Articles by Walden Bello

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The words were so brazen that they have created a firestorm globally. Characterized as “outspoken” and “brash” in the international media, Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto has claimed that “comfort women”—the thousands of Asian women who were forced to serve as prostitutes during the Second World War—were “necessary” for the morale of Japanese troops.

“Anyone can understand that the system of comfort women was necessary to provide respite for a group of high-strung, rough and tumble crowd of men braving their lives under a storm of bullets,” Hashimoto said, according to the Wall Street Journal. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition will have major implications for China’s neighbors in Southeast Asia. Given this, it might be worthwhile to review the changing understanding of the momentous developments in China on the part of people in our region, using my generation—the so-called “baby boomers”—as an example.

Many in my generation in Southeast Asia came of age during the tempestuous years of the Mao era, when China was seeking to assert itself as a revolutionary beacon and undergoing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Many were radicalized by the twin forces of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation against the United States and China’s bid for revolutionary leadership in the third world. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

With speculation now centered on how Superstorm Sandy’s impact may affect the U.S. election result, the final presidential debate, which focused on foreign policy, might seem like a distant event to American voters. But for the rest of the world, this was an event that mattered

As many pundits have noted, if the rest of the world were voting in the U.S. presidential election, the third presidential debate would probably have proceeded differently.

But since only about 200 million people on earth are eligible to vote for the man whose policies will impact all of us, the evening, as expected, turned into an exercise in imperial chest-thumping. President Barack Obama dredged up former Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s assertion that “America remains the indispensable nation” to remind American voters of what a great gift to the world their country is. Not to be outdone in extolling American exceptionalism, Republican candidate Mitt Romney told his compatriots, “This nation is the hope of the earth.” read more