Sol W. Sanders Back in prehistory, during The Cold War, students of arcane Kremlinology — the science and art of trying to unravel what Winston Churchill called “a riddle wrapped in an enigma” — identified a dangerous heresy. “Mirror-imaging”, it was called, defined as attributing to Moscow our own motivations, rather than understanding Soviet Communist […]
Lev Navrozov We trace the mental development of mankind only as far back as, say, one of the tribesmen of that distant time would if he could write and did write on a certain surface that we have found x thousand years later and were able to decipher what he wrote at that time. Let […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com The rise of the son as “supreme commander” of North Korea’s armed forces gives rise to nostalgia. Already the reign of the father is beginning to seem like the good old days. At least as long as Kim Jong-Il was around a certain sense of security prevailed. South […]
Sol W. Sanders The new year’s worldwide economic downturn has an interlocking effect: every national economy is searching to accommodate itself politically as well as economically to what looks to be an extended period of low growth. After longer or shorter periods of historically unrivaled prosperity, they are feeling for a “bottom” — a level […]
Lev Navrozov I call countries that are not free “slave countries,” though Soviet propaganda proclaimed that “Soviet Russia” was the only first “free” country in the world even after it conquered some countries to the west of it, after which those countries became “free” countries in the Soviet propaganda, in contrast to “the rest of […]
Sol W. Sanders A new era of increasing instability is opening in East Asia. The death of North Korean leader Kim Il-Jong is only adding another, if explosive, element to an already volatile equation: China enters a period of substantially slower economic growth, if not a crash, on the eve next autumn of a takeover […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com SEOUL — The death of bouffant-coiffed, platform-heel wearing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il on Saturday ushers in a new era of rampant speculation, pontification and no doubt obfuscation about what’s really going on inside the Hermit Kingdom. The fact is that Kim Jong-Il late last week appeared just […]
Wesley Pruden History loves irony, as Prof. Gingrich could (and no doubt will) tell us. Two men renowned for their deeds die more or less on the same day on opposite sides of the world. The bad guy gets the big headline, the good guy makes the front page one last time as a footnote […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com MINAMISOMA, Japan — The soulful notes of Silent Night wafted from an outdoor sound system on the near-empty main street to the station of this coastal city on the northern edge of the 20-kilometer “exclusion zone” around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The doleful refrain set the […]
John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — With the historic visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Burma, the highest profile American diplomatic contact in fifty years, the United States has entered a high stakes geopolitical chess game in Southeast Asia. Burma, a political pariah state has long been courted by China, coveted by India, […]