1985 Posts located
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…
Korea and Japan are two key allies of the United States in East Asia. These two countries are “window models” of postwar democratization and economic advancement in a free world.…
On 19 October 1983 in Kim Jong-il’s office at the Central Party Building in Pyongyang, a private conversation took place between Kim and two South Korean filmmakers: director Shin Sang-ok…
The world can only hope the recent U.S.-North Korean bilateral discussions will revive the six-power talks and lead to Pyongyang’s renunciation of its nuclear weapons ambitions. Hope, however, is not…
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 –…
By Phil Eskeland Recently, there has been some discussion among certain opinion makers in the United States claiming that the U.S. bears all the burden in defending allies against potential North Korean aggression. Currently, the U.S. has approximately 28,500 troops stationed on the Korean peninsula. Many other U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region participate in…
With the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II over the weekend, KEI takes a look back at what has changed on the Korean Peninsula from the 1945 to today. The three boxes compare a unified peninsula before the Korean War to North and South Korea in the 2010s. By looking at GDP,…
By Troy Stangarone In the pantheon of executions, one would not expect to see a niche devoted to disagreements over forestry policy, which makes the news that Vice Premier Choe Yong-gon was executed by Kim Jong-un for a disagreement over reforesting North Korea and poor job performance such a perplexing development. Executions of high level…
By Nicholas Hamisevicz When it’s a hot summer day in July, one often has to make the strategic calculation of what particular circumstances would require one to leave the friendly confines of a place with working air conditioning. Similarly, it seemed the two Koreas were only going to deal with each other during July under…