Asia

For Southeast Asia, the COVID-19 pandemic was not only a public health crisis. It also provided an occasion for China to deepen its engagement in the region by dint of…

COVID-19 has not gone away, and observers are now discussing possible long-term effects of the pandemic, including on geopolitics. A report by the European Parliament discussed five COVID-generated factors that…

The coronavirus pandemic that struck in late 2019 has affected the world profoundly, and Japan is no exception. But the direct impact on Japan has been relatively small considering the…

The national identity gap between China and the United States has become increasingly apparent. Under Xi Jinping, China has sought to reclaim its historical greatness and proclaimed itself to be…

Despite all the attention around the upcoming second summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, we in the United States still know very little about North Korea, its people, and…

As we approach the second US-DPRK Summit, the media in the United States is so focused on the dynamics between President Trump and Kim Jong-un that the interests and motivations…

When people talk about South Korea’s foreign policy, they are more often than not focused on how Seoul engages with its immediate neighbors on denuclearization. However, as a global trading…

Amid the maelstrom of the drama around diplomacy with North Korean, it’s easy to forget that South Korea and the United States are engaged in a fairly serious trade dispute…

By Jenna Gibson For South Korean children, studying abroad and mastering English used to be the key to success, prompting waves of students to head overseas for their diplomas. Now, South Korea is the third largest source of international students studying in the United States, behind only China and India. But this trend may be…

By Phil Eskeland Commentators on both sides of the political spectrum have used North Korea and Iran interchangeably to buttress their position on the negotiations to corral Iran’s nuclear weapons ambition.  Some argue that the Iran deal will not work just like the 1994 nuclear deal with North Korea.  Others argue that the Iranian deal…

By Mark Tokola Short conversations about North Korea generally end with similar conclusions: it is too soon to tell whether Kim Jong-un has successfully entrenched himself; the North Korean economy whether by design or necessity has introduced some market elements; China is growing impatient with North Korea’s unpredictability and belligerency; and Kim Jung-un’s regime is…

By Mark Tokola People who have worked on policy towards North Korea for some time often remark that nothing really changes: the DPRK’s weapons programs progress, gross human rights violations continue, bad crop years are met with international appeals for food assistance, acts of aggression against South Korea occur periodically, and North Korean propaganda threatens…