Recent clashes between President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump over US policies toward Israel and Russia provide a vivid reminder that successors often affect a president’s historical standing.　Fears that massive deficits would cloud Ronald Reagan’s legacy vanished after George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton reduced them. On the other hand, Clinton’s ability to work with a Republican Congress to improve the long-term fiscal picture looked even better after George W. Bush squandered h

One would not think it would be necessary to remind ourselves occasionally of the awesome destructive potential of nuclear weapons. How could we forget?　But citizens of a certain age remember when the possibility of sudden destruction and death, delivered via intercontinental ballistic missile, occupied a worrisome share of our national and individual psyches. Private citizens built bomb shelters, public schools developed courses on how to radiation-proof a home and municipalities designated the

A school event in Taiwan came to the forefront of international media last week. A group of students from a private high school wore self-fashioned Nazi uniforms and wielded swastika banners at their school’s “Christmas and Thanksgiving Costume Parade” on Dec. 23. Photos taken at the parade served as fodder for a heated debate on PTT, Taiwan’s largest online forum. When one netizen forwarded the photos to the Israeli representative office in Taipei, the debate escalated into a diplomatic affair.

In the winter of 2016-2017, a neologism made its way in the Korean politics, the “Pompidou phenomenon.” Briefly put, this neologism is far-fetched and rather illogical. The so-called “truth” aspiring to hide behind splendid rhetoric easily reveals its true colors once the husk has been peeled off.　The “Pompidou phenomenon” refers to the victory of the French ruling party candidate, Pompidou, in the 1969 presidential elections held after De Gaulle offered his resignation in the wake of the “Revol

Despite sloppy reporting that repeatedly said otherwise, often accompanied by Page 1 headlines, Donald Trump never called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. He specifically said any hacking would not have occurred if the Obama administration had not been so weak, implying that a Trump administration would have been strong and would have prevented it.　He had a point. President Barack Obama has been wimpy on hacking and other misdeeds by Russians, and they have kept coming at us until fi

Greetings and welcome to Rex Huppke’s third annual Surefire Guaranteed-Or-Your-Money-Back New Year’s Predictions.　As most of you know, I was born with the gift of precognition. (I knew that was going to make you roll your eyes.)　Granted, my past prognostications have been described as “pitiful” and “laughably inaccurate,” but critics tend to get hung up on silly details like facts and truth and the unnecessary trappings of reality.　Was I wrong when I predicted that marijuana would be legalized n

Many observers attribute the cause of the present political crisis in Korea to the clash between conservative and liberal forces. But the real cause of the crisis lies in the misuse and abuse of political authority, not to ideological conflict between the left and right. 　Therefore, the solution to the crisis should be looked for in the root cause of the former, not the latter, and this can be found not in a single individual, but in the entire political culture of Korea. The public authorities