The Korea Herald

[Trudy Rubin] Trump thinks his personal relationships with dictators will save the world. He’s wrong

“We have developed a very special bond,” President Donald Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the end of the Singapore summit.　The effusive compliments Trump showered on Kim were endless: “He’s got a great personality. He’s a funny guy, a tough guy, he’s very smart, he’s a great negotiator. He loves his people.　“He trusts me and I trust him.”　And thus was born the latest Trump bromance with a foreign strongman he wooed at a summit. First there was Xi Jinping, now Kim, next, probably

June 19, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Angry old men vs. naive generation

Some time ago, young Korean men and women became angry and frustrated when they realized they could not secure a job, even with a college degree. Whenever there was an opening in the job market, hundreds of applications poured in, each flashing superb, impressive qualifications. Naturally, the competition for each position was always intense. Under the circumstances, the chances of getting a job were slim and so the outlook of the youths became bleak. At that time, young people were infuriated b

June 19, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Angry old men vs. naive generation

[Steve Chapman] How Republicans went soft on communism

If you had told Ronald Reagan in 1988 that in 30 years, the president of the United States would be chummy with communist dictators in China and North Korea, eager to please a brutal Kremlin autocrat and indifferent to the needs of our military allies, he might have said: That’s what you get for electing a Democrat.　Today’s Republicans make up a party he wouldn’t recognize. For decades, the Russians and Chinese dispatched spies and enlisted American sympathizers to try to harm the United States

June 19, 2018

[Maude Lavanchy and Willem Smit] How expensive is the World Cup?

Every four years, as football fans gear up for the World Cup, researchers engage in a game of their own: trying to determine just how costly the tournament is to employers and economies. Our own contribution to this genre suggests that the calculation is a bit more complex than is generally acknowledged.　To calculate the number of productive hours at risk in this year’s tournament, we assume local office hours are between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and that 50 percent of each country’s workforce will be

June 19, 2018

[Jay Famiglietti] Our dismal water future, mapped

Satellite data and images are provocative, even disturbing. They confront us with a global view that can be at once breathtaking, like a piece of art, and yet, in this era of rapidly changing climate, they paint a picture of the demise of the environment. How and if we will respond to what we see is uncertain. That uncertainty lies at the root of our perilous future.　Last month, my colleagues and I published a report the centerpiece of which is a global map, derived from satellite data, that sho

June 18, 2018

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: A worldwide web of institutions

The basic theme of this series has been the degree to which the challenge posed by rising, assertive China has both intensified and changed in recent years, as Beijing’s global ambitions and initiatives have reached a new level. While most Westerners are familiar with Beijing’s efforts to do so through its economic power and growing military might, another facet of that campaign has received less attention: China’s intensifying efforts to remake the international institutional order.　For decades

June 18, 2018

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: A worldwide web of institutions

[Conor Sen] Hosting World Cup is US’ chance at redemption

The success of North America’s bid to host the 2026 World Cup is one hopeful sign that the US and its neighbors could be ending the era characterized by dysfunctional governance, infrastructure neglect and a withdrawal from the world stage. For the first time in ages, America has something to look forward to.　Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the world has seemed zero sum, divided into winners and losers: the political extremes of left and right, terrorism versus nations, the wealth of the ho

June 18, 2018

[Doug Rand and Stuart Anderson] Doesn’t Trump’s America need more entrepreneurs?

Theoretically, the Trump administration’s immigration policy is based on two core principles: upholding the rule of law and promoting a “merit-based” system that’s good for the economy.　So why has the Department of Homeland Security just proposed to scrap the International Entrepreneur Rule, a late-Obama program intended to lure the world’s most promising entrepreneurs to create companies and jobs in America rather than elsewhere?The department doesn’t dispute the lawfulness of the program, whos

June 18, 2018

[David Fickling] Iron law of history blunts China trade folly

Who invented modern steel? It’s a 160-year-old controversy that’s still going strong -- and the answer, in a way, lies at the heart of the current US-Chinese trade tensions.　Many Americans are taught that the originator was William Kelly, whose ironworks in Eddyville, Kentucky was among the first to produce the metal. In the UK and elsewhere, credit generally goes to Henry Bessemer, who obtained the first patents for a mass production process that’s used in modified form to this day.　As with the

June 18, 2018

[David Fickling] Iron law of history blunts China trade folly

[Letter to the editor] Korean schools need proper writing courses

Korean students memorize everything to study for exams. Almost no teachers in school teach students how to write creative answers on exam papers. Thus, students feel lost when they are asked to submit papers in university. Nonetheless, university students are expected to write essays and papers in the majority of the classes, with a huge gap of students’ abilities in writing. However, there are not many professors in universities who teach the students how to think critically and write down thei

June 17, 2018

[Walter Shapiro] Verdict on Singapore? Better real estate deals than bombing runs

For a president who normally adheres to his own doctrine of infallibility, Donald Trump displayed a few flickering moments of uncertainty in the aftermath of the Singapore summit.　Asked by George Stephanopoulos in an ABC interview whether he trusts Kim Jong-un to dismantle his nuclear program, Trump replied, “I do trust him, yeah. Now, will I come back to you in a year and you’ll be interviewing and I’ll say, ‘Gee, I made mistake?’ That’s always possible.”　In response to a similar question at hi

June 17, 2018

[Walter Shapiro] Verdict on Singapore? Better real estate deals than bombing runs

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: exporting an ideology

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017 is sure to loom large in future accounts of China’s relations with the world. It was then that the party cleared the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely, and when Xi himself advertised China’s global ambitions by declaring that Beijing would now “take center stage” in world affairs. It was also when Xi threw down the gauntlet in an equally consequential way. 　In his three-hour speech to the assembled delegates, Xi extolled the

June 17, 2018

[Joshua Pollack] Trump-Kim summit marks a return to engagement, but it’s not a breakthrough

The outcome of the Donald Trump-Kim Jong-un summit in Singapore brings to mind the old Army quip: “Hurry up and wait.”　The urgency of holding a meeting between the top leaders of North Korea and the United States, rather than diplomatic professionals, is perhaps best explained by the personality and mind-set of our first reality TV star president. The freshly signed joint statement of this “epochal event” — not merely historic, mind you, but epochal — is roughly what could be expected to emerge

June 17, 2018

[Silvio Laccetti] Give peace a chance

The long-ago summer of 1950 was different from previous ones for this elementary school boy. Yes, I played stickball in the sidelot and began learning the artifices of adult card games. But something quite extraordinary captured my imagination and attention: the outbreak of the Korean War, on June 25, 1950.　For this boy, war was something he had read about in the Police Gazette, a barber shop staple in those times. Now, curiously, it became real. I was thoroughly absorbed all summer following th

June 17, 2018

[Trudy Rubin] Trump got played in Singapore

President Donald Trump got played.　After all the hoopla and pageantry and Trump braggadocio at the Singapore summit, with Kim Jong-un standing alongside the US president in front of thousands of journalists, the North Korean leader came out the winner.　Kim had already racked up points just by standing alongside the US president as an equal, showered with Trump’s praise and transformed from pariah to international rock star. In recent weeks he was welcomed to Beijing and Seoul, and invited to Mos

June 15, 2018

[Trudy Rubin] Trump got played in Singapore

[Jay Ambrose] Trump, North Korea and positive possibilities

Once upon a time it was fire and fury and loads of sanctions like nobody ever saw before, and look, it was said, President Donald Trump is going to get us into a nuclear war. But then North Korea came around, saying it wanted to talk. So Trump met with Kim Jung-un who promised to denuclearize, and now it’s said Trump has elevated a murderous dictator to hero status and set us up as dupes.　What I want to say is wait and see and quit trying to make Trump out to have handled this so badly when ther

June 15, 2018

[Mihir Sharma] West’s crackup reshapes the East

If US President Donald Trump wanted to discredit the West, he could hardly be doing a more thorough job of it. The hostility he directed at ostensible allies in the G-7 last weekend was bad enough, especially when contrasted with the obsequious praise he lavished on North Korea’s murderous Kim Jong-un in Singapore.　Worse perhaps was the visual contrast between the G-7 and a third, recently concluded summit -- a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Qingdao. There, Trump’s counterpa

June 14, 2018

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: global military threat

I wrote a column recently about how a longstanding assumption of America’s China policy -- that economic integration between the two countries is an unalloyed good -- has now been overtaken by events. But this isn’t the only area in which China’s rise is forcing a re-evaluation of old beliefs.Now, I’ll delve into another issue with enormous implications for US-China relations and American interests: the rise of China as a more globally oriented military power.For years, most experts believed tha

June 14, 2018

[Hal Brands] China’s master plan: global military threat

[Leonid Bershidsky] World Cup extravagance shows Russia hasn’t mastered cost control

If the record cost of the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014 was the embodiment of Russian government wastefulness, the soccer World Cup, which starts on Thursday, appears far more restrained. Yet, despite its best efforts to bring expenses under control, President Vladimir Putin’s regime still hasn’t learned how to be parsimonious.　 The most-often quoted cost assessment for the Sochi Olympics is $51 billion, $11 billion more than the second most expensive Olympics, the 2008 Beijing summer games. The

June 14, 2018

[Mark Buchanan] Why de-nuking North Korea is so difficult

President Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true, but following his historic meeting Tuesday with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his repeated assertion during a press conference that “it does take a long time” to “pull off complete denuclearization” stacks up pretty well. It will probably take a decade at the very least.　 It’s not hard for a nation to dismantle or destroy its nuclear weapons, as well as the technological infrastructure used to create them. North Korea may have as many

June 14, 2018