Asia

While Tokyo and Seoul are often paired as key U.S. allies in Asia, and both alliances are now more solid than ever, their individual alliance dynamics have varied in important…

On December 28, 2015, the Japanese and South Korean governments announced their agreement on the “comfort women” issue. This sudden breakthrough 70 years after the end of WWII and 24…

Most analysis of the extended nuclear crisis that first broke in 2002 has focused, quite legitimately, on the realm of high politics: the diplomatic and military strategies of the contending…

China-North Korea trade accounts for the majority of North Korea’s international trade and is considered significant for the economic development and social stability of North Korea. Due to the fourth…

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…

During the week from May 28 to June 2, North Korea released over 1,000 large balloons across the demilitarized zone (DMZ) into South Korea. The balloons carried payloads of manure, cigarette butts, used batteries, cloth and plastic fragments, and lots of scrap paper (including used toilet paper). One report said that even dirty diapers were…

Questions of whether the K-pop market has peaked are hardly new. Concerns about market oversaturation have been raised since the inception of the third generation in 2012 when the number of groups that debuted annually more than tripled. New bands from industry powerhouses are not making the expected impact in sales, and there has been…

The Ninth Korea-Japan-China Trilateral Leader Summit, hosted in Seoul on May 27, marked the first meeting since the annual event went on hiatus after 2019. Amidst a shifting global economic order, its proclamations affirmed continued trade relations with China by Korea and Japan and brought a new sense of dynamism to economic cooperation among the…

The semi-annual OECD Economic Outlook released in May projects that global GDP growth will remain around 3 percent in 2024 and 2025, shown below in Figure 1. The report’s outlook reflects the continued impact of tight monetary conditions. Nevertheless, the report cites several positive trends, such as falling inflation and improving private-sector confidence. With unemployment…