The Korea Herald

[Daniel Moss] Japan’s not back yet

Haruhiko Kuroda may rue the day he visited Nagoya.In a Nov. 5 speech to business leaders in the city, the Bank of Japan governor came close to declaring the end of deflation and the dawn of a new era. The implication was that interest rates may no longer be geared toward combating something that no longer exists. There was a whiff of normalization.Events have caught up with Kuroda and his upbeat comments look premature, at best, and like a misreading of the economic cycle. He’s likely to spend a

Jan. 15, 2019

[Trudy Rubin] 2019’s real global security threats don’t include border crisis

As US President Donald Trump threatens to declare a state of emergency to counter a manufactured security crisis on the southern border, it’s worth looking at the real security challenges facing the country in 2019.List after published list of such security threats, as compiled by think tanks, the departments of State, Homeland Security and the US intelligence community, fail to mention the press of immigrants on the southern border as one of those dangers. That’s because it isn’t.Yes, border se

Jan. 14, 2019

[Trudy Rubin] 2019’s real global security threats don’t include border crisis

[Bharat Dogra] SDGs and grim global realities

In recent times the development discourse all over the world has been heavily influenced by the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015 for the year 2030.These goals are in the form of specific targets for key areas of development, protection of the environment and so on.If these goals are achieved, then these 15 years will be the most successful years of human history in terms of reducing distress. Hunger is to be almost eliminated, while poverty will be reduced greatly.

Jan. 14, 2019

[David Fickling] Xi’s leading China toward stagnation

The ambition of China hawks in the Trump administration is to maintain American dominance by halting China’s economic rise. It’s strange that President Xi Jinping appears to be working toward the same end.The risk for any economy approaching China’s level of development is that it gets ensnared in the middle-income trap. Once the low-hanging fruits of urbanization and industrialization have been plucked, countries tend to get stuck in second gear.Latin America, the former Soviet Union and the la

Jan. 14, 2019

[David Fickling] Xi’s leading China toward stagnation

[Sachs, Schmidt-Traub and Fajans-Turner] Fully filling the global fund

The single most important public health measure of 2019 is the replenishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. These three diseases, which currently kill around 2.5 million people per year, could be fully contained by 2030, with deaths reduced to nearly zero. The Global Fund is the primary instrument for success, and it needs to raise $10 billion per year to accomplish its mission.The Global Fund, established in 2001 by Kofi Annan, has been credited with saving 27 milli

Jan. 14, 2019

[Bobby Ghosh] Pompeo gives Arabs a dose of Trump cynicism

It was mendacious, petty, deeply cynical and full of contradictions -- and just possibly the most honest expression of a US administration’s policy in the Middle East by a top American official.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech in Cairo will win no hearts and change no minds among his imagined audience, the Arab world. Most Arabs will have paid it no heed at all, since Pompeo is widely regarded as having no “wasta” (connection or influence) on the Trump administration’s Middle East poli

Jan. 14, 2019

[David Ignatius] Saudi engine of repression rumbles on

One hundred days after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is pressing ahead with anti-dissident campaigns and remains in regular contact with Saud al-Qahtani, the media adviser whom the CIA believes helped organize Khashoggi’s killing, according to US and Saudi sources. The Saudi crown prince, far from altering his impulsive behavior or signaling that he has learned lessons from the Khashoggi affair, as the Trump administration had hoped, appears instead to be

Jan. 13, 2019

[David Ignatius] Saudi engine of repression rumbles on

[Faye Flam] US should go back to the moon, but not because the Chinese have

To claim we’ve already been to the moon is like spending a day each in Iowa, Arizona, Rhode Island and maybe Western Pennsylvania and saying you’ve already been to Earth. There’s a lot more to see on the moon -- including the whole far side, the half that’s perpetually turned away from us. That’s one reason for the excitement behind the Chinese-led mission Chang’e-4, which landed in this unexplored region recently.　Images from lunar orbit show the geology there is strikingly different from the s

Jan. 13, 2019

[Faye Flam] US should go back to the moon, but not because the Chinese have

[Eli Lake] Pompeo doctrine isn’t so different from Obama doctrine

Ten years ago, President Barack Obama traveled to Cairo to open a new dialogue with the world’s Muslims. On Thursday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Cairo to offer a rebuttal.　Some of his points are correct. It’s true that Obama in his first term was too sanguine about political Islam. In 2009 -- two years before the revolution that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- Obama invited members of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his speech. Obama wrongly assessed the prospects for

Jan. 13, 2019

[Shayera Dark] Selling Africa’s good news stories

Anywhere in the world, freelance journalism is an extreme career choice. The job requires withstanding pitch rejections, ignored queries, stolen story ideas, and delayed payments. It means reconciling oneself with the economic precarity that comes with having little or no leverage in pay negotiations. But for African freelance journalists, covering the continent presents its own set of unique challenges.In Nigeria, for example, most media companies need diligent editors, seldom publish incisive

Jan. 13, 2019

[Leonid Bershidsky] Macron’s ‘yellow vest’ response makes Putin look soft

French President Emmanuel Macron’s handouts to “yellow vest” protesters have damped the demonstrators’ fervor somewhat but failed to stop the regular eruptions of violence, so now Macron and his government have decided to wield a heavier stick. The new rules being proposed ought to raise some eyebrows: They’re tougher than the norms Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime uses to suppress political opposition.　The shift from a conciliatory tone toward law and order began with Macron’s New Year

Jan. 13, 2019

[Henry William Brands] ‘Compromise’ wasn’t always a dirty word

With the House in the hands of Democrats and the Senate controlled by Republicans for the next two years, compromise will be essential to the passage of any legislation. But it won’t come easily. We live in an age in which compromise is often interpreted as weakness and penalized at the next election. Our congressional districts reward candidates who appeal to the most uncompromising elements of their parties. This whole system has fostered a mind-set that makes politics war by other means.　It w

Jan. 10, 2019

[Henry William Brands] ‘Compromise’ wasn’t always a dirty word

[Jon Wiener] 2019 will be worst year of Trump’s life

Some presidents have really bad years.　For Nixon, it was 1974 -- the Watergate year, which ended with his resignation. For Clinton, it was 1998 -- the Monica year, which culminated with an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999. He won that vote easily and came out more popular than before.　It’s a good guess that Donald Trump’s really bad year will be 2019. And it’s not yet clear whether he’ll survive, like Clinton, or be forced out of office, like Nixon.　Nixon’s worst year resulted from crimes

Jan. 10, 2019

[Letter to the Editor] Please do us a favor, by not going to the Hwacheon Sancheoneo (Mountain Trout) Ice festival.

If your idea of a good holiday is taking part in the mass killing of fish, brought in from farms to be crammed like sardines into a river -- blocked and sealed solely for this purpose -- awaiting thousands of people to lower their hooks through holes bored by electric drills into an artificially frozen surface, then perhaps you want to look away. If not, you might want to reconsider your plans, just in case you had in mind the Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival in Gangwon Province among your poten

Jan. 10, 2019

[David Ignatius] Life without Mattis’steadying hand

At home and abroad, people are now asking a question they’ve dreaded for nearly two years: How will the erratic presidency of Donald Trump function without the steadying hand of Jim Mattis as defense secretary?Life without Mattis is the scary reality of this new year. The president may have tired of the careful, battle-hardened advice he received from the retired Marine general, but America’s allies depended on Mattis for reassurance. As one prominent diplomat put it in a message after hearing t

Jan. 10, 2019

[David Ignatius] Life without Mattis’steadying hand

[David Fickling] Belt and Road is more chaos than conspiracy

Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative a bold infrastructure vision, or a slush fund? The question is becoming more pressing.　Chinese officials offered to help bail out state-owned 1Malaysia Development, kill off investigations into alleged corruption at the fund, and spy on journalists looking into it in exchange for stakes in Belt-and-Road railway and pipeline projects in Malaysia, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. If proven, that would offer the clearest link yet between the 1MDB scandal

Jan. 10, 2019

[Chon Shi-yong] Who will be 2019 Person of the Year?

The first and last months of each year see a flourish of announcements about “the person of the year” and the like. For me, it is interesting -- whether the announcements come from the Nobel committees, Time magazine or my college alumni association -- to learn more about people who have made extraordinary achievements or had great influence. This season, I had a chance to get personally involved in one such event -- designation of the Person of the Year by the Asia News Network, a coalition of

Jan. 9, 2019

[Chon Shi-yong] Who will be 2019 Person of the Year?

[J. Bradford DeLong] What will cause next US recession?

Over the past 40 years, the US economy has experienced four recessions. Among the four, only the extended downturn of 1979-1982 had a conventional cause. The US Federal Reserve thought that inflation was too high, so it hit the economy on the head with the brick of interest rate hikes. As a result, workers moderated their demands for wage increases and firms cut back on planned price increases.The other three recessions were each caused by derangements in financial markets. After the savings-and

Jan. 9, 2019

[Ernesto Araujo] Bolsonaro was not elected to take Brazil as he found it

“Brazilian foreign policy cannot change.” That is how a Brazilian politician summarized his dislike for the foreign policy of President Jair Bolsonaro and myself. Those views are representative of people who have been so traumatized by the shambolic, far-left foreign policy of the governments of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (2003-2016) that they prefer inaction and indifference to any attempt to make Brazil a global player again. They are so used to bad change that they would rat

Jan. 9, 2019

[Ernesto Araujo] Bolsonaro was not elected to take Brazil as he found it

[Virginia Heffernan] Women take US Congress, misogynists lash out

Just over a year ago, a writer named Kristen Roupenian published a short story in the New Yorker called “Cat Person.” It chronicled a brief, mediocre romance. At first, it was hard to say what made the story newsworthy.　Still, just as #MeToo was taking off, “Cat Person” became history’s first viral short story. Something in Roupenian’s tale of Robert and Margot’s relationship -- testy, opportunistic -- felt familiar. And then there was the word mild Robert uses at their breakup, when he finally

Jan. 9, 2019