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…

North Korea was the first country to severely restrict travel and trade across its borders when the pandemic began in 2020. While the rest of the world has since largely returned to normal, many of North Korea’s COVID restrictions remained in place at the beginning of 2023. However, Pyongyang began to ease these constraints in…

At the end of August, U.S. officials at the United Nations headquarters in New York and White House officials in Washington cited intelligence reports that Moscow was seeking weapons and ammunition from North Korea.  Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, stated that “Russia is negotiating potential deals…

The 18 August 2023 summit that brought together the leaders of Japan, South Korea and the United States at Camp David was rightly hailed as a breakthrough moment in consolidating trilateral security ties, especially after years of near-frozen relations. US officials stressed the importance of creating enduring institutions and structures among the three countries. These…

In August, President Yoon Suk Yeol and Prime Minister Kishida Fumio held their first standalone U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral summit with President Joe Biden. At the conclusion of this historic meeting, the leaders unveiled the “Spirit of Camp David” which described their desire to advanced closer trilateral coordination to address regional and global challenges. “We’ve laid in…