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…

In 2001, Senator Joe Biden became Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  At the time, I was Chief of Staff for Congressman Tom Lantos of California, who had just became Ranking Democratic Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier that same year.  Before Lantos’ election to Congress, he had spent a few years…

By Juni Kim Next week’s U.S. presidential election has, to put it mildly, significant implications for the future of U.S.-Korea relations. The Trump administration’s aggressive approach to rethinking U.S. alliances has unnerved longstanding allies like South Korea. The last four years saw the renegotiation of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, U.S. demands for South Korea…

By Mark Tokola On October 10, 2020, North Korea celebrated the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP).  The Pyongyang event featured a military parade and a speech by Kim Jong-un.  The parade had been years in the making and featured everything from matching white horses (reportedly imported from Russia) to…

By Stephan Haggard If you read the media coverage of North Korea’s “military parade,” you would be justified in thinking it was just that. However, the event marked the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Korean Workers Party, not the Korean People’s Army. Indeed, the highly choreographed display is designed to show that the…

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