U.S. Foreign Policy

Seoul has gradually adopted a more outspoken position regarding the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and framed it in increasingly expansive terms—as a regional and global…

The development of the concept of the Indo-Pacific strategy, since its adoption by the United States in 2017, has primarily been driven by the emergence of China as an object…

In 2020, Xi Jinping was on a roll. Donald Trump had left U.S. alliances in disarray and the home front in discord, unable even to unite against a pandemic. U.S.…

What Happened On February 2, Chairman of ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff Won In-choul and U.S. General Mark Milley pledged to continue the process of transferring wartime operational control (OPCON) to South Korea. South Korea’s Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon also recently reaffirmed that OPCON transfer will happen once the ROK military meets the designated conditions, and that…

On January 11, the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) published a report on the future of the U.S.-Korea relationship with recommendations from leading American scholars and policy practitioners. The report comes from six "Vision Group" roundtable conversations that KEI hosted between December 2019 and November 2020 with the support of the Korea Foundation. During these meetings,…

We were reminded last year that it can be difficult to anticipate the events that will dominate any given year. As 2020 began, few people expected focus of the world or the Korean Peninsula to be on a global pandemic, but that is how the year unfolded. South Korea has handled the pandemic relatively well…

By Terrence Matsuo Last month, President Donald Trump announced his intention to invite several guests to the G7 Summit later this year. The unexpected inclusion of South Korea in the upcoming G7 summit may provide Seoul with an opportunity to advance its foreign policy aims, which recently have been constrained by growing tensions between the…