A surprise East Asian love-in
RELATIONS BETWEEN Japan and South Korea are not often cause for a party. But the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two neighbours on June 22nd was a festive affair. Tokyo's political elite trekked to a jolly reception put on by the South Korean embassy. Ishiba Shigeru, Japan's prime minister, called for the countries to 'join hands'; two of his predecessors made toasts. Japanese politicians beamed at photographers while clutching South Korea's ambassador.
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NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
6 Americans detained for trying to send rice and Bibles to North Korea by sea, police say
SEOUL, South Korea — Six Americans were detained Friday in South Korea for trying to send 1,600 plastic bottles filled with rice, U.S. dollar bills and Bibles toward North Korea by sea, police said. The Americans tried to throw the bottles into the sea from front-line Gwanghwa Island so they could float toward North Korean shores by the tides, said a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media on the issue. He said they were being investigated on allegations that they violated the law on the management of safety and disasters. A second South Korean police officer confirmed the detentions of the Americans. The police officers gave no further details, including whether any of the six had made previous attempts to send bottles toward North Korea. Activists floating plastic bottles or flying balloons carrying anti-North Korea propaganda leaflets across the border has long caused tensions on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea expressed its anger at the balloon campaigns by launching its own balloons carrying trash into South Korea, including at least two that landed in the presidential compound in Seoul last year. In 2023, South Korea's Constitutional Court struck down a 2020 law that criminalized the sending of leaflets and other items to North Korea, calling it an excessive restriction on free speech. But since taking office in early June, the new liberal government of President Lee Jae Myung is pushing to crack down on such civilian campaigns with other safety-related laws to avoid a flare-up tensions with North Korea and promote the safety of front-line South Korean residents. On June 14, police detained an activist for allegedly flying balloons toward North Korea from Gwanghwa Island. Lee took office with a promise to restart long-dormant talks with North Korea and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula. Lee's government halted front-line anti-Pyongyang propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts to try to ease military tensions. North Korean broadcasts have not been heard in South Korean front-line towns since then. It remains unclear whether North Korea will respond to Lee's conciliatory gesture after it vowed last year to sever relations with South Korea and abandon the goal of peaceful Korean reunification. Official talks between the Koreas have been stalled since 2019, when the U.S.-led diplomacy on North Korean denuclearization derailed.
NBC News
a day ago
- NBC News
Japan hangs 'Twitter killer' in first execution since 2022
TOKYO — Japan executed a man on Friday who killed nine people after contacting them on social media, the first use of capital punishment in the country in nearly three years. Takahiro Shiraishi had been sentenced to death for his 2017 strangling and dismembering of eight women and one man in his apartment in Zama city in Kanagawa near Tokyo. He was dubbed the 'Twitter killer' because he contacted victims via the social media platform. Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorized Shiraishi's hanging, said he made the decision after careful examination, taking into account the convict's 'extremely selfish' motive for crimes that 'caused great shock and unrest to society.' It followed the execution in July 2022 of a man who went on a stabbing rampage in Tokyo's Akihabara shopping district in 2008. It was also the first time a death penalty was carried out since Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's government was inaugurated last October. In September last year, a Japanese court acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who had spent the world's longest time on death row after a wrongful conviction for crimes committed nearly 60 years ago. Capital punishment is carried out by hanging in Japan and prisoners are notified of their execution hours before it is carried out, which has long been decried by human rights groups for the stress it puts on death-row prisoners. 'It is not appropriate to abolish the death penalty while these violent crimes are still being committed,' Suzuki told a news conference. There are currently 105 death row inmates in Japan, he added.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
It's time for America to remember how dangerous regime change is
The ceasefire between Iran and Israel might still hold, but if not, the United States might double down on its weekend strikes and seek the overthrow of the Iranian regime. Donald Trump threatened this in comments and tweets earlier, and top officials such as Marco Rubio have said they wouldn't mind it if it happened. Israeli leaders are openly in favor. If the US goes down this road, it will not be for the first time. In the last 80 years, Washington has overthrown many regimes. For a superpower, toppling foreign governments is not so hard to do. Getting the outcome you want is. This makes regime change as dangerous as it is seductive, as past US attempts clearly show. The US overthrow of the Japanese and German governments in the second world war made a whole generation of American leaders too optimistic about regime change. Germany's and Japan's transformation into strong democratic allies was a source of inspiration for the regime changes that dotted the cold war – but a misleading one. The only successful changer of regimes in the two centuries before had been Napoleon Bonaparte – and his regimes were fleeting. The United States helped overthrow Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, but this sowed seeds of resentment that helped birth today's extremist government. In 1954, the CIA recruited a group of Guatemalan exiles to overthrow the Soviet-leaning leader Jacobo Árbenz. In 1961, US-backed rebels landed at the Bay of Pigs, in a failed attempt to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro. The US and the Soviet Union fought covert and overt wars to topple regimes from the 1960s until the 1980s, especially in Latin America, but also in Africa and beyond. After the cold war, regime change took on a new purpose as American leaders imagined a better world, free of violent ethnic hatred and a post-Soviet space full of flourishing democracies aligned with the United States. The popularity of the theory of democratic peace, according to which democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other, made the practice of turning non-democratic regimes around seem like the bedfellow of world peace and helped justify regime change on moral as well as national security grounds. And so, the US and its allies overthrew more regimes. The first target was Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milošević. His overthrow proceeded in stages, beginning with coercive airstrikes on his allies in 1995, spreading to Serbia itself in 1999, and ending with the toppling of his regime in elections in 2000. The US role in changing the regimes in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan over the next few years – the so-called color revolutions – was indirect and more limited than adversaries like Russia have made it out to be, but two decades later none of these countries is very stable or democratic. Serbia is ruled by a Kremlin-leaning nationalist. Kyrgyzstan is unstable, Georgia has become a client state of Russia and, sadly, Ukraine is under siege from a vengeful Russian president. The long-term outcomes of fostering uprisings against unwanted regimes have thus not been promising. The 9/11 attacks unleashed a fury of American vengeance that made possible military action on a much larger scale. If the US role in changing the regimes of these post-socialist states was visible mostly in the 'grey zone', nothing was opaque about the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. In Afghanistan, America's lightning-fast campaign made quick work of the Taliban. But US technological advantages melted in the face of an insurgency in a country that was foreign to most Americans who went to fight there, and in which the US national interest was limited to finding Osama bin Laden. After two decades of trying to construct an Afghan democracy, Joe Biden wisely withdrew, acknowledging defeat, and with it the limits of America's regime-changing power. In 2003, the US military also crushed the Iraqi regime with 'shock and awe' that impressed the world – just as the Trump administration's recent bombing of Iran initially did. The regime that replaced Saddam in Iraq was more democratic, but it was also a strategic gift to Iran, who now expanded its power into the vacuum that regime change had created. Military intervention in Libya in 2011 removed Muammar Gaddafi, nobly enforcing the UN doctrine of 'Responsibility to Protect'. But it left behind a sore in the side of all of north Africa and the Mediterranean basin, one that added to the chaos in Syria, encouraged the collapse of Mali and facilitated Europe's immigration crisis. Russia is now attempting regime change in Ukraine but has encountered similar challenges. Its experience there is an abject reminder of the fact that to everyone except the would-be regime-changer, these operations mostly look like brutal imperialism. The unsatisfactory history of regime change can hide the practice's allure. To live with imperfection, with messiness, with injustice, and with enemies, is very hard to do – especially as the stakes mount, as in Iran in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the diplomatic path is arduous and often leads to dead ends. Diplomatic outcomes are usually tenuous and can be short-lived – as demonstrated by the short life of the original Iran nuclear agreement, negotiated painstakingly under Barack Obama and torn up three years later by Donald Trump. But decades of regime-change attempts that yielded lackluster results at best should make the US hesitate before going down that road again. Some may hope for internal regime change – an uprising like the color revolutions. But uprisings have not produced stability in most recent cases, and there is no guarantee they would produce a regime in Iran any more conducive to American and Israeli security than today's ayatollahs. And the more the people rise up, the more a regime like this will crack down. Chaos – in other words, no regime at all – is a likely result. Other leaders and pundits may intend to walk the Trump administration ever closer to the regime-change strategies of George W Bush. A full-scale invasion might eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons programs, but it would be unmatched in scope and consequences since the second world war. Any hope of success would require the US to prepare to pay a hefty price in blood and treasure. None of this is to deny the serious problem that Iran and its nuclear ambitions present, nor the role that coercion must play in containing it. But decision-makers must not focus single-mindedly on Iran's nuclear program. They must ask deeper questions. What are America's real interests in this? How does the character of the Iranian regime affect the lives of ordinary US citizens who simply want to live in peace? How would a forced change of regime affect the character of America's own democracy, especially if it is carried out without congressional approval by a president who has played fast and loose with the constitution? How will it affect the people of the region? Will they view the US as a liberator or just another one of history's empires, determined to possess their resources and control their lives? Given the US habit of regime change, to avoid these questions would be as irresponsible as it would be dangerous for the nation and the world. Chris Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
