Asia

North Korea has recently shown signs of rapprochement with the outside world by agreeing to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula at the six-party talks. The changing dynamics of the…

Data from 2004 show the grain harvest in North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; DPRK) consisted of a bit more than 4.4 million tons. A nationwide campaign was announced…

A controversy has arisen over entrenched regionalism in Korean politics and its resolution. There are basically two opposing views: One is the top-down institutional approach that emphasizes reforms in the…

Social change may be evolutionary or revolutionary or, at times, both. Similarly, administrations may be caught up in and attempt to manage change, or institute it, or both. Although there…

For many years, South Korea has been a homogeneous country. But with more foreigners coming to live in Korea, that is starting to change. In fact, the Korea Institute for…

In early July, the United States and South Korea announced that they had come to an agreement to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system near the city…

With Election 2016 well underway, KEI's very own Phil Eskeland has been closely following how both the Republican and Democratic parties have been talking about foreign policy and Asia. He…

In the late 1930s, nearly 200,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly removed from the Soviet Far East, packed into trains and sent to Central Asia. More than 70 years later, their…

On May 28, 2025, the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) issued a permanent injunction against wide-sweeping tariffs imposed by the Donald Trump administration using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which included universal and reciprocal tariffs announced on “Liberation Day” as well as fentanyl-related tariffs. The CIT’s three-judge panel held that the U.S.…

There is ample public opinion data suggesting a link between U.S. attitudes on trade and trade partners. Recent poll results show that Americans favor trade with countries like China less than with allies like South Korea and Japan. One consideration appears to be how Americans think about trade within the broader context of national security.…

The United States and South Korea scored nearly identical GDP results in the first quarter of 2025 according to newly updated but still preliminary data. Both showed slightly negative change from the fourth quarter of 2024; the United States declining at a negative 0.2 percent rate and South Korea at a negative 0.8 percent rate,…

After months of political uncertainty, South Korea has a new president. Lee Jae-myung, the former mayor of a wealthy Seoul satellite city who leveraged that experience into a governorship of the country’s most populous province and chairmanship of the Democratic Party (DP), won a decisive 49.4-percent victory over the ruling party’s leading candidate. Lee’s victory…