In the year since Funabashi Yoichi, editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun, finished The Peninsula Question, the US and North Korea made an agreement that restarted the Six-Party talks, overcame the Banco Delta Asia obstacle, and issued a joint statement with the other parties that included a promise by North Korea to account for its nuclear …
Continue reading Recommended Book: The Peninsula Question, Yoichi Funabashi
George Washington University's Henry Nau has an essay in Policy Review in which he discusses the challenges posed by debating foreign policy (via RealClearPolitics).I am posting largely without comment, but I want to note that Nau's question is something I've thought about for a while. Ideas about foreign policy depend much more on abstraction and …
Yesterday I wrote about rising concerns that Japan will be criticized regarding the cheap yen at the G7 meeting this weekend in Germany; Japan, however, may also be running into trouble at the six-party talks due to restart this week in Beijing.This article in the FT hints at growing signs that Washington is increasingly open …
Nikkei reports today on the results of the Japanese government's annual survey of public opinion on Japan's foreign relations. The results are not particularly surprising. Nikkei leads by reporting that the ratio of respondents (57%) who thought that Japanese-South Korean relations were bad was the highest since the survey began in 1986 -- this likely …
The Japan Times reported yesterday on comments by Columbia's Gerald Curtis at a forum at the Korea Society in New York, in which he suggested that the abduction issue -- the dispute that has followed upon North Korea's 2002 admission to having abducted Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s -- has isolated Japan.It's worth …
So President Bush and Prime Minister Abe have had their first meeting, in the wake of the APEC summit in Hanoi.As the recap provided by the White House indicates, the agenda of their conversation was not particularly surprising and the meeting provided no major changes in US-Japan alliance policy. (Although, as this Yomiuri summary indicates, …
Tobias S. Harris 