The Rohingya and the Responsibility to Ignore

Posted by on Oct 7, 2017 in Articles, Asia, Featured | 0 comments They were Muslims, and they were leaving the country in droves. Their homeland, a remote corner of a multiethnic country, had become a warzone. Militants had taken up arms to fight for their rights, and the central government retaliated in force. Human rights abuses, mostly by the government, were rampant. Caught in the gunfire, hundreds of thousands of people became refugees. The central...
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Regime Change in Washington?

Posted by on Sep 4, 2017 in Articles, Asia, Featured | 0 comments The most aggressive nationalist in Donald Trump’s administration has been kicked to the sidelines. Steve Bannon, who served as Trump’s chief strategist, left the White House in mid-August after giving a candid interview to a liberal U.S. magazine. After a career of outrageous statements, Bannon finally said something in this interview that was completely unacceptable in Washington, DC, and...
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America’s Violent Century

Posted by on Aug 31, 2017 in Articles, Asia, Book Reviews, Featured | 0 comments John Dower is one the most preeminent historians of World War II’s Pacific theater and the aftermath of the conflict in Asia. His book War Without Mercy (1986) described the racial component of the U.S. campaign against Japan. In Embracing Defeat (1999), he examined the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan. He has long taken a critical look at U.S. foreign policy, subjecting the vaunted...
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Who Will Take America’s Place in Asia

Posted by on Aug 4, 2017 in Articles, Asia, Featured | 0 comments Asia has been the future for more than a generation. When Americans try to glimpse what’s to come, images of the Pacific Rim flood the imagination. For movie audiences in 1982, the rain-soaked Los Angeles of Blade Runner looked like downtown Tokyo. By 2014, the City of Angels in the Spike Jonze film Her had more of a Shanghai vibe. This upcoming October, with the release of Blade Runner...
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Killer Presidents

Posted by on Apr 28, 2017 in Articles, Asia, Featured, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments During the presidential campaign, when he was still battling an array of Republican heavyweights for the party’s nomination, Donald Trump indulged in a bit of hubris that would have buried a more conventional candidate. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa in January 2016. Trump was praising,...
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Will Trump Complete the Pivot to Asia?

Posted by on Apr 28, 2017 in Articles, Asia, Featured, Korea | 0 comments James Mattis visited Asia this month on his first foreign trip as the new head of the Pentagon. It was less a get-acquainted visit than a damage control tour. His boss, President Donald Trump, had threatened to escalate tensions with China and prevent North Korea from launching a nuclear-capable ICBM. He’d accused Japan of currency manipulation. He wanted both Tokyo and Seoul to pay more for...
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