Foreign Relations

Japanese coverage of the diplomacy between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un as well as the broader spectrum of international relations over North Korea has been intensive over the first months…

This chapter provides an overview of Russian expert commentary found in Russia’s media during the run-up to the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi and in its aftermath, covering the period of…

A coherent North Korea strategy must proceed from a theory of North Korean politics, strategy, and decision-making. Structured analytic techniques, particularly the analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH), are instrumental in…

The Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign has led to the imposition of a nearly comprehensive international sanctions regime targeting North Korea and its nuclear weapons program. With negotiations underway, the…

In this series, S. Nathan Park examined the much-caricatured South Korean liberal foreign policy outlook. Far from being “anti-American” and “pro-Pyongyang,” Seoul’s liberal administrations have responded forcefully against provocations from the North and bolstered the alliance with the United States through military deployments abroad and a bilateral free trade agreement. Reflecting their reading of Korea’s…

In the previous article, S. Nathan Park examined how South Korea’s fractious political history birthed the country’s liberals and their foreign policy outlook. He observed that many in DC’s foreign policy circles view liberal administrations as anti-American and submissive to North Korea because the center-left political movement was initially mobilized in opposition to the anti-communist,…

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…

President-elect Yoon Seok-yeol initially announced his plan to dispatch special envoys to only the United States and EU before his inauguration. This excluded China, Japan, and Russia where previous incoming administrations had traditionally deployed representatives. Although additional envoys to Japan and China were ultimately announced after criticism from the former UN Secretary-General, the incident may…