A Promised Land

America as a Developing Country

“We Got the Bas***d!”

Trump Loses. Women and Justice Win.

Shortly after arriving in the Philippines in 1987, a year after the peaceful uprising known as People Power deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos, I attended a Manila meeting of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations. I recall the discussion somehow turning to the former strongman. Reflecting on both People Power and the longer-term, unflinching opposition that fueled his fall, the PCFR chair declared, “We got the bas***d!”

From Manila to Manhattan

The same sentiments cross my mind as I reflect on the results of E. Jean Carroll’s case against Donald Trump. In the legal equivalent of a New York minute – less than three hours of deliberations – a Manhattan jury held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

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From Classic Cars to Our Electrifying Future

The Good Old Days Give Way to Better Days

My new hometown of Benicia, CA hosted its 28th Annual Classic Car Show a week ago.

I suppose I could start discussing the event, as well as the global car market’s electrifying trends, by lamenting America’s historic love for gas guzzlers and their legacy of overconsumption and pollution.

Nah.

More on the future later. But for now…

Wow

Having wandered around the show, I must confess to being wowed. It’s the first such gathering I’ve ever been to. I have no idea how many autos were on display…400? 600?

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The Larger Lessons of the January Insurrections: Why Western Democracy Aid Failed

And What Our Own Struggling Democracy Can Learn

Money for Almost Nothing

In January, backers of Brazil’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, seized the country’s Congress and Supreme Court buildings, as well as its presidential palace. The action represented much more than a repeat of America’s January 6,. 2021 debacle. It signified the failure of several decades of massive democratic development aid across the globe.

Reaching back to at least the 1980s, America and its wealthy European and other allies poured many billions of dollars into buttressing democracy, good governance and the rule of law around the world. The efforts continue to this day. Focusing on post-communist and poorer countries, including Brazil, they have been driven by a mix of cynicism, foreign policy priorities, naivete, idealism and good intentions.

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On Thanksgiving, Let’s Be Thankful for What We Don’t Have

Reflections on Cambodia, Ukraine and a Post-it Note

“Boys Will Be Boys”

Back in 1985, fresh out of law school, I was dispatched to Thailand by a U.S. human rights group. I went there to document a torrent of abuses against the 370,000 Cambodian refugees in camps dotting the Thai side of the border following the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of their country.

The savagery these souls faced took many appalling forms: murders, torture, beatings, rapes and robberies by the Thai soldiers assigned to protect them; similar mistreatment of Cambodians fleeing to the camps, carried out by their own countrymen belonging to rapacious resistance units fighting the Vietnamese occupation; vicious raids on the supposed places of refuge by gangs of Cambodian bandits, 20 to 30 strong; shelling of the camps by Vietnamese artillery based just across the border; and brutal, suffocating repression in the few sites controlled by the remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which had killed at least a million people during its 1975-79 reign of terror in Cambodia before the invasion forced their flight to the border.

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Bring on Your Wrecking Ball: Americans Defy Election Deniers

They'll be back. And so will we.

Not all it’s cracked up to be.

A tale of two summers

In the summer of 1983, I visited an old friend who was a young foreign service officer in Manila. Sitting in his living room, sharing beers and shooting the breeze with a few of his colleagues, we discussed the Philippines’ future. One colleague granted that its then-dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, was a repressive ruler. But he insisted that the dictator was “the only game in town.”

Less than three years later, Filipinos’ “People Power” ousted Marcos.

Pro-democracy Americans’ summer of discontent in 2022 obviously differed from that of Manila in 1983. But there was something similar in the despair in the air here.

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