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Our Long National Nightmare is Over
One of three featured images on the front page of HermanCain.com, the candidate's official website, 3 December 2011
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How Revolution in Syria Could Serve as a North Korean Tipping Point: Huanqiu...
Today’s essential reading springs from the keyboard of Stephan Haggard, whose essay on China’s relations with North Korea pulls apart some very important threads in Northeast Asia and over the...
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“Smart Power” : A Legitimate Arm of American Foreign Policy, or Just...
When it comes to China, there ever exists a need for greater discussion of internet freedom and freedom of information more generally. To the extent that the United States and its Western European...
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Regarding an American “Objectivist Foreign Policy”: Rand, Romney, Feigenbaum,...
In the aftermath of events in Benghazi (the background of which Professor Juan Cole pins down like a butterfly, and the interpretation of which is covered ably by Diplopundit), and considering the rise...
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North Korea, the Obama Trip, and China’s Dilemmas
AFP has a very worthwhile article which describes the very explicit diplomatic strategy being discussed on President Obama’s Air Force One en route to Southeast Asia: “We’ve had a dialogue with the...
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“Spit at the American Gentlemen” : North Korean State Media Rolls Out the...
A short article released on January 10 in Pyongyang was fairly enervating, though no news media outlet seems to have picked it up yet. Nor, as Daniel Pinkston has pointed out already, has any Western...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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