Before the crack of dawn on May 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon and four Secret Service agents quietly left the White House and drove to the Lincoln Memorial, where about 300,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters were camped out. Nixon talked with the student leaders for 45 minutes before nervous Secret Service agents rushed him back to the White House. Nixon and the student leaders had little in common, and meeting did nothing to change opinions on either side. History has treated the meeting as a b

It is well known that Koreans hate to lose. Indeed, we seldom accept a loss, whether in an election or in an athletic competition. When we lose an election, we either accuse the winner of being fraudulent or become spiteful. When we lose an athletic match, we almost always complain that the judge was not fair. We always blame someone or something for our loss or misfortune, instead of admitting our own flaws or incompetence. Recently, Seoul National University elected a new president. Since SNU

On the one hand, it is completely unsurprising that Europe has become a swamp of anti-Jewish hostility. It is, after all, Europe. Anti-Jewish hostility has been its metier for centuries. (Yes, the locus of much anti-Jewish activity today is within Europe’s large Muslim-immigrant population; but the young men who threaten their Jewish neighbors draw on the language and traditions of European anti-Semitism as much as they do on Muslim modes of anti-Semitic thought.)On the other hand, the intensity

You might wonder if there’s any point in even trying to define liberalism. Efforts to do so seem bound to fail. From the start, its meaning has been elusive and in flux. Today, no right-thinking person is against “liberal democracy,” and we mostly take “liberal capitalism” for granted ― yet conservative Americans use “liberal” as a term of abuse and many left-leaning Americans would rather be called “progressives.”It’s tempting to say that “liberalism” no longer means anything. This would be wro

WASHINGTON ― The propagandists of the Islamic State must have imagined that their brutal video of the beheading of journalist James Foley would intimidate and terrorize the world. But people aren’t built that way, not in Muslim countries or anywhere else. When they see sadistic, uncivilized behavior, they are disgusted ― and angry. President Obama spoke with special precision and moral clarity in reacting to the video’s release Wednesday. The Islamic State, he said, “speaks for no religion. Thei

Tobacco is one of the deadliest public health menaces that the world has ever faced. If the nature and extent of the harms had been known from the start, tobacco would never have been approved as safe for human consumption. Each year, cigarettes kill 5.4 million smokers from direct use and another 600,000 nonsmokers through secondhand smoke. The problem is particularly acute in the Western Pacific Region, comprising one-quarter of the world’s population but more than two-fifths of the world’s sm

MUNICH ― Italy is now in a triple-dip recession. But it didn’t get there by itself. Yes, the economy’s long slide reflects Italian leaders’ failure to confront the country’s loss of competitiveness; but it is a failure that is widely shared in Europe.When the financial crisis erupted in the fourth quarter of 2007, Italy’s GDP plummeted by 7 percent, then picked up by 3 percent, dropped again by 5 percent, rebounded by a measly 0.1 percent, and lately, during the first half of this year, shrank a