Asia

After the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) is approved by the legislatures of Korea and the United States, it will likely provide a turning point for the countries’ bilateral…

The denuclearization of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) continues to be a source of considerable international concern. Yet, no coherent international framework has emerged to deal with this…

Korea is arguably the premier development success story of the last half century. Despite this success, there has been a nagging sense among many observers that the development of Korea’s…

The unique restriction of a one-time, five-year presidential term in the Republic of Korea (ROK) has often resulted in short-lived changes to the way the nation’s chief executive has staffed…

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…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is having a serious impact on the global economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. After a 3.6% drop in 2020, world GDP rebounded with 6.1% growth in 2021 (Table 1), reflecting progress in controlling the coronavirus and exceptionally strong fiscal and monetary measures to offset the impact of the pandemic. In…

There is a long tradition of considering North Korean leaders’ public appearances as a potential source of information on the regime’s priorities (see for example: Haggard, Herman, and Ryu; Pyo and Hur; Kim and Lee).  We now have ten full years of this data for Kim Jong-un through the South Korea Ministry of Unification portal,…

The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing on April 7 to question President Joseph Biden’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg.  Goldberg is one of four ambassadorial nominees who testified before the Foreign Relations Committee on April 7.  Two of the four nominees, including Goldberg, are senior…

In the 2022 presidential election, the conservative opposition candidate Yoon Suk-yeol won the race with a 0.8% margin. During the campaign, Yoon received endorsements from five former senior military officers who had served in the Moon administration. They attributed the endorsement to “[their] faith in Yoon’s national security policies,” including his controversial remark that Seoul…