There exist social, economic, demographic, psychological and sundry other “forces of history”, but there are also individuals who, at a certain moment, can make all the difference. It so happened that at the end of the year 2000, the American Supreme Court appointed to the presidency a person who had not won it through the preceding election and who, fundamentally incurious and clueless as to the meaning of government, lacked the personal qualities necessary to function as more than a figurehead. Tragically, the American political system does not accommodate figureheads, and cannot compensate for presidential shortcomings. It has not evolved effective institutions that would prevent an incompetent from inflicting major damage on the country or the world. And so it happened that this unfit president put into practice fantasies of conquest cherished by a group of fanatics who had captured his imagination. Vice-president and president counted for very much in this instance. But only after impersonal forces of history combined to give them their room to maneuver: a take-over of American domestic politics by the most successful political movement, the “American Right”, of recent times; the vanishing of an American public sphere maintained by reliable news media; and the collapse...

There could hardly be a greater difference between the United States and Japan than when their heads of government change. The American president decapitates, as it were, the government entities staffed by career officials and brings in a double layer of new appointees who, he hopes, will do his bidding. The new Japanese prime minister must be painstakingly heedful of balancing factional interests of the ruling party as he selects members of a cabinet, and those newly chosen top politicians are subsequently treated as temporary visitors in the ministries they ostensibly head. If these Japanese politicians are lucky, and survive more than one of the regular cabinet reshuffles, the top bureaucrats who work theoretically underneath them may perhaps help realize a small pet project that will be associated with their name. In the context of the ubiquitous thorny question of how much politicians should listen to bureaucrats or bureaucrats should be guided by elected representatives, the balance between the two has in both countries swung to extreme and opposite ends. But Japan and the United States have still something in common. Something that has suddenly become highly relevant in the United States. Among American government entities, there are a couple...

...terms instead, would render commentary about social affairs and politics much clearer and thus more useful. In the way ‘values’ is bandied about it may refer to a predilection for rock music, or to the deepest religious beliefs that govern all activity. Social scientists aspiring to ‘rigor’ in their analyses compressed all of these meanings into something that could then be used in a most trivial manner (e.g. the values of a particular teenage club) as well as made to stand for something beyond critical scrutiny, something sacred or semi-sacred, something that justified and gave contours to that other vague new quality known as ‘identity’. Especially now the Soviet Union has been replaced with new enemies we should dump the term, as it has dangerously begun to overlap with what Washington believes are security imperatives. Fighting for ‘our values’ has a sonorous resonance, far more compelling than fighting for oil. It implies that the military apparatus is used in the service of the deeper meaning that ties together much of what used to be called the ‘free world’, us Westerners, heirs to the Enlightenment, or Christianity. The moment you replace the amorphous ‘values’ with a more closely defined term, which...

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...

...which had been in power since 1955. Being in power did not, under Japanese circumstances, mean actually governing. And that defect became a central theme in the national discussion at the time, which was widely supported by numerous editorials and series of articles in the main newspapers. A general conclusion was that politicians ought to do what the voters had elected them for: to represent them by designing policies attuned to the many domestic and international changes that had turned the de facto national economic policy of unlimited expansion of productive capacity into a source of numerous problems. Some nine months followed with a political atmosphere that could almost be called euphoric. When that died down groups of reformist politicians remained in splinter parties, which combined and re-combined and eventually congealed into the DPJ under the guidance of Ozawa. There was never any question about Ozawa as a master politician, and a brilliant strategist, who had a broader and more imaginative view than his colleagues of what was needed to make Japan what he called ‘a normal country’. He wrote a book about it. In 2009 Ozawa demonstrated his unquestioned electoral genius by leading this new party, the first genuine...

...undergo a significant cosmetic make-over. But the announced resolve to “win” in Afghanistan, and the apparent eagerness with which a new foreign policy apparatus is being prepared for continuation of the project to deal with “fragile states” and spread democracy in the world, albeit in a friendlier manner than we have seen in the past seven years does not augur well. The year 2008 has seen a proliferation of recipes for a new world order, mostly penned by Americans; recipes for a new American foreign policy to create one. They have tended to skirt around the fact that there was once a relatively stable and relatively peaceful world order; the one that has been destroyed by that same United States. There remains a great reticence to say what I did in the first line of this jotting, but the world is saddled at the moment not with a China problem, or a Russia problem or a Venezuela problem, not even an Iran or Middle East problem. It is saddled with an America Problem. We may have reason to begin thinking differently if the Obama-Hillary Clinton team manages to make Israel realize that some two-state arrangement is the only way for...