TOM PLATE WRITES – Among the easiest things on the face of the earth on which one can become quickly aware of is an Australian after-party. That’s because it tends to carry on for so long that with each additional (happy) hour, it gets very audibly happier. But, as a…
Tag: Pacific Perspectives
PACIFIC PERSPECTIVES: Getting Hot Over Global Warming
TOM PLATE WRITES – Like each of his seven predecessors, the current occupant of the Office of Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, gets to pick his own impossible dream to imagine solved, and he certainly has his. However, the SG disagrees that he’s tilting at windmills, as…
THE PLATE COLUMN: Russia in the Ukraine – Beyond Good and Evil
WRITES TOM PLATE FROM LOS ANGELES IN HIS SYNDICATED ASIA COLUMN – ‘Ukraine Isn’t Armageddon.’ Now, how bold and direct is that?! This was the banner headline splashed over the most incisive journalism I have read on Vladimir Putin and the Crimea crisis. It led the April edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, the…
LOS ANGELES: Trying to Keep Japan in Perspective
TOM PLATE WRITES IN HIS SYNDICATED NEWSPAPER COLUMN: Try it, you might like it: a sense of proportion. Avoid the extreme cry of apocalypse now — or, at least, of apocalypse soon. Stretch your intellectual and historical horizons to appreciate Japan as an expanse of more than just a few…
BOOK EXCERPT: The Enigma of Thailand’s Thaksin
The Following Excerpt from the New Book ‘Conversations with Thaksin’ Appeared First – and Recently — in The Japan Times daily newspaper in Tokyo. It is reprinted in its entirety below. CONVERSATIONS WITH THAKSIN OF THAILAND: PORTRAIT OF A PRIME MINISTER WHO BECAME THE PRIME SUSPECT IN HIS OWN LAND…
PACIFIC PERSPECTIVES: Vietnam on the Positive side, Asia on the American Mind
16 November 2011 Los Angeles — Real-life diplomacy reveals, as Lord Palmerston, twice British prime minister (1855-8, 1859-65), famously put it: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Over the decades…