Latest in South Korea
As a result of precautionary measures, South Korea was able to minimize voters’ risk of exposure to the coronavirus while maintaining the integrity of its election.
South Korean lawmakers have built a bespoke legal regime with highly specific instruments for fighting infectious disease. Is the United States similarly equipped?
South Korea and Japan, two of America’s closest allies, are tumbling into a dangerous economic-diplomatic war over a South Korean Supreme Court decision that ordered Japanese corporations to compensate Korean forced-labor victims from World War II. At the heart of the dispute is a legal disagreement over a 1965 treaty that triggers centuries of bad blood and spiritual animosity between the two countries.
The Olympic games are more than just sport.
The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea have begun. For two weeks, athletes from around the world will careen down mountains and glide on mirror-perfect ice. But as always, global politics–and the military and security threats behind those politics–lie just beneath the sporting surface.
With biannual joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises set to begin on Monday, the temperature on the Korean Peninsula has cooled, if only slightly, following a recent escalation in rhetoric between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Secretary of State Tillerson is proving to be a man of few words. The result is that there is less to parse, but what is on record is more pointed than the lengthy disquisitions of his predecessor. Six components of his Asia trip require careful reading: his assurances to allies; “20 years of failure”; sanctions; military options; negotiations; and the all-important China audience of one, Xi Jinping.
The Assurance Piece
Although drone warfare to date has overwhelmingly been analyzed in the context of US operations against non-state actors - Al Qaeda or affiliated groups or, more recently, ISIS - much of the impact of drones on warfare is likely to come in the markedly different environment of state-to-state conflict (or near conflict) in the Asia Pacific ocean. The conflict environment, not to put too fine a point on it, of China versus, well, everyone or anyone else in the waters that China regards as its near-abroad and everyone one else regards as, more or less, the high seas.
On Saturday, the United States Navy conducted its second freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) in recent months. This time, the destroyer USS Curtiss Wilbur transited within twelve nautical miles of Triton Island—a PRC-held feature in the Paracels also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.