The Korea Herald

[Leonid Bershidsky] Putin lives in a world without rules

It’s chilling when the leader of a nuclear power describes a potential nuclear conflict in terms one might expect from a suicide bomber. But the intellectual foundations of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest geopolitical utterances are even more unsettling: Putin’s policy wonks assume that the world can’t hope for reasonable coordinated action to prevent catastrophic war.Putin told a session of the Valdai Club, set up as a forum for Russian foreign-policy intellectuals to share their view

Oct. 21, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] Putin lives in a world without rules

[Mac Margolis] How Peru’s caretaker-president turned into a star

Peruvians have never been easy on their leaders. For the land that elected Alberto Fujimori and then watched him dismantle democracy, assail human rights and flee the country before returning in irons, maybe that’s for the best.So when a low-profile vice president (Peru’s government has two) who doubled as ambassador to Canada was thrust into the top job in March, following President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s resignation via the sprawling Odebrecht graft scandal, Peruvians weren’t holding their br

Oct. 21, 2018

[M. Taufiqurrahman] Circus of shame rolls into town as Indonesia weeps over earthquake

The timing could not have been worse. While the majority of people in Indonesia had barely recovered from the horror of another massive earthquake and rescue workers were still digging through the rubble looking for survivors, people were sidetracked by a spectacle of shame that would live in infamy.It’s one of those moments when politics rears its ugly head and we are once again reminded that politicians will do the worst things imaginable to score political points.Political activist Ratna Sar

Oct. 21, 2018

[M. Taufiqurrahman] Circus of shame rolls into town as Indonesia weeps over earthquake

[Tyler Cowen] The right finds the perfect weapon against the left

Imagine the perfect political and intellectual weapon. It would disable your adversaries by preoccupying them with their own vanities and squabbles, a bit like a drug so good that users focus on the high and stop everything else they are doing.Such a weapon exists: It is called political correctness. But it is not a weapon against white men or conservatives, as is frequently alleged; rather, it is a weapon against the American left. To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is

Oct. 21, 2018

[Trudy Rubin] Are Beijing and Washington headed toward a new Cold War?

Are we entering a new Cold War -- this time with China?That is a question I will be discussing with Chinese diplomats, businessmen, think tank experts and academics this week, as I begin a visit to Beijing and three other Chinese cities. The issue, now being hotly debated in Washington, turns 25 years of bipartisan US policy toward China on its ear.Such a question would have sounded strange 18 months ago when President Trump was touting his brilliant relationship with Xi Jinping, whom he hosted

Oct. 21, 2018

[Eli Lake] If Mattis goes, Trump will miss him

It took nearly two years, but President Donald Trump has finally said something unflattering about Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Rumors of the president’s unhappiness with Mattis date back several months, yet only last weekend did Trump himself express any, telling “60 Minutes” that he thinks the retired four-star Marine general “is sort of a Democrat.”In another era, when retired generals gravitated toward the center, being called a Democrat by a Republican president would be worth its wei

Oct. 18, 2018

[Eli Lake] If Mattis goes, Trump will miss him

[Jeffrey D. Sachs] America’s ongoing civil war

America continues be in a state of civil war. Not just a civil war, but the civil war. In the first round, back in the 1860s, the Confederacy lost. Yet now the Confederacy is temporarily on top. The United States remains one country divided by two cultures.From the start, the US has been a battleground of two competing visions. America’s founding credo was that “all men are created equal.” Yet the founding reality was that white males were far more equal than everyone else. White men owned slave

Oct. 18, 2018

[Jeffrey D. Sachs] America’s ongoing civil war

[Noah Feldman] Warren and the death of genetic privacy

In theory, taking a DNA test to reveal your ancestry is optional. But it’s on its way to becoming obligatory. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, announced Monday that she had submitted her DNA to ascertain that she does in fact have Native American ancestry -- after President Donald Trump had taunted her by saying he would throw a testing kit at her. For those of us not in national politics, a study in the journal Science last week claimed that within a few years, it will be possible to ide

Oct. 18, 2018

[David Fickling] Just skipping ‘Davos in the Desert’ won’t cut it

The world’s business leaders have suddenly been stricken with a conscience.After the disappearance and suspected murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi from the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, executives who’d been lined up for the “Davos in the Desert” Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh this month are getting cold feet.JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and his peer at Blackstone Group LP Steve Schwarzman, along with BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Uber Technolog

Oct. 18, 2018

[Andrew Malcolm] Trump’s bid to reshape China policy is dangerous -- and vital

Before he even took office, Donald Trump signaled that his policies toward China would differ drastically from his predecessor. They still do.Less than a month after his shocking 2016 election upset, the president-elect answered his phone in Trump Tower and had a pleasant 10-minute conversation with the president of China.Not Beijing, China. Taiwan, China, as in Republic of. It was the first time an American president or president-elect had talked with that country’s leader in nearly four decade

Oct. 18, 2018

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] People vs. money in America’s midterm elections

All eyes are on the United States as November’s Congressional elections approach. The outcome will answer many alarming questions raised two years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidential election.Will the US electorate declare that Trump is not what America is about? Will voters renounce his racism, misogyny, nativism and protectionism? Will they say that his “America First” rejection of the international rule of law is not what the US stands for? Or will they make it clear that Trump’s win

Oct. 17, 2018

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] People vs. money in America’s midterm elections

[Hal Brands] Saudi crisis shows US needs new way to deal with dictators

The disappearance of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has precipitated a new crisis in US-Saudi relations. Yet that crisis has also revived a much older dilemma in American strategy: How to deal with allies that also happen to be morally abhorrent, even murderous, dictatorships.　The rapid spread of democracy from the 1970s through the early 2000s eased this dilemma, by aligning the frontiers of freedom more closely with the frontiers of America’s European and Asia-Pacific alliances. Yet the proble

Oct. 17, 2018

[Hal Brands] Saudi crisis shows US needs new way to deal with dictators

[Anjani Trivedi] Uncover your eyes. There’s no China car crash

Calm down, the world’s biggest car market isn’t going to drive off a cliff. Sales to dealerships in China fell for a third month in September, dropping almost 12 percent from a year earlier, data showed Friday. Retail sales declined 13 percent. Total vehicle sales could now be on track for their first annual drop in more than two decades. Scary stuff. But much of this is a readjustment after years of outsize growth in an industry that churns out more than 20 million cars a year. It’s perhaps too

Oct. 17, 2018

[Mac Margolis] Brazil’s candidates need to stop violence

It was a busy last week for Brazilian yahoos. In Salvador, a seaside town in Bahia state, a martial arts master was stabbed to death. His offense? Admitting he’d voted for the candidate from the left-wing Workers’ Party. In Recife, a government employee wearing left-wing campaign buttons landed in the hospital after being set upon by sympathizers of right-wing presidential hopeful Jair Bolsonaro. An angry mob of his supporters in Rio de Janeiro also beat up a transgender singer; lesbian, gay, bi

Oct. 17, 2018

[Jennifer Huddleston Skees] Tech is new scary story -- but why?

It’s October, which means our televisions and theaters are full of stories of supernatural mayhem. More recently shows like “Black Mirror” and movies like “Ready Player One” portray mayhem wrought not by ghosts and monsters, but by out-of-control technology that feels just plausible enough to incite a different kind of fear. Even the news stokes worries of new, disruptive technologies: Robots will take our jobs, driverless cars will kills us and, for those who really want a scare, algorithms in

Oct. 17, 2018

[Noah Smith] China is the climate-change battleground

Climate change is a menace. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report showing how serious the situation is. If warming continues on its current trajectory, the report warns, then by the end of this century average temperatures will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.That may not sound like a big rise, but in fact the results will be catastrophic. Already, the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution star

Oct. 16, 2018

[Stephen Mihm] Trump is risking an even greater chicken war

The staggering tariffs being levied on China will almost certainly test President Donald Trump’s claim that “trade wars are easy to win.” He might be right, but the president doesn’t seem to have contemplated a different question: What happens when trade wars come to an end?When one country imposes tariffs on another, the eventual resolution of the conflict does not necessarily mean a return to the status quo. Instead, the penalties levied in the heat of a trade war can have destructive ripple e

Oct. 16, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] The importance of being moderate

When I studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo 40 years ago, my dissertation director, Leslie Fielder, taught me to always stay in the middle, avoiding both extremes. He used to tell me, “In a polarized society, it is not easy to stay in the middle because you will be criticized by both extremes. But that is what an intellectual should do.”When I studied at Columbia later, my academic adviser, Edward Said, also enlightened me, saying, “Although I am a Left intellectual, I am neith

Oct. 16, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] The importance of being moderate

[Lee Jae-min] Better late than never

We were hoping that 2018 was an aberration. That countries were just reacting emotionally. That things would return to normal come next year. Sadly, those hopes were just hopes and recent reports confirm what many of us suspected and still dread: Global trade will not exit the “protectionist” orbit anytime soon, and China-US trade relations will continue on a collision course. To a country struggling to overcome an economic slowdown, with red lights flashing on major indicators, nothing could be

Oct. 16, 2018

[Alan Bollard] A decade of disruption comes home to roost

Over the last decade, we have learned that a serious banking failure with risky balance sheets can feed into a major international financial crisis. That, in turn, is big enough to cause an economic crisis as we saw with the “Great Recession.” The downturn in growth, trade and productivity that followed also opened up the possibility of a new contagion today.The global financial crisis, which I confronted as governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand at that time, masked some very important dev

Oct. 16, 2018