KEI Contributor – Mark Tokola

This article was published in United States Institute of Peace on March 25, 2024. The September 13, 2023, meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un in Russia’s Amur Oblast marked a…

KEI’s Vice President  Mark Tokola was interviewed on VOA’s Washington Talk. This interview was published on June 10, 2023. https://keia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/01000000-0a00-0242-e308-08db6945ecad_Trim.mp4   To watch the full clip on VOA, please click here.…

Directly addressing the question of how the U.S. government should respond to China’s hostile economic behaviors, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola published an op-ed on National Interest that outlines how…

In his latest column for the Asia Times, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola notes that there are four assumptions that underpin the U.S. approach to North Korea. There is a…

Does the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, have a foreign policy, not least of all inclusive of the vital Northeast Asian region? The question is not…

With an outbreak of diplomacy under way for the Korean Peninsula, a review of North Korea’s approach to negotiations is timely. A summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and…

For the proverbial visitor from Mars, the political situation in Northeast Asia is inexplicable. Sitting amidst a group of relatively stable, wealthy, and powerful countries, is a small, poor, belligerent…

Today’s relationship between the United States and China is more varied, complex, and cooperative than the accumulation of headlines would lead one to believe. The news media and commentators spotlight…

By Mark Tokola Paul-Henri Spaak, the post-war Belgian statesman who served both as one of the founders of the European Union and as Secretary-General of NATO, wrote in his memoirs that “one must also desire the consequences of what one desires.”  In other words, you shouldn’t complain about the foreseeable outcomes of your actions.  One…

By Mark Tokola On Thursday, July 25, North Korea launched two, (reportedly) short-range, missiles into the sea west of Japanese waters. News reports say that they traveled to distances of 430 and 690 kilometers, and flew low, no higher than 50 kilometers in altitude. Some analysts believe that the projectiles were part of North Korea’s…

By Mark Tokola The breakdown of the February Hanoi summit meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un left the problem of how and when to restart the negotiation process.  One drawback to a ‘top down’ approach is that there is no assurance that the two sides will meet again without a change of circumstances, i.e.…

By Mark Tokola Chalkboards (aka blackboards) had a pretty good run in classroom use from 1814 until whiteboards began to replace them beginning in the 1960’s.  The main place you see them these days is in restaurants, although if you look closely you’ll see that many of their ‘chalkboard’ menus are actually painted fakes.  Most…