Poor Roh Moo-Hyun. The South Korean president’s popularity rating has dipped as low as 10% recently. His backers on the left have savaged him for pushing a free-trade agreement with the United States. With only a few months remaining in his term and the presidential elections coming up in December, he faces a likely victory by the conservatives.
Ten years after the Asian financial cataclysm of 1997, the economies of the Western Pacific Rim are growing, though not at the rates they enjoyed before the crisis. The region has been indelibly scarred by the crisis. There is greater poverty, inequality, and social destabilization than before the crisis. South Korea’s painful labor market reforms, for instance, have produced the quiet desperation behind one of the highest suicide rates among developed countries.
In a July 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, writer Kimberly Kagan touted the success of the Iraq surge strategy. Kagan noted, among other supposed triumphs, that the Maliki government had "confronted Muqtada al-Sadr for promoting illegal militia activity, and has apparently prompted this so-called Iraqi nationalist to leave for Iran for the second time since January." While one can perhaps excuse Kagan’s sunny defense of the surge, (the plan was partly devised, after all, by her husband, Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a fact which the Wall Street Journal did not reveal to readers) the repeated attempts by conservative defenders of Bush’s Iraq policy to dispute Sadr’s nationalist credentials and treat him as an Iranian puppet indicate a real and troubling lack of knowledge of the Iraqi political scene, and of Sadr’s place within it.
According to Starbucks, all the world’s a cafe, and all the men and women merely imbibers. “Geography is a flavor,” the conglomerate proclaims. In the store, customers can choose coffee beans from three regions of the world: Africa/Arabia, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. It is part of a marketing strategy designed to educate consumers to treat coffee more like wine, with flavor connected to locale.
Just over three weeks into the new regime of Gordon Brown, there is a new bounce and a sense of renewed optimism about these islands.
Morocco’s ongoing refusal to allow for the long-planned UN-sponsored referendum on the fate of Western Sahara to move forward, combined with a growing nonviolent resistance campaign in the occupied territory against Moroccan occupation authorities, has led Morocco to propose granting the former Spanish colony special autonomous status within the kingdom.
The recent assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad seems to be the latest example of “our man in Pakistan” doing our bidding despite his questionable credentials. But this week, Foreign Policy In Focus gives you a very different picture of the Red Mosque assault.
We are unquestionably the wealthiest nation in the world. But the question is, in this age of globalization, are we using that wealth and that power to help others so that we can bring them up? Or are we using that wealth and that power just to continue our power and our wealth at the expense of others?
July 4th 2007 may turn out to be an Independence Day second only to the original one of 1776 in its importance to the nation’s history. If the first week back from its holiday recess is any indicator, Congress may now be firmly on the path of reclaiming its constitutional responsibilities – and thus asserting its independence from the imperial pretensions of the current “King George” – to shape policy and programs on defense and foreign affairs.
Back in 2000, Hillary Clinton spent months on a “listening tour” of New York State, convincing voters she wanted to be, not their boss, but their responsive public servant. Letting the world know who’s boss has been the persistent theme of President George W. Bush’s failed foreign policy. To begin to repair the resulting damage, a global listening tour is in order for him.