Asia

Given the growing importance of East Asia to global stability and prosperity, sustaining the five U.S. treaty alliances in the region—Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines—will…

On 30 June 2007, U.S. and South Korean trade officials signed the U.S.- Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA). The two countries reached the agreement after 10 months of very…

On 1 April 2007 Korea and the United States finally completed their year-long negotiations to conclude the Korea- U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), which was then signed by the…

President Lee Myung-bak won a landslide victory in 2007. His popularity before the election was obvious, and it came as a surprise to almost no one that he won by…

2018 has been an incredibly eventful year for both the Koreas and the U.S.-Korea relationship: from North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics at the start of the year to…

Interest in the Korean peninsula is generally very narrow in the United States – it tends to be focused on North Korea and security issues, particularly the country's ballistic and…

Last Friday, on November 30, 2018, President George H.W. Bush passed away. In the days that followed, there were many discussions in the foreign policy community about the late president's…

What does a unified Korea look like? Beyond the question of whether the government of this new country will be a unitary or federal one, how will the people –…

Korea’s healthcare spending in 2000 was the lowest among the 38 OECD countries at less than 4 percent of GDP, reflecting the country’s relatively young population and the limited coverage of its National Health Insurance (NHI). However, adjusted for inflation, healthcare spending grew at an annual rate of 7.7 percent from 2000 to 2022, the…

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol offered a dramatically different vision of Korean unification in his Liberation Day speech on August 15, an annual observance in South Korea that marks the end of Japanese colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula. In his speech, President Yoon framed unification as completing the unfinished task of liberation and the…

The transformation of relations between South Korea and Japan during the past two-plus years is one of the signal accomplishments of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. However, there remain doubts over the durability of this achievement. A troubling question remains whether the historical past of Japan’s colonial rule over Korea will again roil relations. The ongoing…

US-South Korea-Japan trilateral cooperation has been on an upswing since the Spirit of Camp David joint statement, published after US President Joe Biden hosted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio at the eponymous presidential retreat in August 2023. “We commit to expand our cooperation trilaterally and raise our shared…