General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is currently in China after a stop in Japan, during which he talked with Foreign Minister Aso -- and possibly Defense Minister Kyuma, as Steve Clemons wonders, following the rumors surrounding Vice President Cheney's visit -- about a range of technical issues related to alliance …
Month: March 2007
The ever-shifting balance
I was slightly remiss in this post yesterday, because I should have said more about just how successful North Korea's diplomacy has been through all this.North Korea has the Bush administration bending over backward to assuage North Korea and keep negotiations on track, and -- with an assist from the US Congress -- has Japan …
China in charge
The FT ran an article on Wednesday dissecting the process of releasing the frozen $25 million to North Korea. I was especially struck by this line:Several people familiar with the debate said Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, agreed to overrule officials responsible for terrorism financing, who objected to the move, after Beijing warned that a failure …
Seoul speaks up — how about Washington?
The Jiji wire service carried two articles today that report on South Korean officials criticizing Japan for its focus on the abductions issue in the multilateral de-nuclearization talks.First, Yu Myong-hwan, South Korea's newly appointed ambassador to Japan, said at a press conference with Japanese journalists in Seoul that the resolving the nuclear issue must take …
Alliance or agreement?
Talks resume in Beijing on the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the big story is that Japan and North Korea came to blows over the abductions issue.This was always the danger of Japan's pushing the abductions issue at all costs in the face of the North Korean stone wall: the US will have to …
China is not creating its own risk fleet…yet
In the years before World War I, Imperial Germany developed its "risk fleet" -- a large fleet of relatively little utility -- to force the Royal Navy to focus on defending the British Isles, a textbook example of the concept of a fleet in being.It is with this in mind that I read this op-ed …
Continue reading China is not creating its own risk fleet…yet
Assertive Japan
Michael Green's review of Kenneth Pyle's Japan Rising in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, is now online here (via RealClearPolitics). I previously discussed a draft version of Pyle's book here.I find Green's review interesting because it gets at the ambiguities of Japan's re-emergence. Green (and Pyle) are correct to point out that Japan's strategic …
The future of American power
I found this post by Suzanne Nossel at Democracy Arsenal fascinating, in that it is a fair, reasonable critique of the Iraq War that does not indict the very idea of the US using its power in support of its values abroad.I particularly like her points "the US Military has limits" and "military power can't …
Seeking options
I found this op-ed by Gregory Clark in last Thursday's Japan Times fascinating. Clark suggests that North Korea may well be more open to an agreement with the US than commonly assumed, because Pyongyang is looking to expand its foreign policy options: "Even less is there any realization of an even more important factor possibly …
The california rolls are safe
After announcing plans to institute a certification system for Japanese restaurants overseas back in November, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, headed by the beleaguered Matsuoka Toshikatsu (the subject of this superb book -- more on this soon), has decided to abandon these plans after opposition from citizens' groups and after a panel chaired …
Tobias S. Harris 