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Chinese Architects and Cold War Defections: Notes from the JFK Files
In December 2022, the United States government released over 13,000 documents categorized as JFK Assassination Records. A handful of these records deal with China in some fashion, including US...
View ArticleGeorge H.W. Bush in Mao’s China
With the death of George H.W. Bush, it is an opportune time to look back at his time as the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing in the immediate aftermath of Nixon’s 1972 groundbreaking visit to China....
View ArticleOn Think Tanks, or, What Trump Didn’t Get in Helsinki
The Trump administration has brought with it a dark winter of discontent to US think tanks. Institutions stocked with the analytical rosters of former Clinton and Obama appointees with North...
View ArticleNorth Koreans Watching Fox
This post operates on sanity-preserving ground rules: No referring to: think-pieces, think-tank analyses, journalistic hot takes, outraged or absurd Tweets (other than those thumbed out by POTUS),...
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New Book Reviews: Espionage in Republican China, and Britain’s Role in the...
My two new book reviews engage with the intelligence history of two chaotic decades in China, and the British role in the Korean War, respectively. Review of Panagiotis Dimitrakis, The Secret War for...
View ArticleOn Red Lines and Reunification: Recent Remarks by the CIA Director on North...
[UPDATED on 5 February 2018:] Donald Trump surely makes the North Korean state nervous. But when CIA Director Mike Pompeo actually emerges from his operations bunker in Virginia, he tends to speaks...
View ArticleTrump, Nixon, and Gambling on the Korean Peninsula
This essay fragment was written in December 2016, and has not previously been published. If you’re a gambler, the odds are good that Donald Trump will face a North Korea crisis at some point in his...
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Hillary Clinton and the Taxing Friendship: China and North Korea
This essay, previously unpublished, was written in Seattle on 27 May 2010. Hillary Clinton arrived in Beijing last weekend to send an urgent message to China: put pressure on North Korea. Tensions on...
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Wise Words and Wishful Thinking on China’s Relationship with North Korea
The most recent wave of analysis emerging out of North Korea’s test of an apparent Intercontinental Ballistic Missile has once again brought minds back to focusing on China’s ability to pressure North...
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Reflections on the History of Chinese-North Korean Relations, and US-DPRK...
Sometimes we need to modify the questions we ask. The question “Is the Chinese Communist Party going to cut off North Korea?” results in a fairly predictable string of analyses — usually adding up to...
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North Korean Human Rights: Rex Tillerson as Blank Slate
Will the Trump administration maintain and extend US pressure on North Korea on the human rights front? Will the Executive Branch aim to extend and intensify US criticism of and dialogue with Chinese...
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Recent Histories of (Local) Violence in the Korean War
Today I received a stunning new text: Su-kyoung Hwang’s monograph Korea’s Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). A link to the publisher’s description of the book is here....
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Second-Hand Stories: East Asia in the Bill Clinton Autobiography
This essay was written in Seattle on 24 February, 2009; a shorter version was published at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma that spring. This past weekend I took a long walk up Seattle’s Dearborn...
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American Weimar: On Hitler, Obama, and BR Myers’ Diminution of Juche
This essay was written in Seattle in October 2011. Today I spent some time leafing through a solemn black notebook filled with sketches made primarily in the stacks at the University of Washington...
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Notes on Teaching the Nixon Visit to China
The Nixon visit was as clear a turning point as will ever arrive in diplomatic history, involving two of the world’s most important nations. The Nixon visit is a prism into talking about what had come...
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Gen. Douglas MacArthur as 2016 GOP Candidate
Amid the current field of Republicans vying for the Party’s nod in 2016, how would General Douglas MacArthur fare? While MacArthur ended his career without having given a full run for the nomination,...
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Preparing for Doomsday, or October 10, in North Korea
North Korean state media has begun to really ramp up the name-calling at South Korea again. In response to South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s complaint that the ROK was not consulted about the...
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North Korean Purges and Scuttlebutt
A few days after publishing a 2500-word analysis of the Hyon Yong-chol purge aftermath (an abbreviated version of which was published by the Guardian), I spoke with Steve Miller of the Asia News Weekly...
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Full Comment on Women Across the DMZ March
As observers of current events on the Korean peninsula will be aware, a group of peace activists is presently in North Korea and will be crossing the DMZ tomorrow, from Kaesong, into the South. Their...
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Atrocities, Insults, and “Jeep Girls”: Depictions of the U.S. Military in...
Controversy continues to surround various military occupations in East Asia in the 20th century. Specifically, the connection between military occupation and sex work carried out by women the occupied...
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