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May 02, 2024
 

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William Pfaff
For William Pfaff's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 22, 2013
U.S. wears out its welcome
The Ukraine crisis and the German-American dispute over American intelligence and NSA practices are without much doubt the beginning of the end of the American-dominated Europe we have known since the collapse of Communism.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 16, 2013
Hapless qualities for which Obama will be remembered
The wars that he has not ended and the moral climate he has sustained in American government will be the remembered qualities of Barack Obama's presidency. This seems a disheartening.
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 6, 2013
U.S. aims to mend fences with Iran, critics notwithstanding
It's not only most Israelis, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the policy-community hawks in Washington and acolytes of AIPAC in the Congress who hate the interim nuclear agreement signed by Iran in November with the United Nations Security Council "P5-plus-one."
COMMENTARY / World
Dec 1, 2013
Ukraine halts NATO's bulge
Russia has real grievances against the U.S., since the promise made by George H.W. Bush to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not be expanded to incorporate the former Warsaw Pact countries was not kept.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 25, 2013
U.S. pushing new trade treaties at expense of national sovereignty
New trade treaties being pushed by the United States undermine national sovereignty.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 18, 2013
NSA spying accomplishes little beyond alienating allies
The U.S. National Security Agency's spying accomplishes little beyond alienating America's allies.
COMMENTARY
Nov 11, 2013
Discredited theory grips EU
Last week the notorious "troika" representing the three major lenders to severely indebted European Union nations — officials from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank — once again descended upon Athens to consider new Greek proposals for dealing with its debt. (The IMF has recently expressed some doubts, but Greece is still in the game.)
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 29, 2013
Time to end the interference
he West has suffered the delusion that a war on Muslim peoples of the Mideast would produce modernity and democracy. It is essential that the West cease its interference.
COMMENTARY
Sep 19, 2013
No place for a 'Plan B' attack
The Washington debates about the Syrian chemical weapons, and whether there is an Obama "Plan B" by which the United States may yet bomb Syria, seem deaf to what really happened last week.
COMMENTARY
Sep 5, 2013
The folly of attacking Assad
It would seem a piece of wisdom picked up on the school playground not to start a fight that you don't know how to finish.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 17, 2013
Anonymous murder from a safe distance
War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen. And even if it were a police weapon (as it may, one fears, become in the future), the United States Department of Defense and the CIA are not police forces, nor has the U.S. a commission to police the world of its radicals, jihadists and religious fanatics, although for too many years it has acted as if it did.
COMMENTARY
Jan 3, 2012
An Enlightened Awakening?
There are only three valid reasons why the Middle East, the focus of international attention as 2012 begins, is important to the United States and the European nations. These are energy, immigration and Israel.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 1, 2001
A question of hegemony
An implicit alliance has emerged in Washington since the Cold War's end between avowedly "Wilsonian" liberals, anxious to extend American influence and federate the democracies, and unilateralist neoconservative believers in U.S. power projection, who call for American world leadership, aggressively imposed, for world society's own good.
'So hot you can't breathe': Extreme heat hits the Philippines
A pedestrian cools himself with a folding hand fan as he waits for a ride along a road in Manila on Wednesday, as extreme heat hit the Philippines.
Did Japan intervene to prop up the yen? Analysts think it did.
A man walks past an electronic board displaying the exchange rate for the yen against the U.S. dollar (right) in Tokyo on Tuesday.
Town to block view of Mount Fuji in response to overtourism
The town government of Fujikawaguchiko, Yamanashi Prefecture, decided to set up a 2.5-meter-high screen to prevent tourists from taking pictures of Mount Fuji looming behind a convenience store.
Number of vacant homes in Japan hits record high of 9 million
A vacant house in Tokyo is seen demolished in January 2020.
Weak yen fattens tourist wallets in Japan
People visit the Ameya Yokocho market in Tokyo's Ueno district during the Golden Week holiday on Tuesday.
Kishida sets sights on energy and climate in South America trip
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will use a policy speech in Sao Paulo to set out his vision for ties between Japan and South America, almost 10 years after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe advocated for stronger ties between the two in the same city.
Yellow sand allergy: A health issue made worse by climate change
A screenshot of the Meteorological Agency's satellite image of clouds and yellow sand (in pink) on Sunday.
Climate change, chalky grains and the risks for Japan’s rice farmers
A farmer plants seedlings in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture. Japan’s self sufficiency rate for rice is nearly 100%, compared with 38% for food overall, on a calorie basis.
Japan wants you to spend more with ‘luxury tourism’
Performers play a traditional drum unique to Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, in the prefectural capital of Kanazawa on March 16 to mark the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen line to Tsuruga Station in Fukui Prefecture.
Theaster Gates’ ambitious ‘Afro-Mingei’ brings Black Chicago to Tokyo
Theaster Gates' “A Heavenly Chord” lines up church pews before seven speakers and a Hammond B3 organ, a type of electric organ prevalent in Black American churches.

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