East Asia Archive

What a difference two years makes. The spring and summer of 2018 saw an extraordinary rapprochement between the two Koreas, as their leaders held successive face-to-face meetings, culminating in a landmark visit by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to Pyongyang. The flurry of diplomacy produced a number of joint declarations, agreements, hotlines and other confidence-building measures, including an inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong, just 6 miles into North Korean territory from the Demilitarized Zone. It was the first full-time communication channel and served as a de facto embassy between the two sides, which are technically still at war having not […]

Amid a storm of domestic crises, and with less than five months until Election Day, President Donald Trump suddenly faces the prospect of having his signature foreign policy initiative, once quietly stalled, unravel spectacularly. Trump took personal charge of the daunting North Korea file early on, all but proclaiming victory after a groundbreaking, made-for-TV meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un in Singapore two years ago, immediately after which he announced on Twitter: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Back then, that sounded preposterously premature. Today, it brings faint echoes of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 declaration […]

President Donald Trump has never been a fan of alliances. He has complained repeatedly in the past that U.S. allies in Europe and East Asia “don’t pay enough for their defense,” and has demanded that Japan and South Korea quadruple the amount of money they pay as a share of the cost of hosting U.S. military bases in their territory. More recently, Trump announced he was pulling 10,000 troops out of Germany, more than a quarter of its military presence in the country. The political scientist Mira Rapp-Hooper has just published a timely new book, “Shields of the Republic: The […]

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to pull nearly 10,000 American troops from Germany, more than a quarter of the U.S. military presence in the country. For anyone who’s been paying attention to Donald Trump’s rhetoric since he first ran for president, the news of the withdrawal is very much of a piece with his disdain for America’s overseas alliances. The president and his supporters often rail against close U.S. allies like South Korea, Japan and certain NATO countries for supposedly free-riding on Washington’s largesse. Today’s guest on Trend Lines has a new book out that investigates those claims and […]

One sweltering night some years ago, well after I had finished eating dinner, I received an urgent knock on my front door. I was spending a summer in Hanoi, and had just moved into an apartment in a quiet, residential area. My late-night visitor turned out to be a young Vietnamese police officer in uniform. As I often did in such encounters, I tried to keep the interaction as brief as possible by acting confused and answering his questions in English. But then, a middle-aged woman, whom I recognized from the neighborhood, emerged from the shadows and said, “He speaks […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Edward Alden is filling in for Kimberly Ann Elliott, who will be back next week. The first rule when you find yourself stuck down a hole is to stop digging. After more than three years of the Trump administration’s go-it-alone “America First” strategy, the United States now finds itself in a very deep hole indeed. Trump has alienated once-close allies in Europe, Japan, Canada and Mexico by imposing tariffs on their exports to the U.S. and threatening more. His administration has pulled out of major international agreements like the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate […]