Ralph Cossa - The Japan Times

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Ralph Cossa

For Ralph Cossa's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

COMMENTARY

Aug 13, 2003

U.S. can return to the moral high road

KUALA LUMPUR -- On Aug. 6, peace activists from around the world flocked to Hiroshima to pray for peace and remember those who died when the first nuclear bomb was dropped on that city 58 years ago. More subdued ceremonies marked the anniversary of the second, and we all hope last, use of nuclear weapons in anger three days later in Nagasaki.

COMMENTARY

Aug 6, 2003

Too early to toast Kim's cooperation

HONOLULU -- Let's not open up the champagne too quickly! The announcement that North Korea finally has agreed to attend multilateral talks "to resolve the nuclear issue" is good news indeed . . . if they actually show up at the yet to be scheduled meeting. But sitting down at the table, as important as this is, puts us no closer to a resolution than we were yesterday and could make matters worse, depending on how North Korea, and the other five parties (the United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia), approach the negotiations.

COMMENTARY

Jun 21, 2003

Isolation strategy working

HONOLULU -- Washington's strategy of applying international pressure to further isolate North Korea appears to be working, thanks in large part to the actions of one country in particular.

COMMENTARY

Jun 13, 2003

A sharper U.S.-ROK alliance

HONOLULU -- Why is the United States pulling its forces away from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) on the Korean Peninsula? Will the lack of a "tripwire" mean a reduced U.S. commitment to South Korea's security? Or, is Washington moving its forces out of harm's way in anticipation of a preemptive strike against the North's nuclear facilities?

COMMENTARY

Jun 6, 2003

Force restructuring anxiety

SINGAPORE -- There was a time when the Pentagon saw "relieving regional anxiety" as one of its primary alliance maintenance tasks in East Asia. Today, it seems more adept at creating this anxiety, rather than providing the reassurance that lies at the heart of sustaining America's critical alliances in East Asia.

COMMENTARY

May 21, 2003

Narrowing the U.S.-South Korean gap

WASHINGTON -- The summit meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun was, by almost all accounts, a success. The main reason, according to the skeptics, was that expectations were very low. No major breakthroughs were achieved, they argue; "success" merely meant there were no major gaffes.

COMMENTARY

Apr 23, 2003

Which side blinked, and why?

HONOLULU -- The announcement that United States and North Korea had agreed to multilateral talks with China in Beijing on Wednesday was most welcome after six months of escalating tensions. Conventional wisdom is that America's success in Iraq was the primary factor in bringing Pyongyang to the bargaining table with Washington and Beijing after months of insisting that only bilateral talks with the U.S. were acceptable. But this fails to tell the whole story.

COMMENTARY

Apr 14, 2003

Implications of the Iraq war

HONOLULU -- Why diplomacy failed in Iraq remains a subject of intense debate. Even Baghdad's supporters could not argue that Iraq had fully complied with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, which found Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime in material breach of numerous earlier resolutions and promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not fully and immediately disarm.

COMMENTARY

Mar 15, 2003

U.S., ROK narrow the gap

HONOLULU -- Debates are raging among the security policy communities in the U.S. and South Korea over North Korean motives and intentions and how best to deal with Pyongyang. There seems to be only one point upon which all agree: no solution to the current standoff is practical unless Washington and Seoul are in lock-step with one another in dealing with an increasingly belligerent and provocative Pyongyang.

COMMENTARY

Mar 6, 2003

Time to face North Korea

HONOLULU -- While the Bush administration is to be commended for not overreacting to North Korea's saber-rattling and for its continuing assertion that it seeks a diplomatic solution to the current nuclear standoff, Washington needs to stop pretending that there is no "crisis" or that there is no difference between one or two suspected nuclear devices and a full-blown North Korean nuclear weapons program involving the extraction of enough plutonium for numerous bombs. This is a crisis involving both nonproliferation and Korean Peninsula security, and must be dealt with as such.

COMMENTARY

Feb 23, 2003

Don't ignore greater threat

HONOLULU -- The big debate raging in Washington these days is over which country poses the greater threat: North Korea or Iraq (with some throwing Iran into the mix, just to keep the old "axis of evil" intact).

COMMENTARY

Feb 8, 2003

Advice for Roh Moo Hyun

HONOLULU -- A recent visit by South Korean President-elect Roh Moo Hyun's foreign-policy transition team reveals that the incoming administration's policy toward North Korea is still very much in the formative stage. As a longtime student of Korean security affairs, allow me to offer South Korea's incoming leader a few humble words of advice.

COMMENTARY

Jan 25, 2003

Avoiding World War III

HONOLULU -- Help me get this straight!

COMMENTARY

Dec 23, 2002

Fix the U.S.-ROK alliance

HONOLULU -- Now that the South Korean presidential elections are over, it's time for outgoing President Kim Dae Jung to take the necessary steps to ensure a proper legacy. No, I am not talking about his "sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea. His bold, if only partially successful, efforts at redefining South-North relations, which deservedly earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, have solidified his legacy as a peacemaker, regardless of periodic North Korean attempts to undermine the process.

COMMENTARY

Dec 18, 2002

Pyongyang's dangerous game

HONOLULU -- In the past week, North Korea has attempted to create a crisis on the Korean Peninsula by threatening to restart its frozen nuclear reactor while demanding that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) remove monitoring devices aimed at ensuring that the reactor operates in accordance with Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty safeguard procedures. Conventional wisdom is that Pyongyang is creating a fuss to force the Bush administration into new negotiations. This may be true. But I doubt that this is the only reason.

EDITORIALS

Dec 11, 2002

Moving in the right direction

Never in recent memory has a government advisory group engaged in such a bruising battle of words and ideas. Last week, following a stormy debate that caused its chairman to resign, a commission on privatizing debt-ridden highway corporations adopted a final report calling for a drastic cut in toll-road construction and stepped-up debt repayment. What happened there is a far cry from the predictable course of an ordinary advisory panel, where discussions are usually conducted more or less according to a script written by bureaucrats. The commission's seven members -- dubbed the "seven samurai" -- split over the issue, with two of them (including the chairman) pressing for a scheduled expansion of the highway network and the remaining five fighting for a major downsizing.

COMMENTARY

Nov 28, 2002

A reunion on neutral ground

HONOLULU -- Shame on Pyongyang . . . and shame on Tokyo, too!

COMMENTARY

Nov 20, 2002

North Korean motives fan speculation

SEOUL -- I have given a series of lectures on U.S. Asia policy in the weeks since the revelation about North Korea's secret nuclear weapons program. While the audiences and locations in South Korea, Japan and the United States have varied widely, the questions have been remarkably similar. Along with everyone else, I can only guess at the answers.

COMMENTARY

Nov 7, 2002

How safe is nuclear energy?

Recent scandals regarding Tokyo Electric Power Co. safety inspection procedures have added a new sense of urgency to a long-standing question: "Are nuclear power reactors throughout East Asia being operated safely?"

COMMENTARY

Oct 28, 2002

Is it deja vu all over again?

SEOUL -- Is it deja vu all over again on the Korean Peninsula? The short answer is yes . . . and no.

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[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.

Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Vol. 34: Tokyo, a vanguard city for sustainability

Vol. 34: Tokyo, a vanguard city for sustainability

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