[David Ignatius] Populists and traditionalists are battling in both parties

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, made just about the nastiest crack a Republican could offer about President Trump’s foreign policy when he said it “looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.” Obviously, the comparison is flawed. But say this much for Cheney: He’s the rare Republican who isn’t intimidated by Trump these days. Cheney made a string of similarly blistering comments at a supposedly off-the-record conversation with Vice President Pence at a gathering in Sea Island,

March 14, 2019

[Ram Garikipati] Revisiting minimum wage controversy in Korea

A team from the International Monetary Fund, which is here on a regular audit of the economy, expressed concerns on Monday over the pace of minimum wage hikes in South Korea.According to news reports, the delegation led by Tarhan Feyzioglu, Korea mission chief at the IMF, shared the concerns in a meeting with Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki as part of its annual meeting with Korean policymakers.In 2017, the minimum wage spiked 16.4 percent on-year to 7,530 won ($6.60) per hour in the biggest hike i

March 13, 2019

[Kim Seong-kon] Remembering Cardinal Kim Soo-hwan

Ten years have passed since the late Cardinal Stephen Kim Soo-hwan sadly passed away, leaving a giant shadow on the Korean Peninsula. Marked by outstanding charity, generosity, and integrity, he was indeed a saint in every sense, who endured severe ordeals of socio-political turmoil in his time, but not without forgiving smiles and a cheerful sense of humor. In his memory, a remarkable book of reminiscence recently came out under the title “The Memoirs of a Cardinal.” The author of the memoirs i

March 12, 2019

[Lee Hyuk] In celebration of 30th anniversary of ASEAN-Korea relations

It was in 1989 when the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Korea established dialogue relations. This was a historic achievement for Korean diplomacy, as the establishment of ties with ASEAN had an overarching impact on Korea’s foreign policy. In that year, the Berlin Wall also came down, triggering the collapse of the Communist bloc and the end of the Cold War. The fact that Korea expanded its diplomatic horizon to Southeast Asia has brought tremendous political, economic and sociocultu

March 11, 2019

[Elizabeth Drew] Will Trump win second term?

It seems that every time I write about Donald Trump’s presidency, I pronounce it to be in more trouble than ever. This time is no different: He and his presidency are indeed in more trouble than ever. And yet that may not prevent him from winning again in 2020.I used to think Trump might not even finish his first term, much less get a second. Now I’m agnostic. For one thing, the US Justice Department’s questionable view that a sitting president cannot be indicted is an inducement to fight to sta

March 11, 2019

[Michael Schuman] History could doom US-China trade deal

Trade talks between the US and China seem to be hurtling toward a predictable conclusion -- the signing of a shallow deal that doesn’t solve the real issues dividing the world’s two largest economies. The coup de grace will likely come later this month in another high-profile summit between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.It’s time to admit the “comprehensive” pact Trump promised never really had a chance to come to fruition, precisely because of the way he chose to pursue it. What’s wors

March 10, 2019

[David Ignatius] Erdogan sabotages Turkey’s progress by turning away from West

For a scary snapshot of what a “post-American” world looks like, consider the rupture that has been developing through three administrations in the US-Turkey relationship. Turkey has come to think it can call the shots, regardless of US interests.The prime mover has been President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past decade, he has altered Turkey’s political geography -- undoing the Western-facing secular republic created by Kemal Ataturk and creating a neo-Ottoman Turkey that’s more aligned with

March 10, 2019

[Hal Brands] Trump is right on Venezuela, but it may end badly

Donald Trump almost certainly doesn’t want to invade Venezuela. Despite ominous official statements about keeping all options on the table, a president who has repeatedly announced his intent to end America’s “endless wars” is presumably not itching to start another messy military conflict.　Instead, the administration is pursuing a strategy that blends coercive diplomacy with brinksmanship in an effort to break Nicolas Maduro’s hold on power. That strategy represents a fairly reasonable approach

March 7, 2019

[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