Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin.It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A G

A few days ago, U.S. Ambassador Kathleen Stephens hosted a farewell dinner party for Patrick J. Linehan, minister-counselor for public affairs, who has been newly assigned to Osaka as consulate general. Since Linehan is my good friend, I decided to attend the dinner to bid farewell to him. When I met Linehan at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, he seemed to be genuinely sad to leave Korea, where he

WASHINGTON ― “Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils.” The wisdom of that couplet from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” extends in many directions. But let’s consider the context of the Arab Spring and its transition from dictatorship to democracy. Revolutions can go off the rails for many reasons. But history shows that one of the most dangerous (if also understandab

Like many regions of the world, Northeast Asia faces severe political challenges in creating a viable structure of peace. But, given China’s rising power, such a regional structure is becoming all the more necessary if today’s lack of trust is not to devolve into military antagonism.Relations among the region’s three major powers, China, South Korea, and Japan, are burdened both by territorial dis