This year may signal the 59th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice Agreement, yet according to South Korean peace activists like Kang, it signals the last year of war on the Korean peninsula. I spoke recently with Kang Jeong-Koo, a longtime activist-scholar and a steadfast champion of peace, at the Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea (SPARK) headquarters in Seoul.
Mitt Romney’s foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute, while trotted out as a major rejection of the current administration’s approach to the Middle East, mostly just rehashed President Obama’s policies, albeit with more hawkish bravado. But Romney’s speech also included a host of faulty assumptions about Arabs and Muslims, indicating a potentially reckless misunderstanding of America’s relationship with the Muslim world.
Compared to the interests of Jerusalem, Tehran, and Washington, those of the Iranian people come in a distant last.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unrelenting pressure on the Obama administration to back him in his threats toward Iran backfired on him.
Since 1945, the small Japanese island of Okinawa has been unwilling host to a massive U.S. military presence and a storehouse for a witches’ brew of dangerous munitions and chemicals, including nerve gas, mustard gas, and nuclear missiles. However, there is one weapon the Pentagon has always denied that it kept on Okinawa: Agent Orange. But a recently discovered U.S. army report puts lie to those denials once and for all.
In an election season consumed by the sluggish U.S. economy, foreign policy has been a more marginal issue than usual in the U.S. presidential race. But when they have ventured to attack President Barack Obama’s record on global affairs, GOP nominee Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan have avoided substantive issues in favor of tired talking points and dog whistles, chalking up a series of gaffes and exposing their own inexperience in the process.
Mitt Romney’s comment about China in the first debate was no doubt intended to capitalize on American concerns about the U.S.-China economic relationship
The low rolling hills of the Dalateqi region of Inner Mongolia spread out gently behind a delightful painted farmhouse. Goats and cows graze peacefully on the surrounding fields. But walk due west just 100 meters from the farmhouse and you’ll confront a far less pastoral reality: endless waves of sand, absent any sign of life, that stretch as far as the eye can see.
Would that Pakistanis could sue the U.S. government for drone strikes.
Only a few weeks after Francois Hollande’s election, former Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard came up with an original budget-balancing solution: if France chose to relinquish its nuclear arsenal, he argued, “16 billion euros that serve absolutely no purpose” could be saved over five years.