Representatives from South Korea, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama concluded negotiations for a free trade deal last month, with the final agreement expected to be signed next June. In an email interview, Won-Ho Kim, director of the Latin American studies program and of the Center for International Cooperation and Strategy at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, discusses South Korea’s trade relations with Central America. WPR: How extensive is trade between South Korea and Central America, and what are the expected effects of the recently signed free trade [...]
A new, expanded mandate for the Japanese military, known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), participating in the United Nations mission in South Sudan went into force Monday. Japanese soldiers are now allowed to rescue humanitarian workers under attack and play a larger role in protecting U.N. camps. In an email interview, Ippeita Nishida, a research fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, discusses the Japanese military’s overseas activities. WPR: What U.N. and multilateral security missions is Japan participating in, and what is public opinion toward participating in them? Ippeita Nishida: Japan has a 350-strong SDF engineering unit and some staff officers [...]
The buzz in foreign policy circles this week has been over President-elect Donald Trump’s phone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which overturned decades of protocol governing official U.S. contact with the government of Taiwan. It seems that the conversation was not a casual faux pas, but a purposeful decision by the Trump transition team. Now diplomats in Beijing and Washington have to cope with the fallout. But if the essential function of diplomacy has lost some of its sheen in Washington, it is not only the result of Trump’s iconoclastic approach. Traditional diplomacy has also been weakened by competition [...]
