KEI Contributor – Mark Tokola

Writing for the Nikkei, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola highlighted how President Moon Jae-in defied expectations in his speech commemorating Korea's liberation from Japan in 1945 by offering a vision…

Mark Tokola, Korea Economic Institute of America vice president, discusses the trade dispute between Japan and South Korea with Bloomberg's Shery Ahn and Paul Allen on "Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia." In…

KEI Vice President Mark Tokola appeared on Russia-langauge news network RTVI to provide analysis of the last Trump-Kim Summit in DMZ. Despite the criticism, Tokola noted that the meeting was…

After the meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump at the DMZ on June 30, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola was invited to ABC News to discuss its implications. In…

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 There were startling headlines on March 6 that North Korea is prepared to enter into talks, to freeze its nuclear and missile testing, and is willing to abandon its nuclear weapons.  This would be welcome news, but of course there are caveats and questions.  The first caveat is that this is North…

By Mark Tokola The Trump Administration announced a new set of economic sanctions against North Korea on February 23, which senior administration officials have described as the “largest ever tranche.”  Rather than being a grab bag of measures, they are tightly focused on cracking down on North Korean maritime activities that the regime is attempting…

By Mark Tokola Similar to the U.S. “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service has published its 2018 report, “International Security and Estonia.”  It is an estimable report because, as Bloomberg reports, the Estonians have rich insights on Russia.  The report also has…

By Mark Tokola Foreign affairs commentators and journalists can be depended upon to address two topics: (1) is American influence declining, and (2) are there rifts between America and her allies?  On the former, there is a rich vein of declinism literature, pro and con, going back at least sixty years.  The rift stories generally…