...of the problems that are known to the public, such as the coming pension crisis and slow growth, are connected with this unexamined policy of the Ministry of Finance. When Japanese politics reaches the stage when it can shed the bonds of vassalage to the United States and become a truly independent (and normal) country, it can begin to devote attention to the spreading of Japan’s accumulated wealth among the population. It should, even before then, begin to respond to the world as a significant and responsible political entity. There is today virtually nothing in Japan’s foreign policy thinking that reflects the momentous political changes that its giant neighbors — China and Russia — have undergone in recent times. Also the role of the United States in the world has in the past four years changed dramatically. True political leaders, when they make their appearance, will have to inspire the gaimusho urgently to develop new diplomacy to cope with an entirely new reality produced by those changes. The best hope for all this to be accomplished is still a genuine opposition party. If Minshuto keeps itself together, fights its tendency to become a mirror image of the LDP, and continues...

...comfort under the wings of the United States. It led to “political support” for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In practice this came down to participation in the military occupation of that country after the invasion. Just as happened in developments connected with the Dutch military disaster in Srebrenica, new facts keep emerging concerning the motives for participation. Dutch fighting units were there from summer 2003 through spring 2005 in 5 shifts of some 1200 troops under responsibility of the British in a southern the province. Many things went wrong there, and new information about that is emerging as well. These newly known facts cause disquiet and political strife. One thing that has become very clear is that top government officials had, at the very beginning, understood the core of a potentially huge problem right away. They knew that the government could get into considerable trouble by helping with an attack on a sovereign state, and a fellow member of the UN, without a mandate of the Security Council and without the excuse of self-defence. A memo from the judicial department inside the ministry of foreign affairs, which has just surfaced, leaves no room for doubt on that...

...palace was always much smaller. The realms of kings in Shakespeare or Schiller had other realms on their borders even when these were not visible in the play. The realm of George W. Bush has been borderless, Putin, Hugo Chavez or Ahmadinejad were no competing kings, there were no significant kings or princes anywhere in sight. I made a plea in jotting #7 for assembling ingredients for a twentyfirst century political playwright. Well, many traditional theatrical themes have been right in front of us, if we cared to see them in our newspapers. Center-stage stood a protagonist wreaking havoc through willful, thoughtless and selfish conduct. But it is perhaps better that he not be made the dominating character. There were powers behind the throne and at least for much of his reign, a usurper. A very old theme stares us in the face: that of the weak king and his very powerful courtiers. There is no question that our future playwright can connect with confreres of all ages through the ancient theme of corrupted Kingship. George W. Bush has shown plenty of evidence to be possessed of monarchal ambitions and delusions, and presents an ideal example of rule at the...

...word. I cannot get enough of it. And I can say the same about Japanese economic organization. It remains the world’s second largest economy, and managed to attain that ranking only a couple of decades after a war that had left it with a devastated industrial base. The manner in which it did this, and in which economic activities continue to flourish, has perplexed most economists who took a close look, and provides compelling arguments against prevailing economic doctrine in Europe and the United States. I made an attempt to put that in perspective in a recent talk, which was published and can be found here in pdf form. I will continue to come back to that subject. As for the United States, my preoccupation hardly requires explanation. The way in which much of the world with access to TV sets and the Web followed a year-long battle for the presidency may have had something to do with its soap-opera qualities, but probably more important is the general understanding of our planet’s population that it does matter very much who occupies that “most powerful person in the world” position. The first decade of the twentyfirst century, now nearing its close,...

This article is part of the “Turning Points 2003” year-end package from The New York Times Syndicate. c.2003 Karel Van Wolferen (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.) Amid the appearance of a resurgent, newly aggressive America, the really significant international development of 2003 was the destruction of the conditions that until now had made American hegemony possible. The almost universally accepted dominance of the United States had been the pivot of a relatively stable and peaceful world order, but that order now stands on the verge of disintegration. Hegemony implies consent on the part of weaker powers, which enables the dominant power to avoid overt coercion _ the mark of imperialism, from which it must clearly be differentiated. It reveals itself in the dominant country’s influence over other countries’ world views, particularly in regard to international political and economic relations. While the United States has often been accused of arrogance and has not always been accepted as a model of good governance, generally American hegemony enjoyed a global welcome. The United States was understood to constitute the world’s primary force for order, an order initiated in the cauldron of World War II, built in the shadow of superpower rivalry...

...propagation of false stories. We must not forget that false stories crowd out true stories – or those more closely approximating the truth – from the front and opinion pages of newspapers (which, for all their decline and diminishing importance, still direct the non-frivolous fare on TV and the Web). There are many ways in which false stories are amplified and come to us from different directions. Big false stories, the ones that protect many smaller ones against critical examination, tend to have a long life and crucially influence the way in which people live their lives on large patches of territory, spanning many countries, of our globe. Those big false stories are usually rooted in older stories that may have been partially true. And so it is with the two main false stories that I think have more than any other influenced the life on our planet for the past 20 years or so – the period we could call the post-Cold War era. One of them is composed of the ideas that have collectively been labelled ‘neoliberalism’, and the other one – the term ‘realist theory’ covers much of it – consists of a set of ideas around...