This Thanksgiving essay was originally written for the Huffington Post.

In Tokyo for a couple of days, and this was a pretty nice way to get acclimated when I arrived. Beautiful gardens here outside my window. North Korea’s leaders need to spend some time in gardens like these — and cool out a bit.

This is a guest post by Anya Landau French, who directs the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note.

This is a guest post by Sean Kay. He is professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University and an associate at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University.

It’s good to go back every once in a while and get a refresher course on high octane Chalmers Johnson.

Next week, Foreign Policy magazine and its editor-in-chief Susan Glasser will be releasing its 2nd annual roster of the world’s greatest thinkers and doers in foreign policy. I have seen the list — and it’s impressively creative and eclectic.

This is a guest note by Leo Hindery, Jr. Hindery is Chairman of the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently an investor in media companies, he is the former CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), Liberty Media and their successor AT&T Broadband.

I have been chatting up Pete Dominick on his Sirius/XM program Stand up with Pete Dominick for a long time, but I never had any idea what the guy looked like. Same with Rachel Maddow for years until we finally met at the Democratic National Convention.

A handful of newly elected Republican US Senators have written to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trying to undo the Constitutional authority of other elected incumbent US Senators. That’s right.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar is on fire — telling his colleagues that the failure to ratify START will be enormously consequential to the ‘real’ national security interests of the United States.