North Korea

On Jan. 28, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing on U.S. defense policy in the Korean peninsula that examined the administration’s efforts to strengthen the U.S. alliance with South Korea while deterring and securing the denuclearization of the countries’ shared foe in the north.

Editor’s Note: The Trump administration has made North Korea one of its strategic priorities, but the Pyongyang regime is inscrutable, making it difficult to determine the best approach. Brookings senior fellow Jung Pak dissects Kim Jong Un's annual New Year's speech and argues that the North Korean leader is confident and trying to set the United States up for responsibility should relations go further awry.

Daniel Byman

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Editor’s Note: North Korea may be both the world's most dangerous and most despotic regime. Understandably, most U.S. administrations have focused on the nuclear danger, but the Trump administration has also stepped up pressure on the human rights front. Andrew Yeo of Catholic University argues this focus makes sense and that confronting North Korea requires calling the regime out on human rights.

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I’ve been trying to figure out why the U.S. government thought it was useful to attribute the “WannaCry” attack to North Korea. WannaCry was a global ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers, cost billions of dollars in damage, and compromised U.K. healthcare computers in ways that “put lives at risk.” In a Tuesday, Dec.