KEI Contributor – Mark Tokola

On October 19, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola will visit Columbus, Georgia. There, he will be the featured speaker at Columbus State University's Hallock Speaker Series, where he will discuss North…

Several Korean news sources cited a blog by KEI Vice President Mark Tokola entitled "Why is China So Upset about THAAD?" originally published on August 30. Yonhap News, the Korea…

KEI Vice President Mark Tokola was recently published in The Korea Times. Tokola, who served in the U.S. foreign service in both Seoul and London, wrote an editorial on Brexit…

On May 3, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola was quoted in a news broadcast on Korea's Arirang TV. In the story, Asisstant Secretary of State Daniel Russel reiterated the US…

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 Why won’t North Korea admit that it has any cases of Covid-19? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs continues to assert that North Korea is “a clean land” with no coronavirus infections. This strikes outside observers as extremely unlikely, given the large number of cases in neighboring China and South Korea. Furthermore, North…

By Mark Tokola Genron NPO, a Japanese non-profit organization, released the results of an opinion survey in October 2019 that focusses on Japanese and Chinese perspectives of one another, but which also includes some nuggets about how the two countries perceive South Korea.  The survey was conducted by the Public Opinion Research Center in Japan…

By Mark Tokola The Trump Administration’s precipitous decision to remove American troops from Northeast Syria, where they had been allied with Kurdish forces in opposing ISIS, and had been deterring Turkish forces from attacking the Kurds, raises questions regarding the wisdom of relying on the United States.  Of course, the U.S. commitment to have forces…

By Mark Tokola The American foreign policy community—official and unofficial—is impatient with the current dispute between South Korea and Japan, which began as a trade dispute but has now broadened with Korea’s cancellation of an intelligence-sharing agreement, the GSOMIA (General Security of Military Information Agreement).  South Korea and Japan are U.S. allies, both face common…