I recently wrapped up my internship at the Bangkok Post, and my lead piece for this week’s Asia Focus section was published today. In the world’s preeminent superpower, the race to elect the new president is starting to yield clues about the future of its foreign policy. The narrowing gap between China and the United […]
Category Archives: American Politics
Autocracy Hits a Roadblock
“The end of the republic has never looked better”, Barack Obama joked at his last White House Correspondent’s Dinner. That was back in 2016, the year that saw Donald Trump win the presidency despite what seemed like insurmountable odds. Early 2017 saw a flurry of gloomy predictions. David Frum wrote hypothetically in his piece in […]
The Republican Party is Complicit
“You must think Americans are so stupid,” an American friend said to me in a state of despair that the American president is hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly stupid, or hopelessly blackmailed, or all three. President Donald Trump’s terrible, no good, very bad European trip has concluded, and it was, possibly, the most disastrous overseas visit by […]
The Day America Abdicated World Leadership
I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump…I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness…Imagine Trump doing Brexit. He’d go in bloody hard… There’d be all sorts of breakdowns, all sorts of chaos. Everyone would think he’d gone mad. But actually you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought. […]
John Chiang for California Governor
UC Berkeley is supposed to be a very politically engaged school. The numerous protests, the ultra-liberal leaning student body, the history of activism: Berkeley l is supposed to be the hotbed of young political movement in the United States. What I’ve realised, however, is that the reality is quite different. Berkeley isn’t much different from […]
The Cruelty of Tillerson’s Termination via Tweet
This week, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired. While Tillerson’s political demise won’t be mourned at the State Department that he helped decimated in an unprecedented manner, one can still almost feel sorry for him. The former CEO of ExxonMobil, once at the helm of a sprawling business empire, was unceremoniously tossed aside […]
The Emperor Has No Clothes
Fire and Fury, the gossipy tell-all of the inner workings of the Trump administration, is not, objectively speaking, a good book. The writing feels like it could have used more editing. The logic is, at times, questionable. And above all, the details are difficult to verify, or easily provable as false (take the assertion that […]
Trump, Thaksin and Democracy
Some years ago, I enabled the snowing plugin on this blog so that every December, it snows on the posts that I publish. Perhaps lost in the busyness of college life has been my sense of time, and it took me by surprise when I opened this site and found snow falling on Paul Ryan’s […]
The GOP’s Pyrrhic Victory
Why, many asked, did the Republican Party allow itself to be taken over by Donald Trump? An answer that some have given over the past few months is that a unified Republican government means that a Republican legislative agenda will advance. Yes, Trump is a dreadful president, and abhorred by many of the party elite, […]
Making News Great Again
Jim VandeHei, the co-founder of media companies Politico and Axios, was in Berkeley last week to talk about the state of the media and American politics in 2017. The media in the 21st century is definitely an important topic, but I haven’t discussed this issue on this blog in the past two years. However, it […]
