Monthly Archives: September, 2014

We have a defense budget dozens of times larger than that of North Korea, but without the Korea-U.S. alliance, our military could not even manage to deter the Communist regime, not to mention win a war.

It seems an exercise in hair-splitting, however, that Washington pursues every avenue of correct international relations with Vietnam, save one. Vietnam's foreign policy, while always attentive to China, is clearly aligned with the region, notably Asean. Its military is formidable but nothing like it was before the 1978 invasion of Cambodia and the traumatic losses of that conflict. This is the reasoning already employed by those who favour arms sales to Vietnam. It is the reasoning US President Barack Obama is likely to use in his declaration ending the ban on military sales.

The results are not explicit in this regard, but the recent tendency of the American brand to continue deteriorating appears to have ended.

Attorney General Eric Holder has called the U.S. “a nation of cowards.” As attorney general, he fought against racism. Now he is resigning — and Obama has to choose a successor for a man whom black America trusts.

Certainly countries change their positions, but it is now clear that the withdrawal of the United States from the A.B.M. Treaty in 2002 was a huge mistake.