Foreign Relations

This chapter examines the nature and motivations of North Korea’s sharp power toward South Korea. Unlike China or Russia, to secure long-term survival, North Korea ultimately needs cooperation from the…

During his visit to Asia in November 2017, President Donald Trump announced his vision of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” as the U.S. approach to the region. The Department of…

The summit on February 27-28 in Hanoi between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un ended on a sour note, casting doubt on the one-year old diplomatic process that had produced an…

Since the first historic summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last June in Singapore yielded a two-page joint agreement without a clear definition…

On May 2, South Korea and Norway kicked off the annual defense industry cooperation talk in Seoul with a focus on Oslo’s prospective acquisition of Korean tanks. Both players hope to also deepen bilateral and regional cooperation through joint defense research. This is representative of Korea’s broader effort to play a bigger role in the…

Incoming President Yoon Suk-yeol's delegation arrived in Tokyo on April 24 for meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other top officials. Building on Yoon's message of engaging in a "future-oriented" partnership with Washington and Tokyo beyond the Korean Peninsula, the engagement suggested a subtle but important shift in the focus of the trilateral…

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,…