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Mark Tokola is Vice President of the Korea Economic Institute of America in Washington, DC. He retired as a U.S. Senior Foreign Service Officer with the rank of Minister-Counselor in September 2014. His last posting was as Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at US Embassy London. Previously he had served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassies in Seoul, Republic of Korea; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; and, Reykjavik, Iceland. Among his other postings were two tours at the US Mission to the European Union in Brussels, Minister-Counselor for Economic Affairs at Embassy London, and Economic Counselor at US Embassy The Hague. He also served as Director of the Iraq Transition Assistance Office (ITAO) in Baghdad from 2007-2008. Mr Tokola received the State Department’s Superior Honor Award for his work on implementing the Dayton Peace Accords while serving as Political Counselor in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1997-1999. He holds a BA in International Relations from Pomona College in Claremont, California, and an LL.M. in European Community Law from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Mr. Tokola serves on the Board of Governors of DACOR: An Organization of Foreign Affairs Professionals, and on the Board of Trustees of the Bacon House Foundation.
Mr. Tokola’s spouse is Dr. Nancy S. Tokola, a physician who graduated from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She holds post-doctoral degrees from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) in Medical and Pharmaceutical Research and from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) in Humanitarian Action. She was the first American recipient of a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship. Mr. and Dr. Tokola have four children.
Where in the world is Kim Jong-un? The dictator of North Korea who appears so fond of being filmed and photographed has disappeared from sight – and there are rumors…
On January 27, the South Korean government in concert with private biotech companies went into overdrive to produce effective testing kits for the coronavirus. There were at the time 4…
This article was published in United States Institute of Peace on March 25, 2024. The September 13, 2023, meeting between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un in Russia’s Amur Oblast marked a…
KEI’s Vice President Mark Tokola was interviewed on VOA’s Washington Talk. This interview was published on June 10, 2023. https://keia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/01000000-0a00-0242-e308-08db6945ecad_Trim.mp4 To watch the full clip on VOA, please click here.…
Directly addressing the question of how the U.S. government should respond to China’s hostile economic behaviors, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola published an op-ed on National Interest that outlines how…
In his latest column for the Asia Times, KEI Vice President Mark Tokola notes that there are four assumptions that underpin the U.S. approach to North Korea. There is a…
Does the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, have a foreign policy, not least of all inclusive of the vital Northeast Asian region? The question is not…
With an outbreak of diplomacy under way for the Korean Peninsula, a review of North Korea’s approach to negotiations is timely. A summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and…
For the proverbial visitor from Mars, the political situation in Northeast Asia is inexplicable. Sitting amidst a group of relatively stable, wealthy, and powerful countries, is a small, poor, belligerent…
Today’s relationship between the United States and China is more varied, complex, and cooperative than the accumulation of headlines would lead one to believe. The news media and commentators spotlight…
This is the second in a 10 part series looking at how the issues identified in KEI’s annual “10 Issues to Watch for on the Korean Peninsula” series developed in 2021. The original “10 Issues” piece can be found here. Although it is commonly understood that the Biden Administration carried out a policy review regarding…
We were reminded last year that it can be difficult to anticipate the events that will dominate any given year. As 2020 began, few people expected focus of the world or the Korean Peninsula to be on a global pandemic, but that is how the year unfolded. South Korea has handled the pandemic relatively well…
It seems unlikely that there will be any diplomatic breakthroughs with North Korea during the remainder of 2020 unless Kim Jong-un unexpectedly launches a major initiative involving tangible concessions. Donald Trump has little to gain from another summit unless it achieved something dramatic and concrete. Kim Jong-un would be wary of any new deal with…
By Mark Tokola Why won’t North Korea admit that it has any cases of Covid-19? The Ministry of Foreign Affairs continues to assert that North Korea is “a clean land” with no coronavirus infections. This strikes outside observers as extremely unlikely, given the large number of cases in neighboring China and South Korea. Furthermore, North…
Please join KEI and Park Won-ho for a discussion on what South Korean politics look like at a sub-national level.