Why South Korea Cannot Reach Carbon Neutrality on Renewables Alone
South Korea’s 2035 Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2025, sets a target of reducing…
South Korea Wants to Be a NATO Partner, Not Just a Vendor
South Korea is now the second-largest arms supplier to NATO’s European members, but the sales remain a series of bilateral transactions rather than incorporated within…
The U.S.-Saudi Nuclear Deal Is a Test Case for South Korean Uranium Enrichment
On July 22, the United States and Saudi Arabia signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement. However, the future of the agreement became uncertain the following day when President…
Betting on the Future: Prediction Markets, Cryptocurrency, and South Korean Law
South Korea’s first criminal investigation of prediction market users has set the state’s instinct to police gambling against its ambition to lead in digital assets….
What the San Francisco AI Summit Means for U.S.-Korea Tech Cooperation
The AI summit that South Korean President Lee Jae Myung convenes in San Francisco tomorrow is organized around two major growth drivers of the global…
Explaining South Korea’s Stock Market Boom
The KOSPI, South Korea’s benchmark stock market index, nearly doubled during the first half of 2026, the largest increase in the world (Figure 1, Panel…
The Trump Effect on South Korea-Japan Relations
The August 2023 U.S.-South Korea-Japan trilateral summit at Camp David provided powerful impetus for Seoul and Tokyo to restore warm ties, an undertaking initiated by…
South Korea Is Building for the Alliance and for Itself
The United States and South Korea describe the latter’s defense buildup with the same enthusiasm but mean two different things. American officials call it “alliance…
Digital Campaigns and the Reach of South Korea’s Gender Ministry
This essay was part of a contest jointly organized by the Institute for Korean Studies at George Washington University and the Institute for Korean Studies…
Iran’s Bargaining Card That North Korea Never Had
Last week, the United States and Iran concluded a memorandum of understanding (MOU), ending nearly four months of conflict and bringing the two countries back to the…