Modest South West Asians, the Great Game through time, Japanese irony, Korean revisionism, pandering pandas, the collapse of Nepal, America’s friend Vietnam, and more, on today’s Daily Linklets.

Let’s just say that the more I read Kaplan, the less impressed I am with him. I just read An Empire Wilderness. Much of it was good, but he sure managed to find a lot of people who take Cascadia really seriously. Maybe they pulled the wool over his eyes, but I’m amazed he believed them.

Just for the record, I would like to know who Mr. Kaplan’s supplier is. Sounds like he’s got a good one. I’ll read the article at some point, but this strikes me as flat out nuts. Maybe he’s got some extraordinary evidence to back it up, but if I wanted to go out on a limb and talk about sections of Uzbekistan falling to the influence of an East Asian country, that country would be South Korea.

It’s important to remember that in Uzbekistan Kitaiskiy (Chinese) means “absolute, low-rent, piece of crap,” that if one finds the Chinese subtle and sly, they obviously haven’t been fleeced by an Uzbek, and that a major source of frustration in Kyrgyzstan’s protests against Akayev was the perception that China had too much influence. If the Kyrgyz got bent out of shape because Akayev made territorial concessions to China, I’d hate to see how the Uzbeks would react to noticeable Chinese influence.

That being said, we both agree on the importance of engagement, but apparently for different reasons.