North Korea and legitimacy.

Watching his back: Kim Jong -un.

Like all secluded totalitarian states, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is very difficult to read. Information emanating from that hermit country is very scarce; hence, whatever political analysis experts come up with are often based on nothing more than reasonable conjectures.

In the past few days, the United States and the Asian neighborhood have once again been abuzz with the recent bellicose rhetoric coming from Pyongyang. There are those, like the editors of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, who think that North Korea’s saber-rattling is a result of paranoia common to many authoritarian regimes. It would seem, however, that the prevailing opinion is that all-out war remains unlikely, and that the escalation of tensions is merely an exercise of tactical brinkmanship on Pyongyang’s part. The general analysis is that this is just a way for the North Korean regime to test the mettle of the newly-installed administration of South Korean President Park Geun-hye, and to consolidate its bargaining position in order to leverage for foreign aid. I generally agree with this prevailing view, but my opinion has a slightly different nuance.

Sabah: Rewarding violence.

Peace for our time: Is this the last chapter of violence in the Bangsamoro?

By BORIS C. LUNA

NOTE: This is a guest post. It may or may not reflect my own views.

President Benigno S. Aquino III has spoken out against conspirators as the ones at fault in the violence in Sabah. He has threatened to charge Jamalul Kiram, pretender to the throne of the defunct Sultanate of Sulu, for his actions that caused his followers to invade Sabah to assert the ancient claim of his family to the vast territory.

But is it really about the Kirams? Is it about the claim to Sabah? Is it about Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo? Or is this incident merely a product of the traditional myopia of successive Philippine administrations, sacrificing long-term perspective for political expediency in developing policy?

Thaksin’s other sister.

The Prime Minister and the spare tire.

A week before the Philippines achieved its first investment grade status, credit ratings agency Fitch upgraded Thailand’s ratings three notches higher than non-investment levels. The said upgrades were in recognition of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s ability to maintain political stability just a couple of years after divisions created by his brother Thaksin almost succeeded in tearing Thailand apart.

A farang expert on Thai politics once described Thaksin as a Thai Mussolini. The erstwhile mogul and former police chief built a patronage system that rivals that of the monarchy’s. His strong support base, composed mostly of the rural poor in the kingdom’s Isan region, made him a formidable alternative power pole to King Bhumibol Adulyadej‘s circle. His populist economic policy– dubbed by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as Thaksinomics– gave Thailand its first economic turn-around since the Asian Financial Crisis; but his tenure was marked with alleged corruption, human rights abuses, and authoritarian tendencies. In 2006, he was ousted in a military coup that was widely believed to have been engineered by the President of His Majesty’s Privy Council, General Prem Tinsunalonda.

The post-Edsa presidents.

Doves, not pokemons.

In November, right after the President of the United States was re-elected, I wrote the essay “What Kind of President Would Obama Be?” In that piece, I drew on the works of professors Jack Balkin and Stephen Kowronek, the renowned scholar of American presidential history who classified his country’s presidents into four kinds: reconstructive, affiliated, pre-emptive, and disjunctive. The said essay elicited some reactions from both friends and readers, and at least a couple have asked if a similar classification of Philippine presidents can also be made.

Professor Kowronek’s classification describes a political cycle of creating and overturning dominant political regimes, which occur through a long period of time. Thus, it might not be applicable to the Philippine presidency, which has a relatively shorter history. At any rate, I don’t know all Philippine presidents well enough to come up with a similarly structured analysis of the entire Philippine presidential history. However– and I think this is obvious to all observers of Philippine politics– all five post-Edsa presidents seem to fit into only three different leadership templates, of which all students of Philippine politics should take note.

The Curia’s gamble?

Pope Francis: Full of Surprises.

For only the fourth time in the last one hundred years, the maxim “He who enters the conclave a pope leaves it a cardinal” proved true yesterday. An elderly cardinal who had never made it to the papabili lists of all but one Vatican observers, Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, became Pope Francis.

Everyone is pointing out all of the “firsts” about this new Roman Pontiff– The first pope from Latin America, the first Jesuit pope, and the first pope to take a totally new regnal name– but few are pointing out what seems to be the elephant in the room: That the election of Pope Francis is, in a way, an Italian restoration. And I’m not merely referring to the fact that the Argentine is of Italian descent.

Umwelten and the Sabah crisis.

Sabah: Not private property.

The mind, neuroscientists say, operates in a very small subset of the world that its eyes are able to see. This subset forms a restrictive cognitive environment that makes it extremely difficult for the mind to understand the wider world; in other words, a set of biases that makes the mind myopic. This subset is called the Umwelt.

Professor Randy David once wrote that those who live in an Umwelt are, in a way, color-blind– and usually unaware of it.

Tagle, papal politics, and the coming conclave.

HABEMUS PAPAM? Dominum Aloysius Antonius Sanctae Romanae Eclessiae Cardinalem Tagle

Predicting the outcome of a conclave is like predicting who would sit in China’s Politburo during Beijing’s leadership transition. It’s purely speculative, since it’s almost impossible to determine what’s on the cardinal-electors’ mind. As in all political events, however, an educated speculation is possible if all variables are carefully examined.

For instance, while the election of Karol Cardinal Wojtyla in the second conclave of 1978 had been very surprising to most; it was, in retrospect, not that improbable. At that time, there had been a bitter battle between the reactionary clerics, led by Guiseppe Cardinal Siri, and the liberals, led by Giovanni Cardinal Benelli. This bitter rift ensured that there would have been a gridlock, since neither of the blocs could have attained the required two-thirds majority, and that a compromise candidate would have had to be found.

Tubbataha and the Philippine-American alliance.

Grounded: USS Guardian at the Tubbataha Reefs.

The grounding of the American minesweeper USS Guardian in the world-renowned Tubbataha Reefs in the Sulu Sea is stoking emotions in the Philippines. It has put both the American and the Philippine governments on the spot, and has given anti-American activists plenty of ammunition.

The incident is just the latest in what the New York Times has described as a “string of embarrassments” for the American military in the Philippines. A couple of weeks ago, both Manila and Washington drew flak for the discovery of a US drone off Masbate. In the Filipino activist’s mind, that incident evoked images of America’s drone warfare in Pakistan, despite assurances from both governments that the drone had in fact been unarmed. Much earlier, a Malaysia-based American government contractor was alleged to have dumped thousands of liters of untreated domestic waste from a US Navy ship near Subic Bay, alarming environmentalists.

Abenomics: More politics than economics.

Shinzo Abe: Buying his way to victory in July’s Upper House elections

In Tokyo, newly-installed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has unveiled a massive, multi-billion dollar stimulus package, ostensibly to get the static Japanese economy moving. The announcement came after the Prime Minister, in an obvious PR blitz, formed an “economic revitalization council” composed not only of Cabinet members but experts from the academe and the private sector, and called for greater monetary intervention to devalue the Yen.

If these are all designed to shed the Prime Minister’s image as a security hawk out of touch with important domestic concerns– an image that helped ruin his first administration from 2006 to 2007– to a premier who prioritizes the economy, then they’re probably working. Many in Tokyo are now saying that the new administration is a lot better than the one it replaced, simply because it is seen to be doing something. The media has even come up with a nickname for the Prime Minister’s economic policy: Abenomics.

On Manila’s support for the “rearming” of Japan.

Would Japan’s re-militarization be a stabilizing factor?

Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario made news last week for expressing support for the “rearming” of Japan, saying Manila is “looking for balancing factors in the region,” and that Tokyo “could be a significant balancing factor,” presumably against an increasingly-assertive China.

It seems to me that the subliminal message of the way the international press has reported the Secretary’s comments is that, because of China’s intransigence, Japan’s standing among Asian countries is changing. Here are my two cents: