...elections to rub it in some more that Washington would not accept independent Japanese action, nothing that deviated from how the LDP had done things. To underline that point he snubbed his counterpart by declining the invitation to the banquet that is routine for such occasions. Obama and Clinton failed to acknowledge what both Hatoyama and Ozawa sought to accomplish: to sit down with the American top, jointly to regard the changed world around them, to discuss the growing power of China along with other East Asian regional matters, and the variety of new ways that the United States and Japan could perhaps explore to cope with new problems; in other words, to do what is considered quite normal as part of an actual alliance. The new prime minister attempted three or four times to arrange for a face-to-face meeting with Obama. He was rebuffed, not through standard diplomatic channels, but implicitly and publicly by a spokesperson in Washington stating that the Japanese prime minister should not try to solve his coalition problems by wasting the president’s time. Obama had been told by advisers, as revealed by leaked information, to not give the new Japanese prime minister more than ten...

...to NorthKorea. Earlier in Munich, Vice President Joe Biden aimed threatening language at Iran. Both countries are suspected of being at the point of stepping over the nuclear threshold, but that has so far not inspired official America with new thinking. It is possible to see ElBaradei’s musings as an attempt to encourage Obama to seek new directions by reminding him of his own earlier pronouncements. ElBaradei: “President Obama has pledged to seek a world free of nuclear weapons – a legal commitment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty”. The last point is pivotal; or ought to be that. The NPT, dating from 1968, starts from the premise that there are two categories of countries: those with and those without nuclear weapons. The latter signatories committed themselves to forego the use, the manufacture and the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal. The haves committed themselves to eventually giving these up. As it happened, various further treaties have been entered into, but “arms control” has been revealed as something rather different from disarmament. Notwithstanding all the treaties, new nuclear poweres have emerged: India, Pakistan, and Israël. The least that one can say about this is that in this matter countries are judged by contradictory...

One of the things to which this website hopes to contribute is an active European public sphere. I hope that others with an interest in political, economic, and social affairs, who lament the shortcomings of European media in providing a pan-European citizen forum, will want to do the same, so that we may establish new networks for relevant conversation. Too few European voices with something to say reach other Europeans even one border away. A collectivity of those could do much to offset the odd and undesirable fact that most of the world and much of Europe consumes “news” in the choices and sauces and in portions determined by American-British editors. While some of these editors are without question excellent, they themselves can benefit from choices and interpretations arrived at by journalists and essayists from outside the territories in which that wonderful language, which most of us use when meeting foreign friends, is the tool of daily conversation. One of those writers is Jan Sampiemon whose insights in world events and European problems have long deserved an international audience. I met him first in 1972, when he hired me as correspondent for Japan and other parts of Asia for the...

...which now combines its lack of a fundamental purpose with a newly acquired urge for expansion, could well become a long-term danger to Europe. What has become crystal clear since the removal of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union is that the survival of an expansionary NATO within the historical Russian sphere of influence will render collective security unachievable for Europe. Am I referring here to nothing more than the brainstorms of a couple of journalists accused of utopian other-wordliness? Perseverence is required as was the maxim, sometimes proven right, in the famous American goldrush. Can we find some hopeful phrases like gold nuggets in the streaming water of recent political texts? Perhaps in the open letter that Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has addressed to Obama. Steinmeier writes “We will continue to need NATO in the future.” But he continues: “But too often we have postponed an honest debate about tasks by concentrating on enlargement and related issues. Today we need a new fundamental understanding on where the Alliance is headed – something like a new Harmel Report, with which NATO, 40 years ago, reoriented itself during a critical phase in its history.” This Harmelrapport,...

...is highly dependent on what is presented as political and economic news. A perfect example of that have been the ubiquitous references to Japan’s economic ‘lost decade’, during a period in which much of Tokyo as well as Osaka was being rebuilt. The reason why Washington-based think tanks, like the Stimson Center, are important is because those are where the news about Japan is made, or rather amplified. Few people until now have realized that news about Japan has to be made outside it because most foreign newspapers, TV companies, and magazines that used to have regular correspondents in Tokyo have withdrawn them. The manner in which the rise to power of the DPJ has been reported stands out as an example of what you get as a result. The world learned about DPJ’s supposed clumsiness mostly from opinion dispersed by officials in Washington talking with reporters and columnists living next door. There are of course financial correspondents in Tokyo catering to the international investors community, but these wear visors that produce a heavily filtered picture of reality. The inept international reporting on Japan’s calamity, inspired by, and centering almost exclusively on, fears of radiation, is a sad example of...

...does not, apparently, penetrate to the chambers where policy discussions are held. But most importantly, I think, the United States fights in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and will continue doing so, because its military-industrial complex, which has quite some time ago began to live a life of its own, needs enemies. It is basically as simple as that. Make no mistake here: without that complex, famously named by the retiring president Eisenhower, to which a majority of the members of Congress are obeisant as well, America’s political-economic system collapses. As the retired colonel Andrew Bacevich, who has emerged as one of the most cogent and knowledgeable analysts of American militarism, puts it: “permanent war has become the de facto policy of the United States.” * * * To place Obama’s personal reasons in perspective, we must always keep the comic-book nature of American politics in mind. Those aspiring to high office must display ‘strength’. And that is done by not being ‘soft’ on enemies. We have learned from memoirists that President Johnson stayed in Vietnam (after Kennedy, shortly before his murder, had decided to leave) because he feared potential Republican rightwing accusations of betrayal. Obama’s concerns about being thought weak, and...