The elderly gentleman had a remarkable history. He’d worked in the State Department in Latin America and Afghanistan. And, 60 years ago, he served as a translator in Tokyo in connection with the war crimes trial that resulted in 25 guilty verdicts and seven executions of Japanese war criminals just after World War II. Given his background, I was surprised at his viewpoint.
Let’s say that China sends a ship 75 miles off San Diego to do a little surveillance. Those are international waters, after all, and Beijing is interested in the latest developments in our submarine warfare capabilities at Naval Base Point Loma. And it wants to do some reconnaissance for its own expanding fleet of subs. Want to bet that the United States dispatches a ship to tell the Chinese to back off?
She came to Indonesia as the new Secretary of State, and she came, she said, as a friend. Hilary Clinton met Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and later told the press that she "wanted Jakarta’s advice and counsel about how to reach out not only to the Muslim world but to Asia and beyond." This overture from Barack Obama’s administration signaled the direction U.S. policy will take toward the fourth most populous nation on Earth.
"I am the one, whom they will kill in the end, because he himself has never killed." Miklos Radnoti If as a tourist your son comes to my country my son will be kind with him simply because in our religion a guest is a gift of God even if he is our long-standing enemy....
The people of Burma have high hopes for Barack Obama. Burmese still look to Washington — rather than Beijing, New Delhi, or Moscow — to provide reliable political support for democratic change. But although Burma is back in the headlines — with the Rohingya refugee crisis and Thailand’s refusal to provide these stateless Burmese Muslim boat-people with refugee status — the other foreign policy issues pressing in on the Obama administration may quickly push the Southeast Asian country to the back burner.
Editor’s Note: This essay is a condensed version of a paper originally commissioned by the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) for its Academic Paper Series.
South Korea is currently engaged in a large-scale, expensive modernization of its military that aims to provide the country with a more robust and self-sufficient defense. The timing of this considerable increase in military spending might seem, at first glance, rather odd. Korean economic growth has been relatively anemic in the past few years. Meanwhile, the conventional military power of its chief adversary, North Korea, has steadily declined and, until recently, South Korean leaders were committed to expanding inter-Korean cooperation. In another irony, the current Lee Myung-bak administration has simultaneously pushed a much harder line on North Korea and reduced the level of spending projected by the previous Roh Moo-hyun government.
The government of Pakistan released A.Q. Khan from house arrest earlier this month. The former head of the country’s nuclear weapons uranium enrichment program had been detained since 2004, following revelations of his decades-long role as part of a nuclear black market selling nuclear technology, materials, and even nuclear weapon designs.
Particularly over the last eight years, the United States was one big mouth. We lectured the world. We berated the world. We threatened and wheedled and roared. From the world’s perspective, however, the United States was like the teacher in the Peanuts comic strip: an incomprehensible wah-wah sound in the background. You generally ignored this voice of authority — so predictable, so monotonous, so deafening — unless it happened to pick on you.
In 1995, Sakena Yacoobi cofounded the Afghan Institute for Learning (AIL) — today one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Afghanistan — and is now its president and executive director. AIL provides education and health services to over 350,000 women and children annually in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with offices in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Sakena has received numerous prestigious awards for peace-building, including the Peacemakers in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the Gruber Prize, the Bill Graham Award from the Rex Foundation, and most recently, the Kravis Prize for Leadership.
One of the first difficult foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration will be what the United States should do about Afghanistan. Escalating the war, as National Security Advisor Jim Jones has been encouraging, will likely make matters worse. At the same time, simply abandoning the country — as the United States did after the overthrow of Afghanistan’s Communist government soon after the Soviet withdrawal 20 years ago — would lead to another set of serious problems.