Opinion - The Korea Times

North Korea Hikes Up a Missile

By Tom Plate BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. ― Some things you just don't joke about. Certain developments in the course of human affairs are decidedly unfunny. What's a perfect example, right off the top of my head? Oh … how about North Korea's missile launch over the weekend? Unless you have some kind of sick sense of humor, that's obviously no laughing matter. Look at the reaction! President Barack Hussein Obama has decried it. The Japanese have cursed it. Even the Chinese have not tried to justify it. There's nothing funny about it at all. Or isn't there? Let us rail against common sense and prudent citizenship and have a go at explaining why the missile launch by the North Koreans is an absolute howler. Okay? For starters, do you know what they formally call themselves? North Korea prefers to be known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Now, if you're not immediately in absolute stitches over this, you don't know what ``democratic" means, not to mention ``republic" and you may have mislaid your sense of humor. To continue: the DPRK missile threat, as descr

Apr 7, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Small Incidents Trigger Wars

By Tom Plate Serious misunderstandings cause wars. Even relatively small ones, festering underground over time and eating into the foundations of stability, can have the same calamitous effect. Some poisons work immediately; other poisons take time. Let us consider a serious current poison that the U.S. media has been underplaying ― mostly deliberately ― at least for the time being. It happened the other day on the edge of the Korean peninsula. North Korean guards or soldiers, stationed on the China border, grabbed two young American journalists, yanked them back into North Korea, and slammed them into holding pens, probably into a well-known detention/interrogation facility in Pyongyang, the capital. The two reporters ― Laura Ling and Euna Lee, representing the San Francisco-based media outlet Current TV, the brainchild of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore ― were apparently shooting video footage of the North Korean border and into the frontier as far as their camera lenses would allow. That area is famous as a tense crossing spot for North Koreans trying to flee to C

Mar 29, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Therapy for ‘Odd Couple’

By Tom Plate It's fortunate that the chief honchos of China and the United States are to get together for a serious chat next month in London in a sideroom of a so-called economic summit. Almost any event that brings Presidents Hu Jintao and Barack Obama together is to be valued. China and the United States have become the world's single-most important 'Odd-Couple' relationship. So far, the two leaders are getting along ― that is, so far. But Obama is just getting his feet wet with the Chinese and wants, wisely, to pull any and all punches ― for now, anyway. Cool-as-a-cucumber Hu seems to be a cautious soul and doesn't like to throw public punches (except at Tibet). Even so, the new relationship could be getting off to a better start. The Obama administration has been making some China-critical noises and the mainland has been sending out confusing signals. The other day in the South China Sea, a small flotilla of Chinese ships came dangerously ― and purposely ― close to bumping a U.S. spy ship (the Impeccable) while it was doing its electronic-eavesdropping thing. It was s

Mar 15, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Korean Man Dumps Harvard

By Tom Plate BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. ― It isn't easy these days to find silver linings in the ominous and swirling global-warning economic clouds overhead. But if history tells us anything, there must be a few in there somewhere. So perhaps a little imagination is in order to skirt the current oppressive mood of constant unending gloom. Imagine that we earthlings began to take the long view of life, like the Chinese philosopher, or the composer of symphonies, or the writer of great novels. Nothing of any great value or even significance takes place in a short period of time; it is only by taking the long view that meaning and achievement is accomplished. These thoughts arose in the context of a surprising development in the field of higher education in the United States. Dartmouth College, one of the finest small liberal arts schools in the world, announced the acquisition of a new college president. Its choice is notable on a number of accounts. The first is that the appointee is abandoning his position at Harvard University as a famous medical school official and rese

Mar 8, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Putting Asia First

By Tom Plate BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. ― U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent four-stop swing through Asia led to some accusations of symbolic superficiality. Perhaps ― but there can be more real meaning in acts of diplomatic symbolism than what first meets the eye. This is why, notwithstanding the immensely scary worldwide economic drama that overhangs everything now, Clinton's first tour as secretary represented a strong new beginning for U.S. diplomacy. There are two notable extremes to symbolic diplomacy. At the Machiavellian end there is the symbolism of intentional deception: You make nice-nice as a way of putting out an obscuring fog around your desire ― when the time comes ― to make war-war. At the other end is the diplomatic symbolism of intentionality: You make every effort to conform your symbolic moves to the reality of your underlying foreign-policy values and goals. Clinton's trip curriculum came healthily close to the latter extreme. She first went to Japan for an obvious symbolic reason: going there first would mean a lot more to the Japanese

Mar 2, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

China and Tale of Two Clintons

By Tom Plate Gigantic, historic China immediately weights on the mind of an incoming U.S. President, one way or the other, Democratic or Republican. Three years after the awful tragedy at Tiananmen Square, President Bill Clinton came to power, in 1992, but he didn't visit the world's most populated country until 1998. It took him six years to make it. It's true that President Barack Hussein Obama hasn't decided yet when to go, but you can bet it won't take him six years. That was evident when his administration announced that the first trip abroad by the secretary of state would be to Asia. As we all know, that person is none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC), the wife of the guy who took six years to get there. It looks like his wife will, in person, make her mark on China's mainland a lot quicker than her husband. That's a big plus. The United States perhaps could have afforded a leisurely approach to China in the past, but those days are long gone. China's government now holds more American Treasury notes, is a huge trading partner, shares a number of strategic c

Feb 15, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

New Spy Chief

By Tom Plate Dennis Blair, the man who is to become the new U.S. director of National Intelligence, distinguished himself as the military commander-in-chief over the United States Pacific Command. This is an important fact behind his appointment by President-elect Barack Obama. He's to serve as a sort of shotgun sheriff over all U.S. intelligence organizations. The admiral, now retired, had been the top dog over all U.S. military forces in the Asia-Pacific from February 1999 to May 2002. This was a big job, and he did it very well. You have about a dozen major worries in the position, with China being roughly numbers one, two, three and four. India, Pakistan, North Korea and others are on the worry list, but none can hurt the United States (not to mention Taiwan) as much as China. In April 2001, Blair and the U.S. government was hit with the notorious EP3 spy-plane crisis. A scrambling Chinese fighter flew too close to a lumbering U.S. surveillance plane hovering off China's coast, clipped its wings (presumably accidentally), and went down. The Chinese pilot's body was neve

Jan 18, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Huntingtons Gigantism

By Tom Plate BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. ― A giant died the other day. His name was Samuel Huntington. Harvard Prof. Huntington's gigantism was intellectual. His ideas left huge footprints on our intellectual landscape, the way giant storms can impact the earth. Minds were shaken, sometimes stirred and never left untouched. His two most famous books burst on the scene decades apart. ``The Soldier and the State" came out in 1957. ``Clash of Civilizations" came out in 1996. The former offered a theory of how a strong military can and should function in a democratic system. It needs to form a professional caste and operate all but autonomously, yet remain always under civilian control. The latter book offered a theory about the basic nature of future conflicts in international relations. Huntington put it this way: ``It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic." ``The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the m

Jan 11, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Great Sources of Ideas

By Tom Plate Do you still have some last-minute gift-buying to do as New Year's presents for friends? Here are suggestions ― perhaps for that special someone who seems to have almost everything. Chances are, though, that he or she doesn't have anything on the list below! It represents a selection of periodicals to which I subscribe. I would be lost without them. They inform my column, keep my teaching fresh and prevent my mind from getting too soggy. They are recommended to you as excellent gifts for fellow nerds. 1. The Nikkei Weekly (www.nikkeiweeklyus.com). Out of Tokyo, this business magazine may be short on entertainment value but it's properly long on authoritative and timely economic and business analysis. Japan is still the world's second-largest economy, and this is one of its very best English-language publications. Worth the effort. 2. The Oriental Economist (www.orientaleconomist.com). Out of New York, this English-language monthly newsletter offers superb, well-reported and to-the-point analyses of the political and economic scene in Japan. The writing is ge

Jan 4, 2009By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Potential Odd Couple of 2009

By Tom Plate BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. ― Barack Obama, as he takes presidential office next month, will notice that life has become less merry and rather more naughty and un-nice. This brilliant American politician will also soon become aware that suddenly everyone wants to be his friend ― my-oh-my, look how many new would-be friends he suddenly has! But as outgoing President George W. Bush can tell him with authority, the concept of true friendship and Washington political life is all but oxymoronic. In the nation's capital, most political players can count the number of genuine friends on the fingers of their hands and still have almost enough spots left over for the starting lineup of the Washington Redskins. This is almost as true in international relations as in the domestic political sphere ― but not quite. Friendship inside the Washington beltway is more a shifting mosaic of ad-hoc political alliances ― not much more stable than desert sands in a windstorm. But in international relationships a measure of friendship can be obtained due to the relative immobility o

Dec 30, 2008By Tom Plate

Tom Plate

Read more

North Korea Hikes Up a Missile

Small Incidents Trigger Wars

Therapy for ‘Odd Couple’

Korean Man Dumps Harvard

Putting Asia First

China and Tale of Two Clintons

New Spy Chief

Huntingtons Gigantism

Great Sources of Ideas

Potential Odd Couple of 2009

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