Joshua Snyder, American English Professor in South Korea, discusses American involvement with North and South Korea since World War II, how the UN gave Truman the excuse to enter the conflict without declaring war, how the defeat of Robert Taft marked the end of the Old Right until Ron Paul, how 106 of America’s 700+ military bases are in South Korea, how the many billions of American tax dollars being wasted on the occupation are subsidizing the booming South Korean economy, how if we left, South Korea could easily defend itself from the North, how reunification would be an economic nightmare for the South to absorb the North, the wide spread dislike of George Bush in Korea and questions surrounding the Syrian/ North Korean nuclear allegations.

MP3 here. (36:27)

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

Catherine Lutz, professor of anthropology at Brown University, editor of the new book, The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against US Military Posts and proprietor of the Website No-Bases.net, discusses the recent agreement for permanent bases in Iraq, the empire of American military bases all over the world, the resentment of the general populations despite official cooperation, the myth that U.S. troops provide stability in the world, the indefinite occupation of Bosnia and the doctrine of preventive war.

MP3 here. (17:55)

Catherine Lutz is a Watson Institute professor (research) and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology. Professor Lutz received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College and her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. Her most recent books include Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics and Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, winner of the Leeds Prize and the Victor Turner Prize). Others include Reading National Geographic with Jane Collins, and Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory. She is the immediate past of the American Ethnological Society, the largest organization of cultural anthropologists in the U.S.