Asia

In less than a year, the fate of the six-party talks has swung around from the lowest ebb when North Korea conducted its nuclear test to the current high point…

It may be premature right now to talk about post–free trade agreement (FTA) relations between the United States and Korea. The U.S.-Korea FTA still has some way to go before…

The past decade in the Korea-U.S. alliance relationship has not been smooth. Since the late 1990s, Koreans have been raising issues related to the past or current actions of the…

As the reigning consensus has it, the U.S.-ROK alliance is one of the most successful of its kind in history. The alliance not only succeeded in defending South Korea from…

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 –…

Line, a popular messenger and social media platform in Japan used by around 70 percent of the population, has emerged as the next potential challenge for the fragile relationship between Seoul and Tokyo. Run by Line Yahoo, Line is jointly owned by the South Korean tech company Naver and the Japanese company SoftBank, each holding…

With the dust settling from the South Korean general election, which witnessed the highest voter turnout for a legislative election since 1992, the general consensus from both the left and the right is that the outcome was a significant setback for the ruling People Power Party (PPP) and by extension, President Yoon Suk Yeol. For…

South Korea stands out for its investments in innovation, notably high enrollment rates in tertiary education and large investments in research and development (R&D) and patents. Nevertheless, labor productivity (output per worker) in South Korea was 23 percent below the average among OECD countries in 2021. Strengthening the innovation ecosystem and boosting the return on…

The blatant abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea around 40 years ago continues to be a sensitive and controversial issue for the Japanese government and the Japanese people, as well as a serious obstacle to improved relations between Pyongyang and Tokyo. From about 1977 to 1983, North Korean military and intelligence operatives kidnapped at…