The United States has basically thrown up its hands in the current crisis with North Korea. Washington has mounted an aggressive campaign at the UN to further isolate the world’s noisiest nuclear aspirant. But no one thinks that UN actions will have much effort. There is no greater indication of frustration than the revival of… Continue reading Outsourcing North Korea Policy
North Korea’s second nuclear test and the death of former South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun have thrown the Korean peninsula into a period of acute crisis and mourning. Hopes for Korean reunification and regional peace have become very dim indeed. It would seem that the extraordinary experiment that Kim Dae Jung initiated in the 1990s… Continue reading Korean Tragedies
The Obama administration has started off on the wrong foot with North Korea. In the wake of Pyongyang’s April rocket launch, the new administration decided to push a statement of condemnation through the UN Security Council. It has subsequently decided to largely ignore North Korea. According to one U.S. diplomat, the administration believes that it… Continue reading North Korea and Malign Neglect
North Korea’s recent rocket launch received few congratulations and many condemnations, including the recent UN censure. Although Pyongyang did not manage to put a satellite into orbit, it did succeed in getting the world’s attention. It has sustained this attention by kicking out nuclear inspectors, vowing to restart its plutonium processing program, and declaring an… Continue reading North Korea’s Sunshine Policy
When North Korea declared that it was planning to launch a satellite, the United States should have shrugged and gone about its business. Instead, the Obama administration has exaggerated the importance of the launch by treating it as a national security threat. There’s little reason to doubt North Korea’s claim that it simply wants to… Continue reading A Need for Restraint Over N. Korea’s Satellite
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why North Korea just launched another rocket. The country wants attention. It craves the prestige of putting a satellite into orbit. It hopes to gather information for its missile program. And it’s angling to up the ante in the great poker game called the Six Party… Continue reading What’s Up with North Korea?
Editor’s Note: This essay is a condensed version of a paper originally commissioned by the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) for its Academic Paper Series. South Korea is currently engaged in a large-scale, expensive modernization of its military that aims to provide the country with a more robust and self-sufficient defense. The timing of this considerable… Continue reading Ploughshares into Swords
Just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was arriving in Asia this week, Pyongyang was threatening to test a long-range missile. That’s its way of saying, “Don’t ignore us!” North Korea’s nuclear program is not in the top tier of foreign policy issues facing the Obama administration. The new team in Washington believes it has… Continue reading North Korea Sends Message: ‘Don’t Ignore Us!’
Korean Quarterly, Winter 2009
Review of Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 316 It is the unusual academic book that begins with a double suicide. Playwright Kim U-jin and singer Yun Sim-dok are the tragic lovers who open Theodore Jun Yoo’s new… Continue reading The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea (Review)
Gastronomica, Fall 2009
The vehemence of the hard-line opposition to the Bush administration’s North Korea policy suggests that, after seven years of blunders and miscues and outright war crimes, Washington has finally done the right thing on a foreign policy issue. I know: it’s really hard to keep the knee from jerking. Heck, I wrote a whole book… Continue reading Bush Gets One Right?
(Editor’s note: The author presented a different version of this paper at the International Symposium on North Korean Human Rights, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, in Seoul in October.) In the evolving U.S. policy toward North Korea, human rights considerations and national security concerns have competed for precedence. During President George… Continue reading Engaging Pyongyang on Human Rights
As Barack Obama assembles his foreign policy team, he appears to be drawing from two primary sources: the Clinton faithful and Republican renegades. These old dogs might be up for some new tricks, but one risk of relying on such “experience” could be the triumph of conventional thinking in Washington — when the world expects,… Continue reading The North Korean Conundrum
In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions. Their ur-narrative revolved around the experience of Betty and Barney Hill, a sober, middle-aged, interracial couple who told of being taken from their car one night in 1961 and subjected to medical investigation by extraterrestrials with small bodies and large foreheads. They were… Continue reading North Korea, Japan, and the Abduction Narrative of Charles Robert Jenkins
Northeast Asia is a critically important locus of geopolitics, but it lacks a regional security structure. The Six Party Talks – involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan, and Russia – offer one potential model for regional collaboration. But the talks are stalled at the moment, with North Korea balking at a U.S.… Continue reading South Korea’s Persistent Dream of Regionalism
Gas prices are above $4 a gallon; global food prices surged 39% last year; and an environmental disaster looms as carbon emissions continue to spiral upward. The global economy appears on the verge of a TKO, a triple whammy from energy, agriculture, and climate-change trends. Right now you may be grumbling about the extra bucks… Continue reading Are We All North Koreans Now? TomDispatch
On the occasion of their first summit, George W. Bush should have a private, one-on-one, conservative-to-conservative chat with Lee Myung-bak. In this chat, the U.S. President should tell the cautionary tale of how his administration did everything it could to repudiate the North Korea policy of its predecessor ― only to end up in the… Continue reading What Lee Can Learn from Bush
The Bush administration’s approach to North Korea was once quite consistent with its overall foreign policy. There was name-calling, a preference for regime change, and an emphasis on military solutions. Not surprisingly, then, the relationship between the United States and North Korea, like so many other tense stand-offs, deteriorated over the last seven years. The… Continue reading Hardliners Target Detente with North Korea
Here’s the secret to the last seven years of foreign policy disasters coming from Washington. President Bush has become an acolyte of Timothy Ferriss. Haven’t heard of Ferriss yet? He’s the motivational author who champions a four-hour work week. In order to slim down his schedule, Ferriss recommends a low-information diet. “I never watch the… Continue reading Ignorance Is Bliss
South Korea’s new president underwent his own personal green revolution when he became mayor of Seoul. In charge of major construction projects at Hyundai for three decades, Lee Myung-bak reversed himself in the new millennium. He made rivers spring from concrete and grass grow where there had once been only cars. President-elect Lee now has… Continue reading A Green Bulldozer
Korean Quarterly, Spring 2007
Review of Andrei Lankov, North of the DMZ (McFarland and Co., Inc. 2007), 346 pages. In general, scholars love the countries they study. Those who focus on Nicaragua can’t wait to visit the country. Experts on Morocco eagerly await the day they can live there to do fieldwork or archival research. But when… Continue reading North of the DMZ (Review)
Review of Roland Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Richard Saccone, Living with the Enemy (Hollym, 2006) According to the ideology of South Korean nationalism, all Koreans are one: one people, one blood. Korea can claim thousands of years of common history. The last 60 years… Continue reading Living with the Enemy (Review)
<p><b>Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the United States and North Korea bridged their differences and produced a preliminary agreement to resolve their outstanding conflicts. The accord is not exactly a declaration of love. It’s not even a bunch of roses and big box of chocolates. But it’s the friendliest the two countries have… Continue reading North Korean Nuclear Agreement: Annotated
Review of Hyejin Kim, Jia, A Novel of North Korea (San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 2007) During the famine that struck North Korea in the mid-1990s, thousands of hungry refugees poured into northeast China in search of food and work. They often brought with them little more than the clothes on their backs. But they… Continue reading Jia: A Novel of North Korea (Review)
After an intense round of six-sided talks, negotiators are bringing home a deal on North Korea’s nuclear program. Of course the plan has flaws. It’s only the first step in stuffing North Korea’s nuclear genie back into the bottle and ending six decades of hostility between Washington and Pyongyang. It’s way too early for champagne… Continue reading Promising Start with North Korea
They don’t look alike. One is tall and thin, the other short and pot-bellied. If they ever meet for a summit, they could pose for photos as the Blues Brothers of international relations. But it’s not likely that George W. Bush and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will face the cameras together any time… Continue reading George and Jong
Northeast Asia is a high voltage environment. In other words, an enormous gap in power separates the strongest and the weakest countries currently negotiating in the six-party process. Over the last two decades, this gap in power has sustained the Cold War in the region. It has both justified the maintenance of the huge U.S.… Continue reading South Korea Can Play the Role of Transformer
With their new high-speed train system, South Koreans can travel the full length of their country, from Seoul in the north to Pusan on the southern coast, in under 3 hours. In the next phase of construction, new tracks will cut this travel time in half again. The KTX train (pictured to the left) puts… Continue reading Postcard from Pusan