
Is Japan the America’s Pit Bull or Lap Dog… …or Dog in the Manger?
As I discuss in my most recent piece for Asia Times, Duterte v. United States: The Empire Slaps Back, I find the US tunnel vision concerning Asian attitudes toward engagement with China puzzling. The big story in Asia IMO is the smaller powers trying to integrate with the PRC economically while keeping it at arms’...
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There’s playing with fire and there’s dousing yourself with gasoline and jumping into a flaming pit. I do the latter in a piece for SCMP’s This Week in Asiamagazine, The British Forgery at the Heart of India and China's Tibetan Border Dispute. My proposed title, Uncle Sam Plays the Great Game in Arunachal Pradesh,didn't make...
Read MoreI’ve written a couple pieces of the smoking hot issue in Pivotland, Philippine president Duterte’s swerve toward a pro-PRC foreign policy, and what the U.S. and pro-American sector of the Manila elite are going to do about it. The first piece, Reports of death of US-Philippine alliance may be exaggerated, addresses the fact that Duterte’s...
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…But It’s Really Racism
I find the spectacle of liberals heroically mounting the barricades against Trump-fascism rather amusing. For one thing, liberals don’t crush fascism. Liberals appease fascism, then they exploit fascism. In between there’s a great big war, where communists crush fascism. That’s pretty much the lesson of WWII. Second thing is, Trump isn’t fascist. In my opinion,...
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My current piece at Asia Times, Balochistan Is Not Bangladesh, looks at the 1971 establishment of Bangladesh in context of Balochi independence advocates’ imploring Modi to do Balochistan a solid like Indira Gandhi did for East Pakistan. Here’s a video of an independence advocate ringing the bell on Indian TV: Long story short, there aren’t...
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India-Pakistan relations look to be interesting in the next few years, especially if by “interesting” one means “potential for regional conflagration with toasty global elements”. If the PRC continues its rise at its current trajectory and under its current management, chances are that by 2050 the United States will be facing a China that is...
Read MoreI consider North Korea to be America’s stalking horse for its China strategy. If I’m right, things aren’t looking too good. I have a piece up at Asia Times, Will We Have to Nuke Asia in Order to Save It? It reviews the recent excitement over the fifth North Korean nuclear test and addresses the...
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Awkwardly, apparently. Awkward facts surrounding Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's awkward estrangement from the United States seem to produce some awkward reporting. I have a piece up at Asia Times about “Sonofawhore-gate” i.e. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s alleged insult delivered to President Obama that got the Duterte-Obama confab in Laos canceled, and was breathlessly reported in...
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Hillary Clinton affirmed “American exceptionalism” in a speech to the American Legion in Cincinnati on August 31. Her speech was another episode in the chronicle of Clintonian triangulation: the continual search for positions that co-opt and neutralize critics of Clinton and Clintonian policies. And by declaring the “indispensable nation” doctrine, Hillary Clinton convincingly shed the...
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A while back I wrote a piece, The Most Dangerous Letters in the World Aren’t SCS…They’re CPEC. I made the case that the South China Sea was a case of high-functioning, cautious states not interested in blowing each other up…while in South Asia the core Chinese gambit, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, was at the mercy...
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Fidel Castro's 90th birthday celebrations might have been a bit more extravagant if Cuba had emerged from the 1962 missile crisis as the world's fifth nuclear power. Everybody loves to talk about the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when America’s Best and Brightest under Jack Kennedy stared down Nikita Khrushchev and his attempt to...
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Another day, another piece of US think-tankery poo-pooing the prospects for a nuclear confrontation with the PRC. RAND came up with a new report on the economic costs of war with China,Thinking the Unthinkable. In RAND's view the war won’t escalate beyond a limited conventional war fought in the West Pacific and over Chinese territory,...
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To escape the soul-killing political minutiae inhabiting my Twitter timeline, I decided to trawl my own blog archive for diversion…and came across a piece I wrote in September 2013 on Alexander Hamilton! Yes, Alexander Hamilton, current darling of the Washington set and central figure of an ethnically enhanced hip-hop musical that apparently provides the soundtrack...
Read MoreThings fall apart. Especially with a helping push from the United States. The world’s easier for America to manage if it’s broken into smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable and manageable pieces. That, I think, is one of the lessons of the post Cold War era. The USSR fell apart. Yugoslavia fell apart. So did Sudan....
Read MoreI have a new post up at Asia Times that ventures beyond my usual bailiwick. It’s about Cambodia, and it’s keyed on the murder of Dr. Kem Ley, which created an uproar in Cambodian civil society: Cambodian PM Hun Sen Paints a bull’s-eye on his own back. I’m interested in Cambodia because of its role...
Read MoreOpportunistic foreign intervention into domestic democratic processes: it happens. I’m reading Sterling Seagrave’s epic account of the Philippines under Marcos,The Marcos Dynasty, and just happen to be at the part where Edward Lansdale and the CIA are painstakingly molding Ramon Magsaysay into the magnificent vessel that will contain American aspirations in the Philippines. Lansdale did...
Read MoreWalter Liggett, Floyd Olson, and Minnesota
Most people die in deserved obscurity. Others have their memory and reputation snatched away by forces eager to diminish and deny their accomplishments. Walter Liggett was such a person. Walter Liggett was a pioneering muckraker, a journalist who lived—and died—pursuing the biggest story of his generation: the collision of money, power, crime, democracy, and freedom...
Read MoreIn case you haven’t seen Baton Rouge shooter Gavin Long’s alleged manifesto, I’ve included it at the end of this post. It's an interesting document. In it Long appears self-aware, stable, emotionally controlled, analytical, and morally and politically engaged. It concludes: A sacrifice for my people, & a sacrifice for the people. His manifesto doesn’t...
Read MoreNow that the UNCLOS SCS ruling has come down, it’s time to deal with What’s Next? Not good things, in my opinion, as expressed in my latest at Asia Times. It’s called No off ramps, only dead ends in the South China Sea. The diplomatic and strategic wild card, I think, is not the fact...
Read MoreMicah Johnson, Josh Marshall, and Charles Pierce
I normally keep my head down on the Internet but recently I’ve been a near-troll-y jerk on the subject of what I see as inaccurate/misleading liberal media presentation of Trump statements on anti-Semitism and racism. Long story short, I think Trump has the white racist bloc sewn up and he doesn’t need to dogwhistle it....
Read MoreLong Live?
As relatively muted reactions to the Philippines v. China arbitral tribunal award come in from ASEAN and EU, it appears likely that the PRC at the highest level traded an undertaking to finally abandon the nine-dash-line in return for international forbearance on declaration of China as an international outlaw for ignoring the ruling. I suspect...
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I have a piece in CounterPunch magazine about the constellation of whistleblowers surrounding HSBC Bank, HSBC and the Five Whistleblowers. Buy it! HSBC has yet to be brought to book in any serious way for a litany of transgressions in multiple jurisdictions. When I say “not in a serious way” while cognizant of the fact...
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For me the central tragedy of this week is not the massacre in Dallas, horrific as it is. It is the video shot in Falcon Heights of the aftermath of the police shooting of Philandro Castile. Absolutely wrenching to watch. And it should be watched to the very end. It is a heartrending depiction of...
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I have a piece up at Asia Times, China has right to declare ADIZ in the South China Sea. A bit more in your face than my proposed title but a) essentially true and b) not a bad idea improving coordination in zones abuzz with contentious military presences and missions and c) decent clickbait. Pre...
Read MoreI’m ready to call bullsh*t on the notorious “Red Star of David” anti-Trump meme that has swept the Intertubes. Stars of David are not red (blue border on white field); ghetto stars used by the Nazis were yellow; and the red star, among other things, is the shoulder badge of the US Army’s 6th Infantry...
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