Journal of International Studies

One major Asian navy was conspicuously absent from this month's festivities in Sydney: the Taiwan Navy. Did Taipei slight Canberra? Should we fault President Ma Ying-jeou for pique, or apathy, or thoughtlessless? Nope, and nope. You've heard it all before. Beijing's wrath would have been fearful to behold had a Taiwanese man-of-war made port for the fleet review. Navies are services sovereign states use to protect their interests. Had Taiwan been allowed to take part in the maritime congress, it would have appeared as though participating governments were affording the island diplomatic recognition. And that, of course, would never do. Chinese officials go to absurd lengths to maintain a consistent posture toward the island. We even had a furor in the hinterlands of northeast Georgia a few years back. When preparing for a conference of nonproliferation NGOs, an intern dutifully made a nameplate for a Taiwanese professor indicating that he was from, well,  Taiwan . M...

Achtung! At long last I have assumed my proper rank as  Professor-Doktor (spoken in my best Colonel Klink accent). Or so my Lufthansa boarding pass told me upon departing Boston last Tuesday. No one does titles better than Germans. I'm on my first visit to Germany in twenty years, and my first ever to united Berlin. The Wall still stood in 1986, when my University of Regensburg class made the bus ride through East Germany into West Berlin. That marked the Naval Diplomat's first experience hobnobbing with godless commies. It left an impression. I clambered aboard another aircraft so soon after Sydney in order to address a conference on "Maritime Security and Europe" (at the Maritim Hotel, fittingly). My sacred trust was to analyze the strategic features of the Indian Ocean basin, mainly the Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, and Hormuz straits. Our European friends appear eager to discern how they can advance the cause of security in maritime Asia beyond dispatching nav...

One advantage of visiting a place only once in a while is that changes appear to happen stepwise. What happens so gradually that residents barely notice smacks you in the face. So it was with Berlin. Color was my overriding impression when visiting West and East Berlin in 1986. Or, more precisely, a clash of color palettes between the two halves of the city. West Berlin was spic-and-span, shopping districts like the Kurfürstendamm a riot of neon lights. The East? Gray, soot-stained, and drab. Bombed-out buildings lingered forty years after World War II. No more. New construction has filled in the no-man's land along the Berlin Wall, mostly effacing the Cold War past. Indeed, only small traces reveal that the city was once divided. A few sections of the Wall are on display in Potsdamer Platz, complete with a huckster decked out in an East German military uniform. He's eager -- for a fee -- to stamp your passport, just like the bad old days when crossing from West to ...