Korea, North

What if our understanding of North Korea is inadvertently colored by the very resources that we rely on to deepen our knowledge of the country? What does this say about our policies…

Even before the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, foreign policy practitioners and observers were talking about the difficulties of sequencing international sanctions relief for North Korea…

We imagine North Korea as a country that is carrying on not only a conflict left over from the Cold War, but also a decrepit legacy economy from the past.…

The second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on February 27 and 28 ended without an agreement. The key difference in the two leaders’ negotiating…

Joseph Biden will be inaugurated on Wednesday, 20 January, bringing the Trump era to an end. Under the 45th president, American alliances faced significant stress from his skepticism of multilateralism and preference for transactional agreements. The U.S.-ROK alliance was no different, with friction arising between Seoul and Washington from time to time. As the Biden…

On January 11, the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) published a report on the future of the U.S.-Korea relationship with recommendations from leading American scholars and policy practitioners. The report comes from six "Vision Group" roundtable conversations that KEI hosted between December 2019 and November 2020 with the support of the Korea Foundation. During these meetings,…

On January 9, the DPRK’s Permanent Mission to the UN sent out a press release reproducing a portion of a much longer report that North Korean media sources had released on the first days of the Party Congress. It appeared to contain a mildly hopeful message, taking note of the Singapore summit declaration that “assures…

With Joe Biden headed to the White House, North Korea watchers are speculating how the incoming administration will deal with this long-standing foreign policy irritant. One place to look for cues is to review the spate of Obama-era memoirs to outline his administration’s first year with North Korea. In Part 1 and Part 2, I…

Please join KEI for a discussion on North Korea’s potential incorporation of AI into its cyber arsenal.