United States of America

Trade ties between the United States and many East Asian countries have faced a high degree of uncertainty since Donald Trump took office in early 2017. The world is now…

During his visit to Asia in November 2017, President Donald Trump announced his vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” as the U.S. approach to the region. The Department of…

Beef trade was a major sticking point between the United States and South Korea in ratifying the KORUS FTA. The outcome of the renegotiations that led to the March 2018…

The sudden announcement of a North Korea-U.S. summit in March 2018 upended all previous diplomacy concerning North Korea’s nuclear program. In return for a bilateral presidential summit, Pyongyang has agreed…

What Happened On February 2, Chairman of ROK Joint Chiefs of Staff Won In-choul and U.S. General Mark Milley pledged to continue the process of transferring wartime operational control (OPCON) to South Korea. South Korea’s Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon also recently reaffirmed that OPCON transfer will happen once the ROK military meets the designated conditions, and that…

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,…

Throughout the course of roughly a century since Koreans initially migrated to the United States, only two Koreans were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1992, Jay Kim became the very first Korean American to serve in Congress. Almost three decades later in 2018, incumbent Andy Kim became the second Korean American to…

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.