In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

The East Asia Institute has just published my critique of an earlier paper by Dong Sun Lee and Sung Eun Kim, which concludes that ratification of the KORUS FTA will not “markedly reinforce” the U.S.-ROK security alliance. I agree with that conclusion, but I think that the KORUS FTA provides an important strategic message of [...]

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In a new report published by The Asia Foundation’s Center for U.S.-Korea Policy, Research Associate See-Won Byun assesses regional security in Northeast Asia in the aftermath of the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong artillery barrage. The report focuses on dynamics among the United States, China, and the two Koreas. Read an excerpt below, or download [...]

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China’s response to North Korea’s artillery shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last week has been relatively rapid compared to the slowness of its response to the sinking last March (it took three weeks for the Chinese government to express its condolences in response to the sinking of the Cheonan). But, as underscored in Sunday’s [...]

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Although the main stories of the Obama visit to Korea revolved around the gap between the United States and China on global rebalancing issues at the G-20 and the failure of Presidents Obama and Lee to tee up the KORUS FTA, a third issue arose that dramatizes Sino-U.S. differences over the Korean peninsula. At a [...]

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The Office of Senator Richard Lugar has released the latest Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, along with a statement that “the findings include a stark reminder that U.S. and China interests regarding North Korea are largely incongruent. While the United States presses for elimination of North Korea’s [...]

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A major, largely overlooked development of the recent financial crisis has been the emergence of the G20 as the informal steering committee of the world economy. In recent decades that function had been played by the G7, a group of rich industrial democracies. The shift from the G7 to the G20 signals the growing pluralism [...]

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Having spent the past week in Seoul in the aftermath of the September 28 Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) conference and on the eve of the unprecedented 65th anniversary celebrations of the WPK’s founding, I was struck by just how few facts South Korean analysts (and the rest of the world!) yet have at their [...]

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Ten years ago, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, snubbed China’s defense minister on the 50th anniversary of the entry of the Chinese people’s volunteers into the Korean War: Instead, Kim Jong Il hosted the first-ever visit by a U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. A mirror image of that snub was [...]

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I spent last week at several meetings in Tokyo, Seoul, and Jeju that revolved around the Cheonan incident and its implications for regional security. The Lee Myung-Bak administration got high marks for its handling of the immediate aftermath of the incident. It is important to remember that in the hours following the Cheonan’s sinking on [...]

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Two months ago, the sinking of the South Korean corvette Cheonan appeared to mark a turning point in inter-Korean relations. The South Korean interim investigation identified a North Korean torpedo as the cause of the sinking, providing South Korea and the United States with a strong case to take the issue to the UN Security [...]

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