The Korea Herald

[Hal Brands, Francis J. Gavin] The sane way to live with North Korea’s nukes

Donald Trump’s threat to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea as punishment for its military provocations is the epitome of irresponsible leadership. By invoking the prospect of apocalyptic destruction, Trump risks alienating US allies, distracting attention from North Korean misbehavior, and escalating an already fraught situation. Yet even if the US wasn’t led by such an amateurish president, the North Korean crisis wouldn’t necessarily be easier to resolve. The standoff is driven most fundamen

Aug. 21, 2017

[Hal Brands, Francis J. Gavin] The sane way to live with North Korea’s nukes

[David Ignatius] Russia reaps blowback from covert campaign

Intelligence officers sometimes talk about “blowback,” when covert actions go bad and end up damaging the country that initiated them. A year later, that is surely the case with Russia‘s secret attempt to meddle in the US presidential election, which has brought a string of adverse unintended consequences for Moscow.The Kremlin is still issuing cocky statements accusing the US of “political schizophrenia” in its response to Russian hacking. And there are vestiges of the triumphal tone I encounte

Aug. 21, 2017

[Gina Barreca] White supremacists wrong, it’s not our DNA

Like middle-aged women dying their hair fluorescent colors and young women dying their hair iron gray, DNA testing has become fashionable even without necessarily leading to positive results.Do we really need to know more about our ancestral heritage, as if we’re characters out of “Game of Thrones” and desperate to figure out whether to pledge allegiance to wolves, dragons or the incestuous Lannisters, thereby becoming part of some larger powerful dynasty?While finding out information about your

Aug. 21, 2017

[Daniel Moss] Australia’s no-win war on dual nationals

It’s time for Australian legislators and jurists to end a juvenile tussle about citizenship and who can serve in government. Their future depends on it.There is almost daily hysteria in Australia over a formerly obscure clause in the constitution that bars dual nationals from sitting in the federal parliament. The question is which legislators are now disqualified because they did (or didn‘t) know that their birth abroad -- or that of their parents -- sometimes brought with it eligibility for, o

Aug. 21, 2017

[Andrew Malcolm] Trump’s North Korea ‘fire and fury’ might just work

To better understand the ominous ongoing North Korean crisis, let’s view it from Kim Jong-un’s point of view.Why does this ruthless 33-year-old dictator, the son and grandson of communist dictators, persist with defiance, provocations and an ambitious nuclear weapons program in the face of international condemnation, sanctions and threats of an overwhelming response by the United States? Why?Kim has vowed to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles on Americans, possibly near the island territ

Aug. 20, 2017

[Andrew Malcolm] Trump’s North Korea ‘fire and fury’ might just work

[Therese Raphael] Even EU regulators can’t stamp out food scandals

Remember that Chinese pet food, laced with melamine, that caused kidney failure in the family European pooch? Or the pork and beef from Belgium containing cancer-causing dioxin? The horse meat passed off as beef burgers in Britain? Now tainted Dutch eggs are making diners uneasy.There’s something especially creepy about recurring food scandals, even the ones that don‘t pose a huge threat to public health. The latest, involving millions of eggs sold in 18 countries as far from Dutch chickens as H

Aug. 20, 2017

[David Fickling] The world’s most ridiculous constitutional crisis

Australia’s parliament is in the grip of the world’s most ridiculous constitutional crisis. The situation threatens the country’s democratic process, which is reason enough for politicians and courts to work to unpick it. More importantly, though, it raises questions the rest of the world would do well to ponder.Over the past month, five members of Australia‘s 226-member parliament have admitted that they may have unwittingly held dual citizenship -- a condition that, under Australia’s 1900 cons

Aug. 20, 2017

[Park Sang-seek] North Korean nuclear issue: Maximum pressure or engagement?

Since North Korea conducted another intercontinental ballistic missile test on July 28, the US has become more confrontational rather than conciliatory toward North Korea. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley declared at the UN Security Council that the “time for dialogue is over.” The Trump administration has adopted the maximum pressure and engagement policy, abandoning Obama’s strategic patience policy. It has first concentrated on a confrontational approach, resorting to mainly three paths: s

Aug. 20, 2017

[Park Sang-seek] North Korean nuclear issue: Maximum pressure or engagement?

[Jay Ambrose] The North Korean threat

Susan Rice, national security advisor to President Barack Obama, recently said the United States could live with a nuclear regime in North Korea but failed to answer an important question. For how long?After all, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, weird of appearance, weird of mind and downright murderous when it comes to eliminating fellow officials and relatives he does not trust, has said he just may wipe out America someday.To kill time until he tried, a bullying, nuclear-endowed North Korea w

Aug. 20, 2017

[Lawrence M. Krauss] North Korea, Donald Trump and countdown to doomsday

On Jan. 26, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, whose board of sponsors I chair, reset its “Doomsday Clock” to 2 minutes, 30 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to midnight in more than 60 years. At the time, two of the factors we mentioned in making our decision were ominous developments in North Korea and the frivolous and dangerous language the new American president had employed before his inauguration regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear war.Many observers have wondered whether

Aug. 18, 2017

[Lawrence M. Krauss] North Korea, Donald Trump and countdown to doomsday

[Jonathan Bernstein] Trump can’t rebound until Bannon, Kushner fired

In the wake of the events in Charlottesville and the president’s reaction, some activists, including conservatives, are renewing their focus on removing Steve Bannon from the White House. Their reasons are familiar by now: He represents the “nationalist” wing of the administration most closely tied to this weekend’s violence and once bragged that his Breitbart.com was the “platform for the alt-right.” It seems like an easy call, but Maggie Haberman at the New York Times is offering a note of cau

Aug. 18, 2017

[Russell Korobkin] Madness could finally end this crisis

Donald Trump is a narcissistic, short-tempered, uninformed, unpredictable bully. In almost every context, this combination of traits is exactly what you would not want in a president of the United States. But one exception might be in dealing with Kim Jong-un and North Korea.As I tell students in my negotiation class, in hard-nosed, brass-knuckles bargaining, the crazy person wins because he forces a rational counterpart to make concessions in order to avoid mutual disaster. And no one does craz

Aug. 17, 2017

[David Ignatius] US wonders if permanent treaty with North Korea makes sense

After weeks of belligerent rhetoric, North Korea took a pause Tuesday. But where is the mercurial Kim Jong-un headed next? US officials are debating whether he may want direct talks with Washington about a formal treaty to replace the 1953 armistice agreement that ended the Korean War.The US has been pursuing a dual path, threatening military conflict (semi-believably because of President Trump‘s verbal thunderbolts) while also urging stabilization of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. The diplom

Aug. 17, 2017

[David Ignatius] US wonders if permanent treaty with North Korea makes sense

[James Stavridis] The key to countering North Korea lies offshore

As the world worries about the increasing threat from North Korea and its dangerous leader Kim Jong-un, there is a temptation to believe that the problems will be solved ashore. Newly installed President Moon Jae-in of South Korea is exploring a return to the so-called “sunshine” policy of dealing openly with the North while using trade and engagement incentives to defuse the situation. The US wants to deploy a new ground-based missile-defense system to protect troops at the demilitarized zone a

Aug. 17, 2017

[James Stavridis] The key to countering North Korea lies offshore

[Mihir Sharma] Why bother asking Trump to condemn Nazis?

Briefly, before he went wildly off-script on Tuesday at Trump Tower, we lived in a world where the 45th president of the United States had finally managed to condemn Nazis. And let’s ask ourselves: Did that make us feel any better? Did the sight of Donald J. Trump glumly reading off a teleprompter remarks obviously written by someone else convince anyone that he understood his earlier error? Did we all begin to feel that America and the world were in safe hands?Well, no, of course not.Nobody in

Aug. 17, 2017

[John M. Crisp] North Korea crisis calls for a feminine touch

Last week I pulled my attention away from the North Korea crisis -- more on that later -- to consider the memo that got software engineer James Damore fired from Google.Damore was trying to account for the lack of gender diversity at Google, whose tech employees are 80 percent male. He admits the existence of broad cultural biases, but he got in trouble for attributing some of the gender imbalance to essential genetic differences between males and females.While Damore concedes many exceptions an

Aug. 17, 2017

[Kim Myong-sik] Escaping campaign pledge traps

People seriously think of war here on the Korean Peninsula. Life goes on as usual on the surface for the Republic of Korea, but unease turns into fear as increasingly fierce words about war are delivered from the capitals of our ally and enemy. War means destruction and deaths inevitably, win or lose. Will it be possible to rebuild the nation from the ashes of a second Korean War and get back to where we are today in the world, we ask. Our minds’ eyes see power stations, auto plants, shipyards,

Aug. 16, 2017

[Kim Myong-sik] Escaping campaign pledge traps

[Yoon Young-kwan] Dangerous game of chicken

So far, the war between US President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un over the latter’s nuclear program has been fought only in words. But each turn of the rhetorical screw deepens the risk that, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “jaw-jaw” could turn into “war-war.”Last month, following North Korea’s second intercontinental ballistic missile test of the summer, the United Nations Security Council unanimously agreed to impose new and even stricter sanctions on the tiny country. T

Aug. 16, 2017

[Yoon Young-kwan] Dangerous game of chicken

[Katharine H.S. Moon] Can S. Korea save the day?

As North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump’s war of words escalates, National Liberation Day celebrations -- commemorating the Korean Peninsula’s 1945 freedom from Japanese colonial rule -- have unfolded in both North and South Korea. The occasion underscores not just the shared history between the two countries, but also the South’s unique qualifications to bring about a peaceful resolution to the current military standoff.As much as Kim may enjoy threatening the most po

Aug. 16, 2017

[Daniel Moss] Japan’s booming -- now it needs more immigrants

Japan has served its time as a symbol of economic failure. Its latest growth surge puts it in a welcome new role.The country’s demographics, according to conventional wisdom, are supposed to be bad for the economy. Instead, Japan unexpectedly shot to the top of Group of Seven club, with its gross domestic product notching 4 percent annual growth last quarter. That easily outpaced the 2.6 percent recorded in the US during the same period.The biggest gains were in consumption and business spending

Aug. 16, 2017