South Korea’s next president desperately needs a new foreign media strategy
The next South Korean President, or let’s just call it now—Lee Jae-myung, will inherit more than a fractured domestic landscape. They’ll inherit Donald Trump. Lee will be dealing with a man who runs U.S. diplomacy on podcast and social media vibes, Fox News soundbites, and showmanship.
2025 05 23
South Korea has no place for geopolitics in business schools?
Despite being on the frontlines of global strategic fault lines—wedged between a rising China, a declining Japan, a volatile North Korea, and an unpredictable U.S.—South Korean business schools have not moved to embrace geopolitics as a serious academic specialization within their institutions.
2025 05 21
Why study North Korea?
Not every state can, or should, try to understand every other state on its own. For small and medium-sized states like Australia or Canada, when it comes to deeply opaque regimes such as North Korea, pursuing direct analytical insight is an exercise in futility.
2025 05 20
South Korea’s epistemic capture
In South Korea, there’s an old leftist argument that the foreign policy of the country was long ago captured. It draws a straight line from the chinilpa - Koreans who collaborated with Japanese colonial rule - to the postwar conservative elites who aligned the country’s strategy with U.S. interests.
2025 05 19
North Korea as a cybersecurity foil
North Korea has transformed into the perfect “Hollywood” cyber villain. From ransomware outbreaks to phishing operations and crypto heists, North Korea is now cited so frequently in attribution reports and press briefings that its involvement often appears less as an empirical finding than a rhetorical reflex. But this ease of attribution—often accompanied by scant verifiable detail—carries consequences, especially for South Korea.
2025 05 19
Electoral politics in South Korea’s presidential election
Significance. Observers consistently make the mistake of assessing South Korea’s foreign policy trajectory based on campaign rhetoric and election-period positioning.
2025 05 15
Ten step plan to become a North Korea watcher
So, you completed your liberal arts degree and discovered there were no jobs. You enrolled in a master’s degree in international studies and at the halfway point with poor grades, realized there are still no jobs. What do you do?
2025 05 13
Understanding continuity in South Korea’s foreign policy
Yoon has left the building - but what happens to his foreign policy ideas? What happens to closer South Korea - U.S. relations, closer South Korea - Japan relations, and closer trilateral relations?
2025 05 12
Algorithmic foreign policy influence
Ideas in foreign and strategic policy are no longer formulated in academia and passed to the government in cheap lunchtime meetings or over stale coffee at poorly catered academic-government 1.5-track conferences.
2025 05 12
Why the U.S. and NATO failed to secure South Korean support on Ukraine
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. (Biden Administration), NATO, and European governments worked tirelessly to rally support from democratic allies around the world.
2025 05 09