The Korea Herald

[David Ignatius] Western spy agencies strike back

One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy -- the black hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries -- does something dumb and gets caught. That’s essentially what’s been happening recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet spy agency, the GRU. What’s fascinating about the GRU revelations is that they seem to reflect an aggressive pushback after several years in which Putin (chiefly through the GRU) launched recklessly aggressive co

Oct. 15, 2018

[David Ignatius] Western spy agencies strike back

[Edoardo Campanella] Is pensioner populism here to stay?

The right-wing populism that has emerged in many Western democracies in recent years could turn out to be much more than a blip on the political landscape. Beyond the Great Recession and the migration crisis, both of which created fertile ground for populist parties, the aging of the West’s population will continue to alter political power dynamics in populists’ favor.It turns out that older voters are rather sympathetic to nationalist movements. Older Britons voted disproportionately in favor o

Oct. 15, 2018

[Edoardo Campanella] Is pensioner populism here to stay?

[Tyler Cowen] Go ahead, forget the news

Most of all, I am disoriented by the speed at which major news events pass into the rearview mirror in contemporary America.　Last week a man was alleged to have mailed in letters to the Pentagon containing the raw material for ricin poison. No one seems to have been harmed, but if this had happened in, say, 2003, it would have been a major news story for weeks or months. Now I type “ricin” into Google and the top news results are a week old. There hasn’t been much coverage lately, nor have the 2

Oct. 15, 2018

[Peter Singer] Choosing best students

In different countries and for different reasons, university admissions policies are under attack. In a Boston courtroom on Oct. 15, a judge will begin hearing a lawsuit claiming that Harvard’s admission process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament David Lammy described Oxford and Cambridge as “fiefdoms of entrenched privilege” because of the many students they admit from private schools. In Japan, Tokyo Medical University has apologized for manipula

Oct. 15, 2018

[Adam Minter] Interpol debacle won’t just hurt China

The last message that now former Interpol President Meng Hongwei sent to his wife was an emoji depicting a knife. Soon after, he disappeared into China’s feared and opaque Ministry of Public Security, the subject of a corruption investigation about which no details have been revealed. The disappearance is a blow to Meng’s family, Interpol and China’s aspirations to lead similar international organizations in the future.That’s bad enough. But the impact of China’s power play will be even more far

Oct. 15, 2018

[Choi Jung-wha] Person-to-person approach important in promoting Korea

My friend Bronwen Maddox, who is the director of the UK think tank Institute for Government, came to Korea with her daughter for two weeks this summer. I had thought that the trip was solely for the benefit of her daughter, a K-pop fan, but I soon learned that Bronwen was quite knowledgeable and interested in Korean culture as well.It turns out that her daughter introduced her to the K-pop group BTS, and their interest in Korea gradually grew. They would watch Korean entertainment shows on TV, w

Oct. 14, 2018

[Choi Jung-wha] Person-to-person approach important in promoting Korea

[Nisha Gopalan] China’s rental surge is a Gordian knot

Prepare for a crackdown on China’s overheated rental market.President Xi Jinping’s push to develop housing for lease was supposed to take the edge off soaring home prices. It hasn’t worked out that way. Rents instead have rocketed as the government’s call triggered a stampede of investment into the sector, fueling discontent among a millennial population that had already been priced out of the market for home purchases.Chengdu led the surge with a 31 percent jump in average rents in the year thr

Oct. 14, 2018

[Badiuzzaman Bay] Bangladesh’s drift toward digital absolutism

On Sept. 19, Bangladesh passed the latest iteration of its digital policy. Telecommunications and Information Technology Minister Mustafa Jabbar, who proposed the Digital Security Bill 2018 to the parliament, called it a “historic” and “heavenly” law, compared to digital laws in other countries. He also made a cryptic reference to a “digital war” in the future. “If we cannot protect the nation during this war, and if it endangers the state, the fault will be ours,” he said. The official inter

Oct. 14, 2018

[Badiuzzaman Bay] Bangladesh’s drift toward digital absolutism

[Hal Brands] Nikki Haley’s resignation is another win for Trumpism

US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will become the latest senior foreign policy official to leave the Donald Trump administration, following former National Security Advisers Mike Flynn and H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, top economic adviser Gary Cohn, and others. More will likely head for the exits in the wake of the midterm elections in November.Haley’s departure, scheduled for the end of the year, will have two major repercussions on US foreign policy, one short

Oct. 14, 2018

[Hussein Ibish] After journalist’s disappearance, US must reset Saudi relations

The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident and writer for the Washington Post, is the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations in years. While the Trump administration is resistant, unless the emerging narrative about what happened changes, a clear American response will be inevitable and warranted.But we need to be clear about what we want and why we want it, and to accept our own responsibility for the international climate in which this has occurred.Everyone agrees that

Oct. 14, 2018

[Park Sang-seek] How to become a global citizen?

These days the term “Global Citizen” has become a popular catch-phrase in Korea, particularly among the so-called “internationalized people.” Why has this term become so popular or even “sexy”? The trend reminds me of a speech I delivered at the International Management Institute of the Federation of Korean Industries on April 6, 2000. The title was “How to Become a Global Person.” Strictly speaking, the term “global person” is more appropriate than the term “global citizen,” because global citi

Oct. 11, 2018

[Park Sang-seek] How to become a global citizen?

[Anjani Trivedi] What global slowdown? Japan Inc. is roaring ahead

Japan Inc. is getting its groove back. An overlooked policy change could be a driver.In recent months, Japanese companies have been posting a wave of positive data. Machinery orders -- a key indicator of companies’ capital spending in the future -- rose 12.6 percent on the year in August to the highest level in a decade, data Wednesday showed, much faster than forecast. Several analysts had expected orders to fall.Meanwhile, corporate investment shot up last quarter to the fastest pace in over a

Oct. 11, 2018

[Peter Singer] Choosing the best students

In different countries and for different reasons, university admissions policies are under attack. In a Boston courtroom on Oct. 15, a judge will begin hearing a lawsuit claiming that Harvard’s admission process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament David Lammy described Oxford and Cambridge as “fiefdoms of entrenched privilege” because of the many students they admit from private schools. In Japan, Tokyo Medical University has apologized for manipula

Oct. 11, 2018

[Kim Myong-sik] What China means to South Koreans today

“How do you think the current North Korean denuclearization deal will be wrapped up?” A Chinese-American friend of mine asked me when we sat in a Korean restaurant at Incheon Airport last week. A research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, she was returning to California after a seminar with members of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. She was curious about what average South Korean intellectuals expect from China in the current campaign to end the North’s

Oct. 10, 2018

[Kim Myong-sik] What China means to South Koreans today

[Eli Lake] Suspend China from Interpol

In the high-stakes drama over the detention of Interpol President Meng Hongwei, one thing stands out. It’s the plea the international police agency’s secretary-general, Juergen Stock, made to his captors in China.Over the weekend, Stock officially requested that Chinese police clarify the status of Meng, who had not been heard from since leaving Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, to travel to Beijing nearly a week before. “Interpol’s General Secretariat looks forward to an official respons

Oct. 10, 2018

[David Ignatius] Jamal Khashoggi chose to tell truth. It’s part of reason he’s beloved.

George Orwell titled a regular column he wrote for a British newspaper in the mid-1940s “As I Please.” Meaning that he would write exactly what he believed. My Saudi colleague Jamal Khashoggi has always had that same insistent passion for telling the truth about his country, no matter what.Khashoggi’s fate is unknown as I write, but his colleagues at the Washington Post and friends around the world fear that he was murdered after he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.I have known

Oct. 10, 2018

[Noah Smith] Trump needs plan to win trade war with China

President Donald Trump’s trade war is less bad than it was just a short time ago. After some tense negotiations, the North American Free Trade Agreement has been replaced with a new, very similar arrangement, meaning the disruption to trade -- and to US relations with Canada and Mexico -- will be contained. The agreement might even ease the damage from the president’s misguided steel and aluminum tariffs. Trump has also turned his attention away from Europe, avoiding the mistake of getting into

Oct. 10, 2018

[Matthew F. Ferraro] ‘America First’ will likely fizzle fast

The “America First” policy President Donald Trump extolls “has won,” scholar Robert Kagan wrote in a recent op-ed, surmising that the administration’s preference for unilateralism, trade protectionism and immigration restrictions amount to “a new direction of American foreign policy.”But there is reason to believe victory will be fleeting. In time, this period may be recognized more as the high water mark of a short-lived turn toward quasi-isolationism than the beginning of an enduring trend.To

Oct. 10, 2018

[Kim Ji-hyun] Looking forward, not back

A few years ago, I was going through a very rough patch personally. There was a person I couldn’t bear to forgive. It’s not like I didn’t have a hand in the matter, but due to a complicated web of reasons -- which tends to be the case in close relationships -- I couldn’t bring myself to move on.For months, I spent all my free time either strategizing revenge, or seething in silent rage. Then I happened to see this painting on my sister’s wall. It was an amateur piece of work, but the words writt

Oct. 10, 2018

[Hal Brands] China hack shows weakness of Pence’s new hard-line

If you thought the US-China relationship couldn‘t get much worse, consider what happened on Thursday alone. First there was a bombshell report from Bloomberg Businessweek of a major Chinese espionage effort targeting dozens of US corporations and the Pentagon. Then came Vice President Mike Pence’s speech, which offered the sharpest, most comprehensive indictment of Beijing’s behavior by any American leader since the Cold War. Pence labeled the situation with China a “great-power competition.” Wh

Oct. 9, 2018