On 19 March, Imtiaz Muqbil spent a scintillating evening at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) listening to Nirmal Ghosh.
Nirmal Ghosh, 65, is a former foreign correspondent of 30 years for The Straits Times, Singapore’s and South East Asia’s #1 English daily.
Nirmal has been a foreign correspondent in Manila, New Delhi, Bangkok, and Washington, D.C., covering politics, elections, conflict and coups d’etat, natural disasters, social and environmental issues, and geopolitics across Asia and the United States. His journalism has won PANPA and SOPA awards. He was a Jefferson Fellow of the East-West Center (Honolulu, Hawaii) in the summer of 2015 and a Presidential Election Reporting Fellow in the fall of 2016.
Nirmal was a two-term President of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (Focap) and a three-term President of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of Thailand (FCCT).
He is also affiliated with the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. Active in wildlife conservation, he is a Trustee of The Corbett Foundation. This non-profit works with local communities and authorities to enhance wildlife conservation and mitigate human-wildlife conflict across five protected areas in India.
He is also a documentary filmmaker, podcaster, and author of six books, the most recent of which is Backlash: Donald Trump and the Remaking of America.
Keith Richburg, a former foreign correspondent with the Washington Post, joined him. Moderator Dominic Faulder of Nikkei Asian Review introduced the panel with a surprise guest, Steve Herman, chief national affairs correspondent for the Voice of America, who has just become a victim of the shutdown of the US radio service.
Steve Herman, formerly White House Bureau Chief, is now VOA’s Chief National Correspondent.
Herman spent over a quarter of a century in Asia, including years of reporting from Tokyo and subsequently as a VOA correspondent and bureau chief in India, Korea, and Thailand. Herman also served in 2016 as VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, based at the State Department. His travels have taken him to approximately 75 countries, including on-scene reporting from combat zones, civil uprisings, and significant natural disasters.
The veteran journalist has appeared frequently on TV and radio networks, including VOA affiliates, in Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. His articles, columns, and reviews have been published in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Harvard Summer Review, Japan Quarterly, Japan Times, On the Air, Popular Communications, Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute), Radio World, Shukan Bunshun, Shukan Gendai, South China Morning Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and professional conferences in the United States and abroad.
Herman is a former president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan and the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club. He previously served a two-year term as a Governor of the Overseas Press Club of America. Herman is the broadcast vice president for the Washington, DC, chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association and the U.S. Agency for Global Media representative on the governing board of the American Foreign Service Association.
My core takeaway from the discussion is that the “Land of the Free” is all but Dead. The “Land of Fear” is here, probably to stay.
Published in January 2025, the month of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Ghosh’s book is about the “Remaking of America.”
Since January 2025, the staccato of unfolding events has reflected an “Unmaking of America,” with ominous implications for democracy, human rights, freedom, and justice worldwide.
If the United States, the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” can dismantle the pillars of everything it has held sacred, so can other countries. With the Donald Trump regime only three months into its four-year term, all those who stand for democracy, human rights, freedom, and justice need to start thinking long and hard about the implications of that.
The FCCT discussion has set that ball rolling.
Mr. Herman said he was accused of “treason” by a high-ranking official who dug up one of his comments on the USAID shutdown and told that as a “foreign service officer,” he had to parrot the party line. He described how suspending the multi-language radio service would impact communities worldwide, particularly in many repressive regimes.
He said the atmosphere in Washington DC was “sadness, resignation and a little bit of paranoia.” There is also a perception of a “chilling effect” due to narrowing the space for free speech.
In his opening comments and responses to questions, Mr. Ghosh said the United States is experiencing an “unimaginable toxic divide.”
“If you look at the data from internet dating sites, you find that increasingly fewer and fewer people want to meet and date someone with opposing political views.
So this divide is just getting more acute. While I think America is not about to erupt into civil war tomorrow, and I think some people like predicting it’s a terminal decline, I think it would be a fatal mistake to write it off. I think the potential for more violence is becoming more and more accurate and more acute now.”
He outlined how the political perspectives are now split between “patriots” and “traitors.”
Economically, too, the rich-poor income gap is growing with high levels of poverty in a country that has more billionaires than any other.
Mr. Ghosh talked about the implications of the rise of “straight, white, Christian nationalism.” He noted that the anti-immigrant actions are rooted in demographic studies showing that the US white population will become a minority by 2045. He pointed out how the US had swung from electing its first Black President in 2008 and again in 2012, which was supposed to mark the start of a new era, but now, just 12 years later, has swung in the other direction.
The mainstream media’s role has diminished as attention spans shorten and people seek simple answers to complex questions. Mr. Ghosh narrated his experiences covering political rallies where people would warily ask him if he was also speaking “to the other side” and becoming more open and relaxed after being told he was reporting for a foreign newspaper in Singapore.
Mr. Richburg asked, “Do they even know where Singapore is?”
Mr. Ghosh noted the ineffectiveness of the protest movements, not just currently but dating back to the anti-globalization protests of 1999 in Seattle, the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003, and more recently, the Occupy Wall Street protests. The anti-Israel protests in the universities are facing the same fate.
Warning about the rise of McCarthyism, he said, “I don’t think we learn much from history, unfortunately, and history just keeps repeating itself. I think McCarthyism is a good thing to keep in mind, seeing what we are seeing now.”