[David Ignatius] Can Mueller report provide any resolution?

Robert Mueller’s final report should present Congress with a clean choice: Either the facts warrant impeachment of President Trump, or they don’t. That was the promise of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel: He would gather the evidence, and then Congress and the public could make a judgment. In a country with a healthy political system, Mueller’s report would lead to such a consensus and resolution. But we don’t live in that country. Instead, congressional Democrats seem to want it both wa

March 7, 2019

[Adam Minter] Social media crackdown China needs

There are roughly 337 million users on Weibo, the popular entertainment-oriented social media platform owned and operated by China’s Weibo Corp. Roughly one-third of those followers have shared or liked the new music video from teen pop idol Cai Xukun since it debuted in January. That’s a remarkable number given how fractious China’s social media universe can be. It’s also almost certainly bogus.As a recent documentary from China’s state-owned CCTV network suggested, the groundswell of popularit

March 6, 2019

[Shuli Ren] China has a dirty little stimulus secret

Investors trying to gauge how much appetite China has for stimulus should ignore official targets and look at local government bond issues instead.　Premier Li Keqiang set a 2019 GDP growth target of 6 percent to 6.5 percent at the National People’s Congress on Tuesday, down from “around 6.5 percent” in 2017 and 2018. While Beijing’s targeted fiscal deficit of 2.8 percent is higher than last year’s 2.6 percent, billions will be going to cuts in personal-income and value-added taxes instead of on

March 6, 2019

[Kim Seong-kon] Cassandra’s prophecy and the Trojan Horse

It is well-known that Homer’s Iliad, that great masterpiece of Western literature, was inspired by the Trojan War. In Greek mythology, the war was ignited when the Trojan prince Paris eloped with Helen, who was the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The myth also states that behind the scenes, the Trojan War began as a competitive game among the Olympian gods and goddesses. However, historians argue that the Trojan War was, in fact, the first war between the East and the West over the command

March 5, 2019

[Lee Jae-min] Finally, a sub-1 birthrate -- What’s wrong with us?

Last week was all about Hanoi. But hidden in the stack of news reports from Hanoi was that South Korea broke a record again -- this time in the category of birthrate. In 2018 population data, released by Statistics Korea on Feb. 27: Births in 2018 were 326,900, down from 357,800 in 2017. The birthrate in 2018 was reported to be just 0.98, compared to 1.05 in 2017. Alarms rang out loudly last year when the 400,000 mark was breached, then regarded as a Maginot Line. We are now even approaching the

March 5, 2019

[Tobin Harshaw] North Korean economy growing more capitalist

What won the Cold War? Stipulating that the West did indeed “win,” there are a lot of answers to that question: Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”; Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost; George F. Kennan’s containment; the Helsinki Accords; Pershing missiles; the slow rot of a corrupt leadership; etc. To that list I’d like to add … blue jeans.　There was a long history of smuggling American jeans, particularly Levi 501s, in the Soviet Union, but by the last decade of its existence it became a mania. An

March 4, 2019

[Ted Gover] Trump protected American interests in Hanoi by walking away

Many pundits are describing the abbreviated second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi that yielded no joint agreement as a catastrophic failure and embarrassment for President Trump, citing that his self-touted deal making skills fell short with the North Korean leader. They claim that Trump goes home with a loss while Kim gains the prestige that comes with meeting a US president who sat for photo ops, offered public praise and gave him a pass on human rights concerns. 　Yet, Trump was entirely correct to

March 4, 2019

[Jean Pisani-Ferry] The case for green realism

The Green New Deal promoted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fast-rising star in the US Congress, and others among her fellow Democrats, may trigger a welcome reset of the discussion on climate-change mitigation in the United States and beyond. Though not really new -- European Greens have been pushing for such a “new deal” for a decade -- her plan is ambitious and wide-ranging.It may be too ambitious and wide-ranging. But, unlike economists’ favorite approach to climate change -- set the right pr

March 3, 2019

[Trudy Rubin] Limits to US president’s personal diplomacy

Here is the most glaring takeaway from the collapse of the North Korea summit in Hanoi: You can’t negotiate with a wily dictator as if he were a real-estate mogul in New York.President Donald Trump has famously touted his personal relationships with autocrats as the prelude to great deals. “We fell in love,” he said of the half-dozen or so “beautiful letters” he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.Clearly, love was insufficient.The president and his team appeared blindsided by the gap

March 3, 2019

[Robert Park] High-profile political assassinations: a prelude to Korean War

Politically motivated killings became commonplace on the heels of Korea’s 1945 division: The merciless assassinations of Godang Cho Man-sik (1883–1950), Mongyang Yo Un-hyong (1886–1947) and Baekbeom Kim Koo (1876–1949) were the three most fateful.Circa 1945, Cho was “perhaps the most admired political figure in all of Korea” and the “Soviets’ first choice” as proxy leader of the North, owing to his immense popularity and proven ability to guide as well as effectually advocate for the people he s

March 3, 2019

[Park Sang-seek] A new world order is emerging

It seems that a new cold war system is emerging right now. The following changes in the world order are symptomatic of this phenomenon:First, the ideological cold war has been replaced by a geopolitical cold war. The ideological cold war was started by the two great powers, the US and the USSR immediately after World War II. World War II was started by the imperialist powers, mainly Germany and Japan, while the cold war was touched off by a power struggle between the Soviet Union leading the com

March 3, 2019

[Yoon Young-kwan] How to judge the Hanoi summit

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met in Hanoi, Vietnam, Wednesday and Thursday for their second summit. In assessing the outcome, optimists and pessimists alike should focus on three criteria: irreversible progress toward a formal peace settlement, denuclearization, and the potential transformation of the North Korean regime.In retrospect, if the unsuccessful diplomacy of the past 25 years has taught us anything, it is that denuclearization will not happen without fi

March 1, 2019

[Kim Myong-sik] Worsening political strife under security whirlwinds

The future framework of South Korea’s national security is being carved out by US President Donald Trump, the whimsical leader of our closest ally, and Kim Jong-un, the young dictator of an aggressive adversary, in a tete-a-tete in Hanoi, Vietnam. Frustrated over their position as powerless bystanders at this crucial moment, South Korean politicians are clashing over irrelevant matters. One of the top issues involves the government’s plan to destroy weirs built across major rivers 10 years ago.

Feb. 27, 2019

[David Ignatius] Shanahan could transform Pentagon

In the days after he resigned as secretary of defense in December, Jim Mattis told people he hoped to be succeeded by Patrick Shanahan, his deputy. Shanahan has remained in limbo since the beginning of the year as acting secretary, perhaps trying to convince President Trump’s critics that he will be independent, the way Mattis was, while simultaneously reassuring the White House that he won’t. Trump appears almost ready to name Shanahan permanently. Newt Gingrich, one of Trump’s confidants, told

Feb. 27, 2019

[Kim Seong-kon] Drivers of a bus named Korea

Koreans often enjoy mocking their ex-presidents by parodying their governing styles and characteristics. Recently on the internet, I came across a funny poster featuring photos of our ex-presidents with brief descriptions that metaphorically compared their leadership to driving. The metaphor seems appropriate because the leader of a nation is like the driver of a bus or the captain of a ship, both of which could be a microcosm of a country. On the poster, our first President Syngman Rhee was ide

Feb. 26, 2019

[Robert J. Fouser] Focusing on what works with North Korea

The race for the Democratic nomination for US president in 2020 grows by the week, and more potential candidates are waiting in the wings. Each week also brings a new round of grand proposals: universal health care, free public college, the Green New Deal, universal child care, infrastructure, and reparations for slavery. The energetic left and its friends in the media are enjoying the proposals in the hope of “reshaping” American society. Candidates promise much, but offer few specifics other t

Feb. 26, 2019

[Jan-Werner Mueller] What’s left of the populist left?

As Venezuela’s crisis deepens, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere are gleefully pointing to the disaster of Chavismo to warn of the dangers of “socialism.” And, with Spain’s left-wing Podemos party apparently splitting and Greece’s Syriza steadily losing popularity since 2015, even impartial observers might conclude that the “pink tide” of left populism is nearing a low ebb.But such assessments conflate political phenomena that have little to do with each other. The only program th

Feb. 25, 2019

[Anjani Trivedi] China’s borrowers have $890 billion problem

Chinese industrial borrowers are strapped for cash, as billions of dollars of debt come due this year. The ones that benefited from Beijing’s largesse should be most worried. Issuers are on the hook for more than 6 trillion yuan ($890 billion) in 2019, up 15 percent from a year earlier. Companies in sectors including mining and materials, capital goods and real estate make up 4 trillion yuan of the pile -- and of that, industrial companies comprise about 60 percent.For years, this sector largely

Feb. 25, 2019

[Noah Smith] China’s recession-proof economy heads to a stress test

China bears have had a bad decade. Repeated predictions that China’s large and growing pile of debt would lead to an economic crash have been wrong so far. The country sailed through the global financial crisis. It has weathered the slowing global demand for its exports, the drying up of its excess rural labor supply, slowing coal production, and the peak and decline of its working-age population. In 2015 and 2016 it experienced the bursting of a stock-market bubble, followed by more than a year

Feb. 24, 2019