Critics of the Obama administration were delighted at the images from the president's recent trip to Asia. There was the deep bow before the emperor Akihito. There was the group photo with the head of the Burmese junta. There was the deferential press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The traffic circles in Tirana, the capital of Albania, are a free-for-all. There are no lanes. There are no signs. There are no rules. On a visit to Tirana several days ago, I drove into the swirling chaos with all my senses alert, relieved that the rental car came with...

Russia is disappearing. So is Japan. Europe is next to go.

It's not the rising waters of global warming that threaten these parts of the world. The problem is more basic. The Russians and Japanese, as well as large numbers of Europeans, are not having enough children to replace themselves....

At the recent off-the-record meeting between U.S. and North Korean representatives at a conference in California, journalists were eager for any crumb of information about what the two interlocutors said to each other. The dialogue was "useful," according to the North Korean representative. The U.S. side remarked that the mood...

This year in Istanbul, the flags on Republic Day seemed extra large. It wasn't a special anniversary year. Turkey was celebrating its 86th year as a modern secular state. Nevertheless, the sheer number of flags - 60,000 hanging from government buildings, draped across skyscrapers, dominating squares - was unprecedented....

The bottle looks beautiful. It sports an old-fashioned spring-top stopper. The red, diamond-shaped label features an elegant font. From a distance, the silhouetted landscape on the label looks exotic. It is, like all fine gourmet water, "bottled at source." Even the French name of the water suggests elegance: B'eau...

When I recently visited Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, a young girl on our tour of the house raised her hand tentatively during the docent's remarks about the enslaved people who worked the plantation.

"Did Jefferson treat his slaves better than other slave-owners?" she asked.The docent responded, wisely, that slavery is slavery,...

A mixed metaphor lurks behind the Obama administration's foreign policy. On the one hand, there's Obama's "open hand" approach that rewards the unclenched fist with a handshake. On the other hand there's the other hand, the one that Obama keeps close to his chest. This "hand" is the set of...

Cross-posted with Tomdispatch.com

Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, NATO is looking peaked and significantly worse for wear. Aggressive and ineffectual, the organization shows signs of premature senility. Despite the smiles and reassuring rhetoric at its annual summits, its internal politics have become fractious to the point of dysfunction....

I never much liked the idea of arms control. During the Cold War, we managed our nuclear arsenals rather than reduced them. We treated our nukes like huge, dangerous animals. We restricted their movements but gave them ample care and feeding. Until recently, getting rid of the animals altogether was...

The Vietnam War ruined everything. It not only destroyed Vietnam and killed a huge number of its inhabitants. It not only killed so many American soldiers and destroyed the futures of so many veterans. It not only spread into Cambodia and Laos and wrecked those countries for generations.

The Vietnam...

Last week, I inadvertently found myself back in second grade. This is how it happened.

I recently published an essay on the tradition of suicide missions in the West that generated a lot of letters, some of them negative. But even the detractors generally respected the norms of polite...

At the edge of Europe, in Ireland's Shannon Airport, they conduct surveillance on the U.S. empire.

ShannonWatch, a group of a dozen or so peace activists led by a former Irish commandant and peacekeeper, scrutinizes the commercial and military planes that pass through Ireland to bring troops and hardware...

Last November, shortly after Election Day, I met with a legislator from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Kuniko Tanioka was in town to see the usual Washington types. But she also wanted a front-row seat to watch Barack Obama's historic win. After all, Obama was the reason she'd thrown...

Japan has been a one-party oligarchy for a very long time. This may not be a polite thing to say about a democracy and a U.S. ally. But Japan has been ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) for the last 54 years, except for a few nanoseconds after the...

To: Leon Panetta, Langley HQ
From: Operative 650, Shanghai office
Re: Memo XE1250

Leon:

I just received the memo on the latest Blackwater scandal. Talk about embarrassing! Why did we outsource assassination to those bozos? Remember in 2006 when a Blackwater guy, drunk as a skunk,

The "sunshine generation" is coming to an end. In South Korea, Kim Dae-Jung's death comes hard on the heels of Roh Moo-Hyun's suicide. In North Korea, meanwhile, Kim Jong-Il has been planning for his own succession. These three men were responsible for two inter-Korean summits and a host of agreements,...

We endure, ignore, or fall prey to as many as 20,000 ads a day. That's one ad every three seconds of our waking hours. We wear ads on our shirts, forward commercials via email, sing jingles with our friends, and even brand corporate icons on our bodies. We've...

Jimmy Carter, the saying goes, was destined to be a great former president. The jury is still out on Bill Clinton, but he certainly accomplished his mission to Pyongyang quickly and successfully.

Last week, Clinton flew to North Korea, met with Kim Jong Il, and brought home Laura Ling and...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

The actor Will Smith is no one's image of a suicide bomber. With his boyish face, he has often played comic roles. Even as the last man on earth in I Am Legend, he retains a wise-cracking, ironic demeanor. And yet, surrounded by a...