U.S. Still Playing Catch-up in Asia

Posted by on Dec 10, 2013 in Articles, Asia, Featured, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wrapped up his finger-wagging tour of Asia on Friday, with a busy week of lecturing the Chinese, trying to get the South Koreans and Japanese to play nice with one another, and damning North Korea with faint praise for releasing an 85-year-old American after more than a month of detention. Aside from a couple of verbal gaffes, his performance elicited generally...
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The Undead and Us

Posted by on Nov 13, 2013 in Articles, Featured, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments I thought it was a fad, and it would die out. Three years ago I read Daniel Drezner’s piece inForeign Policy about his search for an “international relations theory of zombies,” which he subsequently expanded into a full-length book. Really, this was on the order of devoting an entire university class to the lyrics of Madonna. If I just pretended that zombies didn’t exist, they would...
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NSA and TMI

Posted by on Oct 30, 2013 in Articles, Featured, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, undisclosed location Re: Memo XP1476 Greetings from the tropics! I apologize for not writing to you earlier. As you probably know, if you have my file in front of you, I wrote to your predecessors with various modest proposals:outsourcing targeted killings to the Chinese, turning our drone program into a reality TV show, and imposing an Empire...
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The World Without U.S.

Posted by on Oct 24, 2013 in Articles, Featured, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments In his 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to roam. It’s an optimistic vision of the future—if you’re a buffalo or a dolphin or a cockroach. No more ranchers. No more...
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Collapsism

Posted by on Oct 16, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Korea, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments When small children want something to go away, they close their eyes. Poof! The monster disappears. The spoonful of spinach vanishes. The spilled milk evaporates. Except that they don’t. U.S policymakers indulge in a similar variety of child’s play called collapsism. They close their eyes when they want a particularly despised adversary to go away. And poof! Kim Jong Eun’s North Korea...
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Syria: What’s Next?

Posted by on Oct 2, 2013 in Articles, Featured, Islamophobia, US Foreign Policy | 0 comments It started as a peaceful revolt. It descended into a civil war that has so far claimed over 100,000 casualties and ejected nearly one-third of the population from their homes. Even worse, it has broadened into a regional conflict in which neighboring countries and their proxies try to tip the balance of power in a broad swath of territory from Iran to Israel. The Obama administration has...
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