as influential. In the last several weeks, North Korea has stopped dismantling its nuclear facilities and has even threatened to rebuild what it has… Continue reading Stealth Crisis
Nearly 70 years after the Games began again in the modern era, the Olympics finally took place somewhere outside the West. It was 1964, and the host country was Japan. The Tokyo Olympics were an opportunity for Japan to erase the stain of history. It had been tapped to host the 1940 Olympics, but its… Continue reading Asia’s Olympics Debs
Within walking distance of downtown Rome there is a sheep farm that dates back to the Middle Ages. The Casale della Vacchereccia, leased from the Vatican, is nestled in a park that has preserved the kind of farmland that once surrounded Rome on all sides. The humble Vacchereccia still produces ricotta cheese from the milk… Continue reading Postcard from Rome
Being a futurologist means never having to say you’re sorry. Our predictions always come true eventually — or, if they don’t, well, how quickly people forget. Look at Newsweek’s George Will. He predicted that the Berlin Wall would endure, and in an article published on the very day in 1989 that the Germans were tearing… Continue reading The Goldilocks Apocalypse
According to the overpopulation crowd, the current food crisis is the latest evidence that the world has become too heavy with us all. We are currently at 6.6 billion and expected to approach 9 billion some time before 2050. Mother Earth is mad as hell and isn’t going to take us anymore. We’ve heard this… Continue reading Pop ’til We Drop?
Empires die hard. The war that broke out last week between Russia and Georgia is a terrifying reminder that the disintegration of the Soviet Union is far from over. Seventeen years ago, it looked as though that region might escape the worst consequences of imperial collapse. After all, the Baltic states achieved their independence with… Continue reading Die Hard
The debate has seesawed back and forth in the press, in blogs, on the street. Will George W. Bush, prodded by his pitchfork-wielding vice president, bomb Iran before the end of his term? According to one camp, an attack on Iran is so last term. In fact, the whole “evil axis” thing is passé. The… Continue reading Will He or Won’t He?
Here’s a tip on how to sound smart on foreign policy. When your friends are talking about the Iraq War, shake your head and look very somber. “The real problem,” you inform them, “is Iran. That’s the next battlefield.” Okay, people have been talking about Iran for several years now. And, according to Seymour Hersh,… Continue reading Be Ahead of the Pack
In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions. Their ur-narrative revolved around the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a sober, middle-aged, interracial couple who told of being taken from their car one night in 1961 and subjected to medical investigation by extraterrestrials with small bodies and large foreheads. They were… Continue reading North Korea, Japan, and the Abduction Narrative of Charles Robert Jenkins
With the Six Party Talks to denuclearise North Korea once again on the ropes and the world reeling from a deepening financial crisis, the United States is looking to China for help. The Pentagon still views China as a rising and potentially threatening military power. But the State Department has been relying on China’s mediating… Continue reading US/China: Rivals, Partners in Asia
After more than 15 years in the drafting, Burma unveiled its new constitution in February. The 194-page document has generated a widely disparate response. In May, just days after Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit Burma and killed tens of thousands Burmese, the military government reported that 92 percent of the population supported the new constitution in… Continue reading Burma’s New Constitution: Radical Change or Fig Leaf
Northeast Asia is a critically important locus of geopolitics, but it lacks a regional security structure. The Six Party Talks – involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan, and Russia – offer one potential model for regional collaboration. But the talks are stalled at the moment, with North Korea balking at a U.S.… Continue reading South Korea’s Persistent Dream of Regionalism
Northeast Asia is a relatively peaceful place. Although the Cold War still divides the Korean peninsula and the Taiwan Straits, there are no hot conflicts in the region. Negotiators in the Six Party Talks are attempting to solve the major security issues of the region through diplomatic means. But at another level, wars are being… Continue reading East Asia: History Wars
The Fergana Valley in the heart of Central Asia has a reputation for instability, violent conflict, and Islamic fundamentalism. The three countries whose borders intersect in this densely populated mountainous region – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan – have struggled to build modern states in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This process… Continue reading Central Asia: Modernity vs. Islam
Back in the 1980s, it seemed the right thing to do. Groups were emerging in Eastern Europe that were just saying no to the Cold War, to the human rights abuses of their governments, to the stultifying lack of democracy in their societies. I joined the growing network of activists in the West that supported… Continue reading For Your Freedom and Ours
What happened to the global food crisis? It was in the news and out again as quickly as a bad Hollywood movie. The media covered the alarming increase in food prices that have hit poor people so hard. Riots broke out in dozens of countries. Zimbabwe, Sudan, and North Korea are on the edge of… Continue reading Empty Plate Club
Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks… Continue reading Are We All North Koreans Now? TomDispatch
I was on Wisconsin public radio last week, being interviewed on the state of U.S. foreign policy. All the callers were in perfect harmony. We all agreed that the last eight years have been a disaster for the United States, that we must move away from militarism and toward diplomacy, that we must, well, you… Continue reading Getting to Yes