Did you know that I am an Asian-American?

First, read the following sentences from an otherwise wonderfully informative essay:

Iraq taught us the cost of going to war against an adversary that we do not fully understand. Before we take a radical step into Asia, we should be sure that we’re not making that mistake again.

Do you see what I see?

No?

"Before we take a radical step into Asia" is the key there.

That phrasing seems to ignore that Iraq is in Asia.  (Afghanistan, too, is in Asia.)  So, it should be phrased as "Before we take another radical step into Asia." Right?

Perhaps you are thinking that I am being picky.  No, I am not.

In the US, "Asians" has come to mean only people from the Far East: China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam,  and maybe even the Philippines.  This has been an issue that I have been fighting ever since my graduate school days when I reminded many white Americans that I too am an Asian.

One of my favorite encounters on this topic was post-graduate school, when I was working as a transportation planner.  An Anglophile colleague, Marilyn, walked over to my work space during a coffee break to ask me a question.  She was reading a novel set in London, and was confused that the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi characters were being referred to as Asians.  I had to explain to her that Asia is a continent, and people from that continent are Asians, as much as the French and the Czech are Europeans!

A couple of months ago, I wrote a letter to The New Yorker, on this very topic.

In the essay on how television made Trump's presidency possible, Emily Nussbaum writes that “The Apprentice” attracted diverse contestants and audience.  Nussbaum notes: "It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants."  In that sentence, Nussbaum makes the same mistake that is often made here in the US--she identifies "Asian" as being separate from "Indian, and Middle Eastern," even though India and the Middle East are very much part of Asia.
In America, "Asians" has come to mean only those from from the far eastern edges of Asia--like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam.  Perhaps this resulted from our military entanglements with those countries.  But then given our military expeditions elsewhere, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one would think that by now we would have figured out that the people of those countries too are Asians!

I didn't care whether that would be published (it was not) but I had to get that off my chest!  This time, I am not going to bother writing to that magazine again about Iraq being in Asia.  It is a losing battle!

(Mis)Reading history: North Korea v. South Korea, and India v. China

As a graduate student in the late 1980s, which feels like a lifetime ago, I came across quite a few studies that contrasted two pairs of countries for their development trajectories: India and China, and the two Koreas.

Back then, the divergence between India and China--at least on the economic scene--was just about emerging.  The Korean situation, however, was very clear: North Korea was rapidly falling behind South Korea's success.

That divergence between the two Koreas is clear in the chart below, which I picked up from Daniel Drezner's blog:

The divergence was obvious to us grad students only because we were looking at it after the roads had forked.  Drezner quotes Nicholas Eberstadt,

Around the time of Mao Zedong's death (1976), North Korea was more educated, more productive and (by the measure of international trade per capita) much more open than China. Around that same time, in fact, per capita output in North Korea and South Korea may have been quite similar. Today, North Korea has the awful distinction of being the only literate and urbanized society in human history to suffer mass famine in peacetime. 

and then wisely suggests that we keep such charts in mind:

whenever anyone confidently asserts the obvious superiority of a particular model of political economy.  Because, I assure you, there was a point in time when such superiority was far from obvious.

One of my professors from grad school, Peter Gordon, notes in his blog post, which is also on very much a similar point:

It is a cliche that you can never know enough history.  Picking up on Smith, North, Acemoglu, Lal and others, we see that economists can never know enough history. 

Yep. In many posts, like in this one, I have explored the contrasts between India and China.  Yes, there is enormous divergence now.  But, imagine if there is one heck of an unraveling of the Chinese social contract, and the Communist Party loses control, leading to economic declines similar to what happened to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union ... Looking back in time after such a situation, will the divergence be that obvious?

Will North Korea ever emerge from the darkness?

A couple of years ago, when discussing energy consumption patterns, I showed the class the widely discussed image in which North Korea looks completely dark, to the north of South Korea.  It was one of those images that was worth more than a few thousand words.

More recently, I had students read this essay.  When it came to discussing it in class, a couple of students jumped in right away with the 1984 comparisons.  I can still remember "J" remarking that he always thought 1984 was fictional, and never, ever imagined that it could be a reality.

What a messed up situation there!  The economic effect alone is staggering:

Back in 1970, the two countries were roughly comparable — in fact, AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt argues that, at the time of Mao Zedong’s death, North Korea’s workers were more productive and better educated than China’s. But, as you can see from the graph below, North and South Korea’s economies massively diverged around 1976, as North Korea’s rigid central-planning economy failed to keep up:

Data from the Historical Statistics for the World Economy.

During the early 1970s, North Korea’s economy stagnated, with GDP per capita flatlining until Kim Il Sung’s death. Then, in 1994, after Kim Jong Il took over, the economy started shrinking noticeably, per capita incomes fell, and the country became dependent on emergency U.N. food aid to stave off famines that had already killed as many as 3 million people. North Korea became, as Eberstadt puts it, “the world’s first and only industrialized economy to lose the capacity to feed itself.” (That said, there’s evidence that North Korea was growing weakly in the last few years of Kim Jong Il’s rule).
At the moment, North Korea’s per capita income is less than 5 percent of the South’s. As the Atlantic Council’s Peter Beck puts it, “Each year the dollar value of South Korea’s GDP expansion equals the entire North Korean economy.” 

And that is merely on the economic front.

I noted in an opinion piece a few years ago about a graduate school classmate, who was from South Korea.  When the war broke out, his parents apparently left their toddler daughter with the grandparents and fled south, with the idea that the war would end within a couple of weeks and they would all reunite.  The parents never saw their parents and the daughter since then.  In fact, they didn't even know whether the daughter was even alive. 

I am reminded of a student's remark in the context of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe because, I bet she would say the same here too: "if suicide bombers want to kill people, why don't they go near these dictators and blow themselves up? It will be a win-win-win situation."

Do the actions in Libya mean Iran will speed up the nuclear bomb?

The words recently used by Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, Ambassador Rice, ... well, the list of people is endless ... the words used to describe Gaddafi range from "delusional" to a much milder "dictatorial" ...

There are lots of delusional leaders of government. North Korea's Kim Jong-Il and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe are way on top of that pyramid, along with quite a few others.  These two together have been the cause of millions of their peoples dying early deaths.

We might even bomb the hell out of Zimbabwe, but the world knows that we won't go anywhere near North Korea.  Why?  North Korea has the bomb.  Having the bomb is the ultimate security blanket for any regime that tries to hold on to power.

Libya's Gaddafi was on that same path of acquiring a bomb--even tried buying from India!  In the end, in the international games that governments play, Gaddafi decided that he might be better off extending a peaceful hand to the West and, thereby, consolidate his choke-hold over Libya.  Thus, he abandoned his nuclear "Islamic" bomb project, and won kudos from the West.

The then British PM, Tony Blair, was all cuddly with "our man in North Africa"

Blair saw political capital in embracing the monster. The ostensible reason for this bargain was that Gaddafi would graciously abandon his WMD programme – although there is no real evidence that he has. Blair believed, too, that Gaddafi would be a valuable tool in the global war against Islamist terrorists.

And there was more in this Faustian bargain. Not only would the Bush administration welcome any intelligence that could be gleaned from this obscure part of North Africa, but Shell and BP would gain extensive drilling rights in an oil and gas-rich country much nearer Europe than the Gulf.

Imagine if Gaddafi hadn't abandoned his nuclear project.

the 2003 deal removed Colonel Qaddafi’s biggest trump card: the threat of using a nuclear weapon, or even just selling nuclear material or technology, if he believed it was the only way to save his 42-year rule. While Colonel Qaddafi retains a stockpile of mustard gas, it is not clear he has any effective way to deploy it. “Imagine the possible nightmare if we had failed to remove the Libyan nuclear weapons program and their longer-range missile force,”

So, that means that we have all the more highlighted to Iran's Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and president Ahmadinejad that their theocratic regime might want to insure itself by speeding up making the bomb.  So, should we be surprised with news like this?

 This also means that Israel will now be all the more itchy to prevent Iran from getting one.  Jeffrey Goldberg's thought experiment seems more real now than when his essay was published:

What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

Happy spring, everybody :)

Funniest cartoon of the day: North Korea and Iran

The crazy North Korean government!

This past Veterans Day, one of the students, "D," talked to the class about his service in the military, and focused on his duty in the Korean DMZ.  "D" was a 18-year old soldier selected to serve in the inner rings of the DMZ and was, thus, witness to a crazy series of incidents--the "axe murder incident"--that left his captain and lieutenant dead.  "D" said that for quite a few days they were on full alert, prepared for an all out war, all over again.

But, and thankfully, that war didn't break out.

According to "D", and the few readings that I did later, this bizarre North Korean attack was to consolidate the ascent of Kim Jong-il.   Now, it is Kim Jong-il's time to hand over the controls to his anointed successor--his son, Kim Jong-un  The timing of this latest bizarre attack can be at least partially attributed to this succession.

The NY Times:

Analysts say the regime may be trying to ensure that the Kim family dynasty continues for a third generation by winning the loyalty of the powerful military with shows of force.

Time:

Analysts in Seoul said the thread plausibly linking the nuclear revelations and Tuesday's attack in the West Sea is the leadership succession now under way in Pyongyang. Both underscore what has been a central political component of the Kim Jong Il regime, the doctrine of "military first" politics. In Kim's words, it means "placing top priority on military affairs" and turning the North Korean army into a "pillar of the revolution." Just six weeks ago, the regime in Pyongyang effectively affirmed that Kim's son Kim Jong Un would succeed his father as the next ruler of North Korea. That the North continues to upgrade its ability to make nuclear weapons — the regime already has between 8 and 12 bombs, according to U.S. intelligence — while lashing out militarily during a high-profile visit to the neighborhood by Obama's special envoy shows one thing: when young Kim takes over, nothing much in the North will change.
"Kim Jong Un," says Cheong Seong-Chang, a senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, a Seoul think tank, "is currently under the influence of more hawkish generals. The son's power base is derived from the military, and the power of military is greater than ever."

As David Letterman often jokes, it is not Kim Jong-il, but "Menta Ly Ill"

Market down. Korea tense. Euro burns. So ...?

More here
ht

64 Years later. Nukes haunt us.

Here is to hoping that we will never ever again use a nuclear bomb, as we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago.

It is an unfortunate irony that news of Burma's interest in acquiring nukes with North Korean assistance comes at the same time.

I hope that President Obama will sincerely follow-up on, and implement, his grand statement in Prague earlier this year:

Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. (Applause.) And as nuclear power –- as a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.

So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.) I'm not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly –- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, "Yes, we can."