John Metzler

In a scathing but measured account, a report by the UN”s Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) produced an update on North Korea.

In the closing stages of the seemingly perpetual U.S. Presidential election campaign, the final debate was slated to cover foreign policy — it really didn’t.

While recent flareups of the coronavirus have been spreading across large parts of the USA, Americans are hardly alone in facing the deadly pandemic.

FPI / October 16, 2020 By John J. Metzler Beijing’s widening human rights and political crackdowns in both Xinjiang Province and Hong Kong have underscored the People’s Republic of China’s pavlovian reaction involving any opposition towards the ruling communist regime. Though suppressing religious and political dissent is nothing new on the Chinese Mainland, its scope […]

FPI / October 8, 2020 By John J. Metzler Germany’s reunification is now history. It seemed not so long ago that the Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, Central European countries had regained their sovereignty through the freedom tsunami sweeping Europe, and unimaginably on Oct. 3, 1990, West and East Germany, the front line frontier […]

FPI / October 1, 2020 By John J. Metzler Since March the world has been battered by the Covid-19 virus. Over a million people have died and many more have been sickened by this “invisible enemy.” From its origins in China, through its spread into Europe, the United States and Latin America, the virus has […]

FPI / September 24, 2020 By John J. Metzler Presidents, Prime Ministers and Kings are attending the opening debate of the UN General Assembly; but online. The 75th anniversary session of the Assembly was planned as a gala gathering of chiefs of state and government but shall now be relegated to a series of virtual […]

FPI / September 17, 2020 By John J. Metzler Viewing the sorrowful September 11 commemorations, I was instantly transported back nineteen years to the terrorist attacks on America. As I wrote back then, “On a picture perfect September morning, the Grim Reaper visited New York…it would be our generation’s Pearl Harbor.” A mournful, nervous but […]

FPI / September 11, 2020 By John J. Metzler The rising tide of China’s military modernization, expansion, and force projection capabilities has long haunted policymakers from the United States to East Asia. But while many Washington politicians were premised on the paradigm of China’s “peaceful rise” and a world of global commerce with only occasional […]

FPI / September 3, 2020 By John J. Metzler Nearly six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States remains mired in the nebulous haze of the “invisible enemy,” suffering greatly both physically and emotionally. We have been battered and bruised economically and most of all psychologically. And all this in the midst of a […]

FPI / August 20, 2020 By John J. Metzler A visit by an American Secretary of Health to an East Asian ally would seemingly not register much media attention, especially during the Summer. But in the age of global Corona and the deadly spread of the Covid-19 virus, health certainly matters. So, when U.S. Secretary […]

FPI / August 16, 2020 By John J. Metzler The massive double blast which rocked Beirut harbor brought near cataclysmic damage to the Lebanese capital. Yet as the dust settled on this tragedy, with 200 dead and 5,000 injured, the political and economic reverberations of the explosion have shaken Lebanon to the core and threatened […]

FPI / August 9, 2020 By John J. Metzler The story comes right out of a Dan Brown mystery thriller in which Vatican secrets are targeted by State sponsored computer hackers. Yet according to cyber security sources, the intrusion into sensitive Vatican diplomatic traffic is not fiction, but a cold hard fact of modern espionage. […]

FPI / July 30, 2020 By John J. Metzler Its very name Hagia Sophia evokes the ancient mysteries of Byzantium. Its setting along the Golden Horn on the majestic Bosphorus joining Europe and Asia in itself serves as a beacon for uniting world religions. Yet this magnificent church which has weathered the march of time […]

FPI / July 23, 2020 By John J. Metzler In a sweeping, scathing and searingly poignant speech, U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr swept back the curtain on China’s communist regime in a tour de force rarely seen. His focus centered not only on China’s rulers menacing their own people and those of East Asia, but […]