KEI Contributor – Mark Tokola

On February 14, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola was quoted in several print and broadcast news outlets in South Korea regarding the assassination of Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia. The quotes…

On February 14, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola was quoted in an Associated Press story about the assassination of Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia. The quotes were based on Mark's analysis…

A February 6th article by the Observor cites KEI Vice President Mark Tokola, who noted that North Korean can still incur heavy losses on South Korea and Japan even without…

On October 28, online news site the Observer ran a story about the North Korean nuclear threat and quoted KEI Vice President Mark Tokola. The story, which was titled "Can…

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…