Foreign Relations

What Happened On April 5, North Korea delivered on a North Korean promise. It launched a long range missile, also known as a Taepo-dong 2, a 3-stage rocket, in the…

Eyes and ears were on Beijing earlier this month, as the chief negotiators from China, North Korea, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States met in Beijing for a…

Korea has once again been threatened by financial contagion that started in another country. In 1997, it began with Thai baht; this time, the trouble started on Wall Street. Since…

Black September, Meltdown Monday, America’s Financial 9/11, Financial Tsunami, Perfect Storm, worse financial crisis since the Great Depression 1929… Whatever the term used, recent events on Wall Street will certainly…

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…