KEI Contributor – Mark Tokola

TV Chosun quoted KEI Vice President Mark Tokola in a recent broadcast on the topic of North Korea's Party Congress. The broadcast quoted Tokola as saying that the DPRK will…

On May 3, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola wrote a blog article entitled "A Watcher’s Guide to the Seventh DPRK Party Congress," which discussed the upcoming Worker's Party Congress in…

On February 22, German news outlet Deusche Welle published an article entitled "Can the latest US sanctions against North Korea work?" In it, they quote KEI Vice President Mark Tokola…

In June 2015, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola participated in the Salzburg Global Seminar's symposium entitled "International Responses to Crimes Against Humanity: The Challenge of North Korea," part of the Salzburg Initiative…

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…