Nuclear weapons are primarily defensive in nature and represent the ultimate insurance against foreign invasion. This must be the backdrop for the future of Trump-Kim meeting for which the expectations seem to have been hastily heightened and not the much-exaggerated “historic” meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas. No less “historic” meetings were already held twice before––in 2000 and 2007––and the 1992 Joint Declaration for the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula literally stated that “The South and the North shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.”
We are at the very beginning, not at the end, of a long road that may lead to nuclear-free peace with North Korea, but quite realistically may not. Even worse, with the exaggerated expectations now, the Trump Administration has actually increased the risk of a large-scale conflict.

Japan, China, and the Western Balkans

Why Shinzo Abe Visited Serbia

North Korean Endgame: Is The Regime Rational or Not?


The End of “End of History” and the Arrival of Casino Democracy

A year ago, on the eve of the Brexit vote, many went to bed confident that the referendum was one big showoff event for those who held a deep-rooted, but utterly misplaced, contempt for the political, social, and economic consequences for the UK’s membership in the EU. They expected that at the end of the day sanity would prevail. Their complacency did them in! Then in November, many went to bed in the US, believing that what happened in the UK half a year before was a unique event, Donald Trump's candidacy for the presidency was a joke, and he had virtually no chance of prevailing. Complacent again. 
If voters - and more importantly, those among them complacent enough to believe that democracy would take care of itself without a robust get-out-the-vote effort - knew then what they know now, they certainly would have gone to the polls. But they didn’t. Instead, they bet on pollsters’ predictions. Their forecasts could not have been more wrong.
In the Brexit referendum, only 36% of …

Trump's NATO Debacle: Elephants on Glass Flooring


Japan’s Nuclear Moment

If Japan wanted to develop nuclear weapons, there would be no better moment than now to start. As the North Korean regime grows desperate to get a more generous ransom against its nuclear program, its threats to Tokyo grew multifold. Last week Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, warned that North Korea is preparing to launch missiles with sarin against Tokyo. The U.S. President, Donald Trump, further added to the turmoil by declaring last week that an “armada” of American military vessels is heading to the Korean peninsula, only to be contradicted by his own military, which broke the news that days later the “armada” was sailing nearby Singapore, over 3,000 miles away from the Korean peninsula, and reportedly has been travelling in the opposite direction. So much for the credibility of the American “extended deterrence”, which should guarantee the security umbrella over Japan, a policy in force since 1975. Now, both South Korea and Japan feel cheated and let down, while the U.S. …

How Europe and America Lost Turkey

A Japanese diplomat once replied to an American counterpart asking him about the principles of the Japanese foreign policy by pointing, “Your country may be based on principles, ours is based on archipelago”. Geographic boundaries are rarely elastic, even when socially constructed. Cultural boundaries may seem more elastic, but like the physical ones, they too are rarely prone to fundamental changes. More importantly, the latter often determine the perception of the former. In “The Revenge of Geography” Robert Kaplan argued in a powerful way that ignoring geography may be a fatal mistake that could prevent us from understanding the nature of many political conflicts. What he ostensibly omitted from his paradigm is the difference between physical and human geography. A cursory look would show that when the two overlap, greater stability ensues. But when they don’t, a search of identity could take many paths, not all of them leading to stability.

Turkey is a case in focus. In a striking …