Utterly Fascinating

How a Jersey-born barbecue joint owner became our best diplomat to North Korea. I’m not kidding. The Post has a long profile of Bobby Egan, who apart from owning and operating Cubby’s, also managed to convince North Korea’s UN ambassador to tell the TImes that they were willing to negotiate over their nuclear weapons program.

Just read the whole thing.

American Foreign Policy & Japanese Prejudice

Gordon Chang argues that because Japan and Korea see international politics in East Asia as a zero-sum game in which China gains power in the region and influence with the US at the expense of other states, the US should see East Asia this way as well.  He is trying to rebut this good article (pdf) by Brad Glosserman in which he argues that Japan’s view of East Asia is limiting and cuts them off from seeing benefits from greater regional cooperation.  Here’s the money bit:

Tokyo should adopt an inclusive outlook and not feel threatened by improved relations between Washington and Beijing. Just as a positive Japan-China relationship will not threaten Tokyo’s ties to Washington, improved U.S.-China relations need not undermine the U.S.-Japan alliance. The key is ensuring that the U.S. sees the value of an alliance with Japan; one asset will be an improved Japan-China relationship.

Japan, and by extension Chang, has a very limited view of the possibilities of how cooperation and politics can work in East Asia.  Because of historical and cultural reasons, Japan sees itself in constant competition with China and thus gets jealous and resentful when the US  builds up its bilateral relationship with the largest country in the world.   The US, because of its power in the region and especially its influence over Japan, can change this equation.  We could assure Japan that we still value them as our longest standing ally in the region and are trying to move China into a regional system of cooperation, instead of isolating them within East Asia, making them more likely to lash out against their neighbors.  Chang, however, just accepts these Japanese prejudices and assumes that because Japan sees a zero-sum game in East Asia, the US should deal with China in the same way.  What Chang can’t prove is that it’s necessarily true that as we get closer to China, we get farther from Japan, or that their interests are damaged in any meaningful way.  We should be pursuing our priorities in East Asia, and not caving to unenlightened Japanese resentments.

He’s So European!

Mona Charen’s column discussing Obama and Clinton’s foreign policies is almost a how-to guide for conservatives who want to denigrate liberals in the most reductionist, lazy way.  She tries to say that because Barack Obama emphasizes fairly internationalist foreign policy ideas and because Clinton teared up when talking about how she wanted to lead the country, Clinton is the “patriotic” candidate and, we’re left to assumed, that Obama hates America.

While Charen’s questioning of Obama’s patriotism is par for the course, what’s really interesting is her off-handed dismissal of the committment to nuclear abolition as a way to prevent proliferation.  She says:

What would they talk about if they did meet? Perhaps they’d discuss Obama’s plan to eliminate the world’s nuclear weapons. He has said, “Here’s what I’ll say as president: ‘America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons.’”

While at first blush, the idea that the US committing itself to a nuclear weapon free world doesn’t seem like it would do much to deter Iran and North Korea, this idea actually has a lot of backing among people that Charen wouldn’t claim aren’t patriotic.  For one, Ronald Reagan himself was a nuclear abolitionist, and at the Reykjavik Summit, he seriously discussed with Gorbachev the prospect of abolition.  Is Reagan not patriotic enough for Charen?  Surely, if Reagan could get he leader of the “Evil Empire” on board for abolition, then North Korea and Iran will be a piece of cake.  More recently, noted America haters Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and William Perry have signed on for nuclear abolition.

But going back to Obama: yes, he could talk to Kim Jong Il about a world free of nuclear weapons.  We don’t like to talk about it, but the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon in war was the US.  And it happened not very far away from Korea.  For most of North Korea’s history, it has been colonized and brutalized by outside forces, and today, there are tens of thousands of US troops just south of their country, so it’s actually clear why they want to pursue a nuclear program.  More specifically, during the Korean War, MacArthur and Truman both spoke of  using nuclear weapons in Korea and Manchuria, Truman even requested 34 bombs for possible use in the war.  University of Chicago historian Bruce Cummins details in a piece for Le Monde Diplomatique exactly how seriously nuclear weapons use was considered by top American military officials in Korea. In short, a commitment to abolition probably could change the mindset of the North Korean leadership and make them more amenable to getting rid of their own nuclear program.

What I find most odd about Charen’s column is that describing a foreign policy as “European” still has currency as an effective put-down.  Was it not many Europeans (by which she must mean the French) who opposed the Iraq War, which most Americans now think was a mistake?  What’s even better is the weird phallic imagery she uses, not only is Obama’s foreign policy “European,” it’s also “utterly flaccid, squishy.”  I wonder what Charen thinks about developing bigger, longer rockets?  Do I really have to ask?

In the Year 2000…Japan Will Reject Robots for Elderly Care

Garance links to this fascinating article about how elderly Japanese aren’t huge fans of robots doing various household chores. I don’t see what else there is for Japan to do besides have robots take over domestic work, however. On Okinawa, the median life expectancy is in the 90s, while fertility has been in a tailspin for decades — it’s currently at 1.23 children for women. The population is almost 40% elderly - and that number is growing. Usually, countries would fill in the missing natives with immigrants, but Japan is famously nationalistic and ethnocentric, so they decided to go to robots for elderly care instead of Filipinos or Thais. Here’s a New York Times Magazine article from 2004 talking about the rise of robot elderly care.