East Asia Archive

In mid-May, India sent a junior foreign minister to Pyongyang for an official visit, the first such visit by an Indian government minister to North Korea in almost 20 years. The trip took place against the backdrop of intense diplomatic engagement between Washington and Pyongyang that could ease North Korea’s economic isolation. In an email interview, Balbina Hwang, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University, discusses North Korea’s economic and diplomatic ties with South and Southeast Asian countries, and the implications of the potential thaw on the Korean Peninsula for these relationships. World Politics Review: What has been the nature […]

For many years, North Korea’s relationship with the outside world has endlessly cycled between belligerence and crisis, always backed by an endless chorus of hysterical hostility. Recently, though, things seemed to be heading in a very different direction. Since late March, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has held two cordial meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. And during a landmark April summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Kim promised to work toward an official end to the Korean War and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The next big step for Kim was a planned June meeting with […]

Forty years after China embarked on the economic reforms that have helped transform it from an isolated and impoverished communist outpost into an increasingly confident and capable global power, a growing number of observers in the United States have, understandably, concluded that Washington adopted the wrong strategy toward Beijing. Their judgment is largely rooted in two propositions. First, the United States was mistaken to assume, or hope, that China would become more democratic as its economy grew. Second, by persisting with efforts to integrate China into the postwar international order, the United States ultimately enabled the rise of a country […]

It is a bedrock for both countries, so why does the 65-year-old security alliance between South Korea and the United States look shakier today than it has been at any time since its inception? Codified in a 1953 treaty after the armistice that froze the Korean War, the alliance helped South Korea preserve its independence and transform itself from one of the world’s most underdeveloped nations to an economic powerhouse and robust democracy, while signaling America’s determination to contain communism. But today, amid an unexpected diplomatic thaw between North and South Korea and with an American president dismissive of alliances, […]

Last Friday’s historic meeting between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the first inter-Korean summit in over a decade and only the third since the nation was divided after World War II, was arguably long on symbolism and short on substance. But the symbolism was extraordinary. Kim came to the meeting across the heavily fortified boundary dividing the Korean Peninsula, the first North Korean leader to set foot in the South. He and Moon shook hands at the concrete curb that marked the boundary, and—in an apparently unscripted moment—Kim took Moon’s hand and the […]