News Abroad

The Talking Cure: How It Might Help in the Middle East to End Nuclear Threats

by William Lambers

Everyone realizes that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose a grave threat to the Middle East. But even a resolution to the Iranian nuclear dispute won't remove the vicious cycle of hostility and arms buildups in the region. Only by establishing confidence-building measures among all nations in the Middle East can this be achieved. In an area filled with animosities this idea may seem hopelessly idealistic, yet the Cold War enemies, the United States and the Soviet Union, learned to build co

Why Japan Has Even Worse Relations with North Korea than We Do

by Gavan McCormack

On 14 April, the 61st session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting, adopted a resolution drafted and submitted jointly by Japan and the EU on the situation of Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). It called on North Korea to immediately return Japanese abductees and on the UN General Assembly to take up the question of North Korean human rights violations in general.[1] The No 1 abductee whose return is sought by Japan is Yokota Megumi

Why China Has to Steal Technology

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

There is no entry for China in Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy. Pity. For the violence and the timing of the Anti-Japanese demonstrations (justifiable as they are) as well as the Japanese Prime Minister’s apologetic response to those demonstrations clearly illustrates Sharanky’s central argument: Now we can see why nondemocratic regimes

The Significance of Pope Benedict XV

by Thomas Fleming

I'm puzzled that so little is being said in the media about the historical significance of Cardinal Ratzinger's choice of Benedict XVI as his papal name. As a German, I think we can be fairly sure he is trying to remind the world of the tragic story of his predecessor, and how close he came to bringing World War I to an early conclusion. The story has specical significance for Americans. In the spring of 1917, Pope Benedict XV called on the warring governments to make a peace of mutu

Getting Out: Why We Need to Remember the Dominican Republic, 1965

by Alan McPherson

U.S. planners in Iraq have gained little inspiration from the past, especially from the shopworn Vietnam analogy. That war haunts both supporters and opponents of the 2003 U.S. invasion, and more so as the occupation enters its third year.   Supporters of the Iraqi war say the"liberation" of Iraq has helped Washington kick the"Vietnam syndrome," the fear of sending U.S. youth into harm's way. Opponents answer that the conflict is a"quagmire" dragging down U.S. resources and morale

Understanding Iraq's Insurgency

by William Polk

In the aftermath of the destruction of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, America has convinced many, probably most, Iraqis that it is not occupying their country to promote freedom but to engage in a new and more sophisticated form of impe

Why Is Japan Suddenly Indulging in Rosy Reinterpretations of the Past?

by David McNeill and Mark Selden

Sino-Japanese relations sunk to a new low on the weekend of April 9-10 when an estimated 10-20,000 Chinese protestors surrounded the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, pelting it with missiles and shouting"Japanese pigs come out" and"Be ashamed of distorting history." Thousands more vented their rage in other parts of the capital and in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and elsewhere. The protests, demanding a boycott of Japanese goods, followed Tokyo's authorization of textbooks that many in China co

The Conclave: What the Media and the Rest of Us Need to Know About Its History

by Frederic J. Baumgartner

The conclave is the longest-standing method of choosing the wielder of authority for any institution. In its setting and ceremony it appears to be thoroughly medieval, but in many of its details it is only a

Is Dealing with Islam the Next Pope's Great Challenge?

by Timothy R. Furnish

With the passing of John Paul II, a number of Church and geopolitical analysts are hoping that the conclave will elect as the next leader of Catholicism a man conversant with the world’s second-largest religion: Islam. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, with over 2 billion adherents and the Roman Catholic Church accounts for about 1.1 billion of those, while there are 1.3 billion Muslims. (And contrary to popular belief Christianity, not Islam, is the world’s fas

We've Been Here Before: The Tiger Cages of Vietnam

by Don Luce

My best friend was tortured to death in 1970. Nguyen Ngoc Phuong was a gentle person. But he hated the war and the destruction of his country. He was arrested by the U.S.- sponsored Saigon police in one of his many anti-government demonstrations. After three days of continuous interrogation and torture, he died."He was tortured by the (Saigon) police but Americans stood by and offered suggestions," said one of the men who was in prison with him.Perhaps this is the biggest singl

China, Japan and the U.S.: How We're Playing Our Hand Badly

by Chalmers Johnson

I recall forty years ago, when I was a new professor working in the field of Chinese and Japanese international relations, that Edwin O. Reischauer once commented,"The great payoff from our victory of 1945 was a permanently disarmed Japan." Born in Japan and a Japanese historian at Harvard, Reischauer served as American ambassador to Tokyo in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Strange to say, since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and particularly under the administration of George W.

The Lessons of Iraq We Refuse to Learn

by William R. Polk

Are there any lessons to be learned by the American venture into Iraq? The great German philosopher of history Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel doubted our capacity to find out. “Peoples and governments,” he wrote, “n

The Cover-up that Helped the IRA, the PA, and the Kashmiri Separatists

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

SRINAGAR: Gunmen shot dead a grandmother, mother and her infant daughter after the child's father, a former Kashmiri separatist rebel, surrendered to Indian security forces, police said on Sunday. They then set the house on fire before fleeing, a police spokesman said. Militants often attack families of police and army informers in the India-held Jammu and Kashmir, where separatists have waged a revolt against Indian rule since 1989. Police had no further deta

Poisoning the Well: The False Equation of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

by Irfan Khawaja

In a recent review of Dennis Ross’s book The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, the military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes: The world is obsessed with the so-called occupied territories in Palestine, but not from any abstract principle of postbellum equity or worry over civilian deaths. Otherwise UN resolutions, European subsidies, and American envoys wou

An American in Canada Explains

by Brett Hooton

Last year on September 11th, I awoke with a mouth full of ash. I discovered this anomaly when, after brushing my teeth, I spit a chalky, dark gray stream into my bathroom sink. Stunned, I pressed my face close to the mirror, said “ahh,” and extended a tongue that was as black as chimney soot. At that instant, I remembered it was the anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. Then I shivered with a strange epiphany

Can Hezbollah and Hamas Become Democratic?

by Daniel Pipes

If Al-Qaeda renounced terrorism, would the U.S. government welcome its running candidates in American elections? Had the Nazis denounced violence, would Hitler have become an acceptable chancellor for Germany? Not likely, because the tactics of Al-Qaeda and the Nazis matter less than their goals.Similarly, Hezbollah and Hamas are unacceptable because of their goals. These organizations are important elements of the Islamist movement that seeks to create a global totalitarian order alon

Are We in World War IV?

by Tom Engelhardt

Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once -- most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. For decades, the world was poised for that next world war; the two superpowers with their nuclear arsenals running to thousands of weapons (as they still do), a few hundred of which would have been civilization-busti

Does the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Have a Future?

by Lawrence S. Wittner

This May, the United Nations will be holding a review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a key nuclear arms control and disarmament agreement to which 188 countries are now parties. Originally proposed by the U.S. and Soviet governments, the NPT was signed at the United Nations in 1968 and went into force in 1970. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations agreed to renounce the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed nations agreed to divest themselves

The Genius of Republics Is Pacific?

by Alexander Hamilton

In recent weeks, with the elections in Iraq and Ukraine and other places, there has developed the idea that democracy, to put this quaintly, is the "wave of the future." But while these developments are undoubtedly positive, there is implicit in the celebrating the assumption that the proliferation of democracies will make the world safer. And this assumption may or may not be accurate. In the Federalist Papers

Reading Between the Lines of the Bush/Putin Press Conference

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer

Something rather extraordinary happened during the joint press conference held by presidents Bush and Putin in Bratislava. Vladimir Putin was placed on the dock accused of disloyalty to the Russian democracy and George W. Bush was forced into acting as his prosecutor. So upset were the Russian reporters that they reverted to their Soviet era behavior. Ironically, in so doing they prevented the subject from being changed, kept Putin on the defensive and the spotlight squarely on the sad decli