North Korea’s Momentous Transition

Posted by on Sep 1, 2019 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 0 comments North Korea belongs to a dwindling category of countries known as “totalitarian.” Compared to their authoritarian cousins, totalitarian regimes aspire to control all aspects of society. As Italian fascist Benito Mussolini once put it: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In such countries, there is no autonomous business sector or civil...
read more

Pyongyang on the Potomac

Posted by on Aug 30, 2019 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 0 comments When Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands on June 30 at the line dividing the two Koreas, the pictures that appeared on front pages all over the world depicted two very different leaders. Trump is a tall, 73-year-old white man who leads the world’s most powerful democracy. Kim is a short, plump, 35-year-old Korean who heads up the world’s most notorious non-democracy. They look like the...
read more

Summit Interruptus

Posted by on Apr 6, 2019 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 0 comments Of all the bizarre things that Donald Trump utters — the lies, the garbled words, the fanciful stories — his comments on his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are in a category by themselves. “I was really tough and so was he, and we went back and forth,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in West Virginia in September. “And then we fell in love, OK? No, really, he wrote...
read more

The Next US-North Korean Summit

Posted by on Apr 4, 2019 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 0 comments The second meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un is scheduled for next month. The most likely location will be Vietnam. The agenda is much the same as before: how to get North Korea to denuclearize and the United States to dismantle its sanctions regime. The question remains: which side will make the first substantial move? The summit comes at a particular difficult time for Trump. The...
read more

Is Korea’s Cold War About to End?

Posted by on Jan 7, 2019 in Articles, Featured, Korea | 0 comments Remarkable changes are taking place on the Korean peninsula. The two Koreas are actually starting to demilitarize the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Just in the last couple weeks, they have taken down 22 guard posts, demined the Joint Security Area, and established a no-fly-zone about the peninsula’s dividing line. They’ve pulled back from confrontation along their maritime boundary. North Korea...
read more

North Korea: Nukes vs. War?

Posted by on Jan 4, 2019 in Articles, Featured, Korea, Security | 0 comments Nuclear weapons have held the world hostage for more than 70 years. Although they possess terrifying power and the world has come close to nuclear war on several occasions, these weapons have only been used twice, in 1945, by the United States against Japan. Advocates of deterrence believe that nuclear weapons actually kept the peace during the Cold War. The United States and Soviet Union,...
read more