Just yesterday, the head of the table said grace. He went beyond acknowledgement and thanks for the food to include a prayer for the strength and protection of the State of Israel. Before my first mouthful (and I eat real fast), a close friend raised her voice to say that we should all be praying for the Palestinian people.
As empires weaken or collapse, they either start wars to preserve themselves—or provoke wars through the chaos of their absence. The greater the empire’s role in shaping global or regional order, the more damaging its decline is likely to be—both for itself and for others.
In South Korea, the idea of a post-American Asia—that is, a regional order no longer anchored by the U.S. alliance system—invites wildly divergent visions. Nowhere are these differences more vivid than at the ideological extremes.
Hugh White’s recent essay in The Quarterly argues that Australia should be preparing now for the departure of the U.S. He notes “it is futile for Australia to frame its defence around U.S. deterrence of China when America itself is not serious about it.” His essay is understandably focused on Australia, but much of what he says applies equally to South Korea. Should South Korea be preparing now for the departure of the U.S.?
It didn’t take long. Just minutes after it became clear that Lee Jae-myung won South Korea’s presidential election, American conservative social media lit up with a verdict: “RIP South Korea.” According to Laura Loomer: “the communists have taken over.”
Attention has turned to the re-emergence of a Cold War-like division in East Asia, with China, North Korea, and Russia on one side and the United States, South Korea, and Japan on the other.
I’m reading acacdemic papers written about Korea from the 1950s. You can tell these papers would have been shared among colleagues, perhaps even discussed in closed-door seminars or cited in speeches. These academic papers mattered.
The passing of Richard Armitage, Joseph Nye, Henry Kissinger, and just under ten years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, marks more than just the end of an era of iconic U.S. foreign policy thinkers. It symbolizes a broader intellectual shift.
For a country as geopolitically charged and historically complex as Korea, one might expect a rich tapestry of speculative fiction — alternate histories, emotional futurisms, surreal dystopias — flowing from English-language writers.
Now, if we are, in fact, living in a simulation and this simulation is created by advanced beings that share similarities to ourselves, then the question then becomes: What is the simulation for?
