and a new Sampiemon column. Who in his or her right mind does not want to help Barack Obama succeed as President of the United States? Almost everyone in Europe hopes he does, so is the overwhelming general impression. And Europeans should help him, so write a number of American commentators. They should end their unwillingness to cooperate with Washington. What that means for the liberal hawks, over-represented among them, was conveyed by a Thomas Friedman column shortly after the election. This correspondent, who has what must be the most enviable job in contemporary journalism, may not be much as a political analyst, but as a weathervane indicating the direction of the winds of received opinion in Washington he certainly is useful. You wanted Obama, now you have him, and it is therefore time to do something in return, so spoke Friedman to the Europeans. And that something is mainly to send more troops to Afghanistan. More misconceived advice for helping Obama is hard to imagine. We do not yet have a clear idea of what his true thoughts are about Afghanistan and what he is being told by relevant advisers. It is a central question among American friends and...

One of the things to which this website hopes to contribute is an active European public sphere. I hope that others with an interest in political, economic, and social affairs, who lament the shortcomings of European media in providing a pan-European citizen forum, will want to do the same, so that we may establish new networks for relevant conversation. Too few European voices with something to say reach other Europeans even one border away. A collectivity of those could do much to offset the odd and undesirable fact that most of the world and much of Europe consumes “news” in the choices and sauces and in portions determined by American-British editors. While some of these editors are without question excellent, they themselves can benefit from choices and interpretations arrived at by journalists and essayists from outside the territories in which that wonderful language, which most of us use when meeting foreign friends, is the tool of daily conversation. One of those writers is Jan Sampiemon whose insights in world events and European problems have long deserved an international audience. I met him first in 1972, when he hired me as correspondent for Japan and other parts of Asia for the...

or ingredients for a twentyfirst century Shakespeare 2 (see also portrait) This evening I will be joining three close friends who happen to be American to celebrate, in the words of one of them, the departure of the worst president ever. All my other American friends think of him the same way, although force of journalistic hedging habit prompts some to insert “one of” before “the worst”. And then, if my Tokyo friends have managed to stay awake – we are running 14 hours ahead of Washington – their attention will turn to the pomp and circumstance taking place over there. What they will see, as must occur to everyone else in the world watching the inauguration, is rather unlike the manner in which elected heads of government, as distinct from royal successors, take over in other countries. What an odd contradiction between principle and practice. We should remember that the whole idea of monarchy is resolutely rejected as a matter of principle by almost all Americans who think about these things; the American Revolution was, after all, triggered and justified by revulsion against the arbitrary exercise of power by America’s colonial overlord, King George III of England. When in...

As the Bush years are now one day away from finally drawing to a close, what occurs to me is how much is lost in writing from hindsight. Sure, the gains that come with it are not open to dispute: often a better perspective as earlier unknown elements of the story fall into place, or revelations emerge that give it a dramatic twist. But there is something about the immediate experience of an event that, when conveyed with an effort, may contain knowledge about it that will be very difficult to recapture at a later stage. Which is why historians like diaries. Some knowledge just simply disappears. George Orwell understood this when writing about the Spanish Civil War and being sure that what he himself had learned about it from direct experience would never enter generally accepted historical records. Two striking examples from my own experience come immediately to mind: the last days of Saigon before North Vietnamese regulars took over the city in April 1975, and never-explained aspects of what happened during the horrific Kobe Earthquake and its aftermath in January 1995. I experienced the Bush years in a special, haunting manner. I had just embarked and a writing...

Washington has a problem with Europeans. They do not do enough. Notwithstanding the help it gets from European NATO officials concerned with their position in the scheme of things, they only very reluctantly send soldiers to Afghanistan. They are frequently upbraided for being deficient in their attitude toward war making in general, as if wars were not sometimes necessary. In his widely sold Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan chided the European Union for its failure to acknowledge that it could only live in its beautiful and peaceful ‘postmodern’ garden because the US was patrolling the street outside and making sure that robbers did not break in. The neocons started this line of thinking, but along with other neocon assumptions it has spread through America’s journalistic bloodstream. Something else nags at the more articulate American minds: Europeans acting morally superior ever since their clumsy previous president made them feel ashamed of their own country. The fact that Europeans “love Obama”, a frequently repeated observation in his first term, was reason in rightwing circles to be suspicious of both Obama and the Europeans. A sentiment that spilled over into the mainstream media. Anyone of their own – leave alone their own president...