North Korea Archive

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is visiting Russia for the first time in nearly a decade. His tour of the country’s Far East began with crowds of cheering people greeting him at Bureya railway station in Amur province.

At long last, Washington looks ready to pass free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. Congressional ratification has been a long time in the making — the trade agreement with Colombia was signed in 2006, while the agreements with Panama and South Korea were inked in 2007. The trade deals with Colombia and Panama were, in some sense, part of a last-ditch effort by President George W. Bush to salvage the work put in by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Hopes for that hemisphere-wide trade zone […]

While the horrific famine in the Horn of Africa has captured international attention, a similar emergency on the other side of the world, in North Korea, has quietly moved past the point of crisis. The World Food Program in April called for $224 million in emergency aid for North Korea. But the international community — particularly the United States and South Korea, traditionally the largest donors to North Korea — have so far refused to fund the request. Their resistance, according to Roberta Cohen, a nonresident senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, can best be explained […]