North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un can launch a rocket this month in defiance of international opprobrium and still look forward to better relations with South Korea’s next president. The candidates in the Dec. 19 election to head Asia’s fourth-biggest economy are outdoing each other in pledges to re- engage with the totalitarian state, undeterred by Kim’s […]
In July, when North Korea‘s state media identified Ri Jol Su as the wife of the country’s supreme leader Kim Jong Un, reporting the couple’s visit to an amusement park, the contrast with his father, Kim Jong Il, could not have been starker. State media reports and official accounts of the elder Kim’s activities and behavior never […]
As we have pointed out previously, in the principal divided-country scenarios of the second half of the 20th century — North and South Vietnam, East and West Germany, North and South Yemen — reunification was thought of for decades as only a remote possibility, before it suddenly occurred in a tumultuous, fast-moving fashion, in a way few of […]
“I UNDERSTAND that the end does not justify the means…I apologise to the victims hurt by my father’s dictatorial rule in this regard.” These were the words offered by a leading hopeful for the presidency, Park Geun-hye, on September 25th. She was taking the bull by the horns, addressing what her opponents and other critics […]
looking beyond borders 