United States of America

Adhering to the action-for-action framework of the February 13, 2007 agreement, North Korea and the United States traded symbolic actions last week that grabbed the headlines—explosive video footage of North…

For Korea watchers—and particularly for those of us who worked closely on events associated with President Lee’s visit to Washington—April was a very rewarding month. After multiple protocol meetings, site…

KEI recently completed its seventeenth annual Ambassadors’ Dialogue program. The tour was the third featuring Lee Tae-sik, the Republic of Korea’s Ambassador to the United States, and Alexander Vershbow, United…

On September 20, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) released its report on the KORUS FTA. The ITC study is a required analysis under Trade Promotion Authority that explores the…

By Robert R. King BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) has just released an excellent report on the trafficking of North Korean defectors:  “The North Korean women who had to escape twice” by BBC Korea editor Su-Min Hwang.  The report gives first-hand details of North Korean defectors in China who were trafficked and provides an account of…

By Juni Kim At approximately 7:20 a.m. on January 2nd, a minor 2.8 magnitude earthquake was detected by seismologists close to the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea. Although the last nuclear test occurred in September 2017, Woo Nam-cheol, the Korean Meteorological Administration’s geological analyst in South Korea, attributed the quake to the after-effects…

By Troy Stangarone If 2017 was the year of “fire and fury,” 2018 saw the United States and North Korea turn from the rhetoric of war to diplomacy as U.S. President Donald Trump met North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un at the first ever U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore. If 2018 was the year the diplomacy…

By Yonho Kim North Korea’s transportation system traditionally centered around the railway, as Kim Il-sung, the founder of the communist state, stated: “Railways are the arteries of the country.” However, with the economic crisis in the 1990s, the railway system was no longer able to properly function due to a lack of energy and deterioration…

Please join KEI and KIEP for a discussion about the first 10 years of KORUS and the future of the U.S.-Korea economic relationship.