The U.S. Coast Guard Hercules plane parked at Bonriki International Airport fires one by one its mighty engines, and the crowd immediately begins to cheer. There is not much to do on Tarawa Archipelago, and the U.S. military and coastguard planes landing here for refueling almost every day are the main source of entertainment for the local people, especially children.
While the proponents of the U.S. pivot to Asia argue that it enhances regional security, it is in reality precipitating a much more explicit Sino-American rivalry, thus undermining the prospects of an amicable and pluralistic regional order. Ultimately, America’s growing military presence in the region could backfire, giving birth to what it dearly seeks to prevent.
Richard Armitage is at it again. George W. Bush’s deputy secretary of state has made a career of telling Japan what to do. When then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had second thoughts about joining the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, Armitage told an official, “Don’t try to back off.” Earlier, he had advised Japan (in Gavan McCormack’s paraphrase) to “pull its head out of the sand and make sure the Rising Sun flag was visible in the Afghanistan war.”
The announcement of America’s “Asia-Pacific pivot” by its first Hawaiia-born president was highly fitting, since the Hawaiian Islands are at the piko (“navel” in Hawaiian) of this vast region. A less flattering metaphor for Hawaii’s role in the Pacific is what Maui educator and native Hawaiian activist Kaleikoa Kaeo has called a giant octopus whose tentacles reach across the ocean clutching Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, Jeju island, Guam—and, at times, the Philippines, American Samoa, Wake Island, Bikini Atoll, and Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Japan’s right-wing is trying to make the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands dispute an example of why Japan needs nuclear weapons.
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.
Out of deference to its founding principles of respect for sovereignty, the United Nations has failed to protect populations from slaughter.
The main geostrategic challenge facing Asia—as well as the U.S. presence there—has been the extraordinary rise of China in the past decade. In Obama and China’s Rise, Jeffrey Bader, a veteran diplomat of over 30 years, recounts his experiences working for Obama’s presidential campaign and serving as the senior director for East Asian affairs on Obama’s National Security Council from January 2009 to April 2011.
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.
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