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September 15, 2025

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COMMENTARY / World

Jul 11, 2014

If only the U.S. had stayed out of WWI

Did U.S. intervention in the latter stage of World War I end up in just prolonging the European slaughter? David A. Stockman, first-term budget director for President Ronald Reagan, says it did as well as trigger a cascade of offenses later on in the 20th century.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 11, 2014

Cost of 'making' democracy

By William Pfaff

For most of the American electorate, the U.S. perseveres as the messenger of democracy to a world that usually hasn't earned it and probably doesn't deserve it. But consider what this proud effort in the Mideast, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere has done to U.S. civil liberties and to U.S. democracy.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 11, 2014

The silver fox of dictatorship and democracy

By Nina L. Khrushcheva

The reality of the times was that Eduard Shevardnadze was both a democrat and a despot. His death brings closer to the end the Gorbachev generation of reform communists who presented a stark contrast to the dour Brezhnev-era hard-liners, spurring (mostly inadvertently) the collapse of the Soviet empire and the long transition to democracy.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 11, 2014

Germany's triumph in Brazil was no surprise

By Leonid Bershidsky

Everything about the 7-1 German victory over Brazil in a World Cup semifinal was logical and even overdue. The entire German soccer system has been working toward this moment since 2001.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 11, 2014

Is there a right to secede?

By Peter Singer

If a majority of the voters in a distinct region of a country favor independence, does that mean that they have a right to secede? Paradoxically the EU has made it more feasible for states like Scotland and Catalonia to consider independence.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 11, 2014

Megacities offer toxic mix of modern apocalypse

By Pankaj Mishra

Exhibits at the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture demonstrate that the urgent challenge for many societies is to prevent the megacity from becoming a byword for multifaceted apoclypse, mashinging together poverty, corruption, violence and fundamentalism.

COMMENTARY / Japan

Jul 10, 2014

Cost of passive power struggles

By Yoichi Funabashi

The chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation recalls how the failure of the navy minister to express a truthful personal opinion within a group closed the window on Japanese doves' hopes of averting war months before the Pearl Harbor attack.

COMMENTARY / Japan

Jul 10, 2014

Abe's defense policy from a historical perspective

By Masamichi Hanabusa

Since Japan, unlike China, neither possesses nor desires nuclear weapons, Japan's use of military power in East Asia has its limits. Therefore, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's decision to let Japan exercise the right of 'collective self-defense' is limited in scope and should not alarm countries that have no intention of attacking Japan or the U.S.

COMMENTARY / Japan

Jul 8, 2014

Japan's innovation challenge

By Shinji Fukukawa

The Abe administration's capacity for deciding how to raise the birthrate, improve child-care facilities, realize an appropriae work-life balance and promote other 'innovations' that enable Japan to solve its many problems is now being tested.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 8, 2014

Thomas Piketty with Chinese characteristics

By Xiao Geng and Andrew Sheng

As property prices have risen faster than wages and profits in manufacturing, China's top 1 percent income earners are accumulating wealth significantly faster than their counterparts in the rest of the world — and far faster than the average Chinese.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 8, 2014

Xi's fumbles give Obama's pivot a second chance

By William Pesek

Years from now, when the history of Barack Obama's much-maligned 'pivot to Asia' is written, he may owe a debt of gratitude to Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose overbearing ways in the region are giving Obama a second wind.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 8, 2014

Whitewashing the Iraq war

By Ramzy Baroud

As Iraq stands on the verge of a complete breakdown into sectarian states, a former leading Iraq war advocate is popping up in the U.S. media, and he's in no mood to accept any responsibility for the protracted tragedy.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Sumadori Bar on Shibuya Ward's main Center Gai street targets young customers who prefer low-alcohol drinks or abstain altogether.

Rethinking that second drink: Japan’s Gen Z gets ‘sober curious’

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Maruhachi never sleeps in quest for better futons

Maruhachi never sleeps in quest for better futons

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