On the island of Okinawa is a very unusual war memorial. The Cornerstone of Peace resembles the Vietnam War memorial in certain respects: large black walls inscribed with names. But the Cornerstone of Peace has a different shape: curved, concentric walls rather than an angled slash. More importantly, the Okinawa memorial lists all of those… Continue reading Memorial Daze
I’m from Jersey. So whenever the Boss sings, I listen. He’s always sticking up for the little guy, the Tom Joads, the downsized, and the downtrodden. He’s patriotic, but it’s a bittersweet patriotism. You remember: when the Reagan campaign in 1984 and then the Dole campaign in 1996 wanted to use the song “Born in… Continue reading Listen to the Boss
Every culture, it seems, has the same joke: Put three Koreans—or Albanians or Poles or Kenyans or Californians—in a room. After an hour of debate, they’ll form four political parties. We are, by nature, a factious species. We huddle together in large crowds for football games or New Year’s celebrations. But when it comes to… Continue reading Divided We Stand
In 1990, I thought that another world was not only possible, it was happening before my eyes. With hundreds of other activists, I was in Prague to attend the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (HCA). The Berlin Wall was no more, the Cold War was receding with breathtaking rapidity, and a new age of people’s movements seemed… Continue reading Another World
Our allies should organize an intervention. I’m not talking about a military intervention, though some neighborhoods in the United States might welcome UN peacekeepers to replace the local constabulary. I’m talking about one of those interventions that friends organize when one of their buddies has become a drug addict or keeps driving when drunk or… Continue reading America the Exceptional
It’s a scandal worthy of the Yes Men. Over the course of three years, this band of merry pranksters impersonated World Bank officials and told bemused audiences that Spain should outlaw the siesta, corporations should adopt “compassionate slavery” for workers in Africa, and fast food restaurants could solve the global hunger problem by serving a… Continue reading The Yes Man
The state, according to classical liberals, is a problem. It meddles in the economy. It over-regulates. Through the tax system, it robs Peter to pay Paul. If only the state would get out of the way, these purists argue, then the invisible hand of the market would magically set things right. Equilibrium would reign, and… Continue reading The Self-Hating State
Gamblers in Las Vegas frequently cling to the illusion that they can win. Some do. Most don’t. The casino owners—usually called “the House”—have rigged the system in their own favor. The flashing lights, free drinks, and oxygen-enriched air in the casino distract the gamblers from this elemental rule. Sure, you might hit 21, score big… Continue reading Trading with Vegas
Liberals love a good war. There’s nothing like a bombing run or a missile attack to preempt the perennial criticism of liberals as weak on defense and national security. Take Truman and Korea, Kennedy and Cuba, Johnson and Vietnam, or Clinton and Kosovo. Wars demonstrate “spine” and “leadership” and all the qualities that tell the… Continue reading Suffocating Consensus
The U.S. public wants out of Iraq. The Iraqis themselves want the occupation to be over. What’s a poor U.S. soldier to do? As the Iraq War drags into its fifth year, the U.S. army finds itself in an untenable situation. Whatever welcome the Iraqis extended to the troops has worn exceedingly thin. Roadside bombs… Continue reading No Thanks
War needs a why. Yes, war is ultimately senseless. But soldiers will not fight and die without a reason. “Their’s not to reason why, their’s but to do and die,” wrote the poet Tennyson in The Charge of the Light Brigade. But soldiers rarely volunteer these days simply to serve as cannon fodder. The public,… Continue reading Mission Incomprehensible
Many Americans look across the Pacific at China and see nothing but a vast digestive tract. A billion-plus people are developing quite an appetite: for oil to run their factories, for sheet glass to sheathe their skyscrapers, for grain to feed themselves and their livestock. Behind every recent resource depletion, it seems, lurks a growing… Continue reading Too Big to Fail
Last year in Hamdania, west of Baghdad, eight U.S. soldiers abducted an Iraqi man from his home, threw him in a ditch, and shot him. The soldiers placed an AK-47 and a shovel near his body. They wanted to make it seem as though he were an insurgent digging holes to plant roadside bombs. Planting… Continue reading Tampering with the Evidence
What is the world coming to when a wonky slide show wins an Oscar for best documentary? The Inconvenient Truth is about just that: what the world is coming to. And Hollywood is sufficiently freaked out by the prospect of eco-apocalypse to bestow its highest honor on such a low-tech cinematic undertaking. Al Gore might… Continue reading Just Climate Change
Back in the early 1990s, an editor at Harper’s asked me for suggestions of progressive foreign policy analysts who could participate in one of their roundtable discussions. I provided a short list, with Noam Chomsky on top. The editor thanked me politely but said that the Chomsky suggestion wouldn’t fly. In so many words he… Continue reading On Chomsky
At the beginning of Chinese filmmaker Jiang Yimou’s popular movie Hero , a martial arts master arrives at the court of the powerful Xin ruler. The master swordsman, an orphan who goes by the moniker Nameless, harbors a secret desire to assassinate the king on behalf of his own wronged territory, the nation of Zhao.… Continue reading The Rise and Fall of Nations
It’s not been a good time to be a journalist. Outside the United States, reporters literally take their lives into their own hands to cover dangerous stories. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 55 journalists died in 2006, a steady increase over the last several years. The mafia-style hit of Anna Politkovskaya in Russia… Continue reading Targeting Journalists
At Saturday’s anti-war demonstration in Washington, my 84-year-old mother slipped as she stepped off a curb and fell backward. A young man in a small knot of anarchists caught her and gently restored her to the vertical. And on we marched. Leave no grandmother behind! We shout at the television. We complain to our spouses,… Continue reading The Point of Protest
You’re astride a donkey, and it’s not going anywhere. You’ve got carrots in your pocket and a stick in your hand. Which to use? In the ideal world, the donkey would take a few steps forward to get the carrot that you dangle in front of its nose. If it slows down or gets distracted… Continue reading Bait and Switch
On Oct. 3, with the fall semester in full swing, the dining hall at Georgetown Law School was packed with students slumped over bookbags and laptops. Squeezed among their plates and papers were tabletop displays announcing that the day’s meal was part of an “Eat Local Challenge” that required the school’s chef to create a… Continue reading The Challenge Facing Local Food
The risk of war on the Korean peninsula remains high, and the U.S. government is raising it higher by opening an economic front. In September 2005, one day after regional negotiations produced an agreement with the potential to defuse North Korean-U.S. tensions, the U.S. government charged North Korea with counterfeiting $100 bills. Calling this alleged… Continue reading Sanctions and the Road to War on the Korean Peninsula
The movie Good Night, and Good Luck depicts how journalist Edward R. Murrow took down the most dangerous U.S. demagogue of his era with a simple, yet elegant, act of annotation. Murrow played excerpts on his CBS news show of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speeches about the “Communist menace” and then refuted the charges. The lies… Continue reading Don’t Mourn, Annotate
Thousands of young people with long hair and studded tongues pay good money several dozen times a year to listen to lectures about genocide. Well, “lecture” is perhaps not the best way to describe Serj Tankian’s delivery. The tall lanky Tankian, who has cascades of curly hair and looks like the long-lost offspring of Frank… Continue reading Headbangers against Genocide
The headlines this week will be all Iraq, all the time. President Bush will unveil his not-so-secret plan of a military “surge” to rescue Iraq from all its other disastrous surges—in civilian deaths, pervasive violence, and unemployment. FPIF analyst Dan Smith, in Bush to Iraq: More War, argues instead that “Congress needs to act as… Continue reading Nuking Iran
Capitalism and democracy go together like … like what? Peanut butter and jelly? Or a fish and a bicycle? The leaders in Beijing are happy to eat their peanut butter sandwiches without jelly. Since launching economic reforms in the late 1970s, the Chinese government has promoted rapid economic growth but without much in the way… Continue reading Iron Fist Economics
“Covering the Mekong,” Foreign Policy In Focus, December 29, 2006 “All Talk,” World Beat, December 18, 2006 “China’s Multilateralism or U.S. Bilateralism,” Inter Press Service, December 14, 2006 “China and the Uses of Uncertainty,” Foreign Policy In Focus, December 13, 2006 “Political Football,” World Beat, December 11, 2006 “China: What’s the Big Mystery?” Foreign Policy In Focus, December 4,… Continue reading 2006 Archives
Korean Quarterly, Fall 2006
Washington vs. Pyongyang: War or diplomacy? In this analysis of US policy, John Feffer shows how Bush’s combination of uncompromising negotiating positions, strong rhetoric and firm containment measures has served to accelerate North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme instead of ushering in the de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, Republican reverses in the recent US… Continue reading Washington vs. Pyongyang: War or Diplomacy?
The controversial musical Yodok Story played for three nights in the Washington, DC area. I saw a performance only a couple days before Pyongyang announced its nuclear test. It might seem that these two events occupy the opposite ends of the North Korean experience. The North Korean government has defied the international community and tried… Continue reading Yodok Story and the Bomb
The Mekong River–which translates to the “mother of all rivers”–starts in the mountains of Tibet, flows through China’s Yunnan province and then into Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It’s an extraordinary region, home to 250 million people and some of the most dynamic and troubling developments in the world. In the vivid new… Continue reading Covering the Mekong