South Korea
Tokyo Olympics are a chance for diplomatic reset with North Korea
Six months ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Japan–North Korea relations remain strained. Since September 2018, the Olympic organising committee withheld North Korea’s request to…
Moon Jae-in’s foreign policy reorientation
South Korean President Moon Jae-in is changing South Korean foreign policy. He has allowed Seoul’s relationship with the United States and Japan to deteriorate while betting…
Why does North Korea keep dragging its feet?
The long-awaited US–North Korea working-level talks collapsed last week, as Washington and Pyongyang could not agree on the definition of “denuclearisation” and mutual concessions…
Korea-Japan tensions, as seen in the suburbs of Brisbane
On the weekend of 24–25 August, the Brisbane City Council painted over a freshly-completed mural of a Korean statue on a traffic signal box. The mural had been approved…
Japan and South Korea’s diplomatic dispute doesn’t need US mediation
Already at its lowest ebb in decades, the Japan–South Korea relationship looks set to plummet further still. Leading this diplomatic descent are the perennial “history problems”,…
The trouble in the air on a tense Tuesday in Northeast Asia
Last Tuesday (23 July) was a bad day in Northeast Asia, not just for what happened but what it foreshadows. Tensions are rising. After all, it’s not every day that a South Korean…
The pitfalls of North Korea’s summitry spectacle
The third meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korea Chairman Kim Jong-un has come and gone, again without much substantial progress, but its symbolism has…
The Burning Sun scandal that torched South Korea’s elites
A scandal that began with allegations that some of South Korea’s biggest male K-pop stars had drugged and raped women (The K-Pop sex and drugs scandal sweeping South Korea)…
Just why is the North Korean status quo so persistent?
Last month in The Interpreter, I argued that inter-Korean status quo is deeply persistent. US President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in have tried all sorts of…
The persistent status quo with North Korea
It is a commonplace in media treatments of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) to view the previous two years as remarkable. This is often premised on…