Foreign Relations

Despite turbulence in its bilateral relations with Japan and South Korea over the past several years, China has expressed a continuing and growing interest in establishing a trilateral China-Japan-Korea free…

As with many complex situations, any effort to address the question of how competing regional interests would play out in response to Korean reunification begins with “it depends.”1 Countless reunification…

The Park Geun-hye administration’s foreign policy/North Korean policy keyword is “trust,” which is intended to be the base on which to build a “New Korean Peninsula” and a new order…

The reunification of the Korean Peninsula has been an important aspiration of the Korean people on both sides of the 38th parallel for nearly six decades. The emotional family reunions…

March saw President Yoon Suk Yeol make significant efforts to realize his campaign goal of rehabilitating relations with Japan. After a trip to Tōkyō to meet with Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, the president told his Cabinet that the two countries must look towards the future. “Korea-Japan relations can and must be a win-win relationship that…

The OECD’s March Interim Economic Outlook projects that Korea’s real GDP will increase by 1.6% in 2023, matching the Bank of Korea’s February forecast. The new projection is a slight downward revision from the OECD’s November 2022 outlook in the context of below-trend global economic growth. The impact of the war in Ukraine and high…

The Tokyo summit that brought together South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on 23 March 2023 successfully cleared away much of the accumulated debris of the last five years of dysfunctionality. The two-day official visit — the first by a South Korean president in a dozen years — checked off…

I’m currently completing a book on North Korea watchers - the community of scholars, analysts, government officers, NGO advocates and journalists who, for one reason or another, commit a portion of their lives to watching North Korea. After twenty-five years in government, academia and consultancy, with much of my time working on Korean Peninsula affairs,…