The Korea Herald

[Martin Schram] Trump’s Mueller fixation may be reality based

Sooner or later, every president experiences fleeting feelings that he’s somehow accomplished the geometrically impossible feat of painting himself into a corner of his Oval Office.Along with the Marine band’s ceremonial “Hail to the Chief” and the military aide toting the nuclear-code “football,” feelings of entrapment come with the job.But these days, US President Donald Trump is looking, sounding and behaving as if he’s feeling like those white oval walls are closing in, a little more each da

Nov. 19, 2018

[Adam Minter] How to top the charts in China

American pop star Ariana Grande had every reason to expect that her new single, “Thank U, Next,” would race to the top of the US charts when it was released earlier this month. When she checked iTunes after its release, though, she met with a surprise. Kris Wu, a superstar in China, not only had the No. 1 spot on the iTunes’ singles chart but also seven of the top 10 songs. It was an extraordinary achievement for an artist with almost no North American profile, and Grande and her camp weren’t bu

Nov. 18, 2018

[Adam Minter] How to top the charts in China

[David Ignatius] America’s overt payback for China’s covert espionage

While the bombastic US-China “trade war” has been getting the headlines, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have been waging a quieter battle to combat Chinese theft of trade secrets from American companies -- a practice so widespread that even China trade boosters regard it as egregious. The Trump administration’s much-ballyhooed campaign of tariffs will eventually produce some version of a truce -- economists say that any other result would amount to a mutual suicide pact. But the ba

Nov. 18, 2018

[David Ignatius] America’s overt payback for China’s covert espionage

[Michael Schuman] Xi Jinping, not Trump, is the true cold warrior

The US-China trade war is looking more and more like a cold war. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, crackdown on alleged Chinese theft of American technology, and rhetoric have overturned decades of US foreign policy that had prioritized cooperation. Meanwhile, his counterpart Xi Jinping hasn’t budged on any concessions. China experts worry that relations between the world’s two most important countries have reached a turning point.Trump usually gets the blame (or credit, depending on where you s

Nov. 18, 2018

[Justin Fox] Healing the nation’s wounds with parks and libraries

There’s this new park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it’s amazing. I went on a weekday afternoon last month expecting calm and quiet and instead encountered thousands of people, mostly families with kids. It was the first public-school break since the Gathering Place, as the park is called, had opened Sept. 8, and it seemed like everybody in and around Tulsa had decided to check it out.My fellow park visitors, while skewed toward youth, were of many different ages, races, ethnic backgrounds, sizes, hai

Nov. 18, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] Europe’s losing credibility on Iran sanctions

European Union leaders have long called for the bloc to behave more independently and strengthen its international role. Their failure to build a way to bypass US sanctions on Iran has brutally exposed how far they are from that goal.In September, Federica Mogherini, the EU’s top foreign policy official, announced plans for a special-purpose vehicle to keep some trade with Iran flowing with Europe. The hope was to keep the 2015 Iran nuclear deal alive after it was abandoned by the Trump administ

Nov. 18, 2018

[David Ignatius] The world is adapting to the reality of Donald Trump as president

One of the assumptions that economists sometimes use to frame their models is to specify that some variables will be held constant, a concept that’s expressed with the Latin phrase “ceteris paribus.” We often make the same mistake in politics and foreign policy. We concentrate on our own domestic issues and assume that the rest of the world will remain fixed while we sort them out. We’ll get back to you later, in 2021, say. But the world moves on. It’s dynamic, not static: Erratic changes in one

Nov. 15, 2018

[David Ignatius] The world is adapting to the reality of Donald Trump as president

[Noah Smith] NIMBY backlash against Amazon’s HQ2

Splitting Amazon’s second headquarters between Queens and the Virginia suburbs of Washington was probably not the best decision from a social perspective. Added traffic will strain already crowded local infrastructure, and New York and Washington are already highly productive cities with thriving technology economies. For the country as a whole, Amazon’s decision represents a missed opportunity.That said, critics of HQ2 go too far when they paint the investment as a disaster for local residents.

Nov. 15, 2018

[Supalak Ganjanakhundee] Tussle with China in Mekong basin

Countries in the Mekong basin, notably those located in the lower part of the river -- Asia’s seventh longest -- are in need of a collective strategy to secure their future, given China’s control of the upstream part and ongoing changes in global geopolitics.The 4,909-kilometer river runs from Tibet in China through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. But only its lower portion is regulated by an international agreement and an organization.The lower part is popularly known as Mekong w

Nov. 14, 2018

[Supalak Ganjanakhundee] Tussle with China in Mekong basin

[Eli Lake] NK's missile work not surprising

Ever since he met with Kim Jong-un last June in Singapore, US President Donald Trump has spoken of his North Korean summitry with pride. The nuclear crisis, he has assured the world, is defused. Diplomacy continues. Sanctions remain.Experts have known for some time that these talking points were shaky. On Monday, analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies proved it. The center released a report using commercial satellite imagery to show that North Korea continues to work on i

Nov. 14, 2018

[Eli Lake] NK's missile work not surprising

[Peter Singer] Are you buying oil from Saudi Arabia?

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2 has focused attention on the Saudi regime, and especially on its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In large part, this is because Turkey’s government has kept the episode in the international spotlight.At first, Saudi officials said that Khashoggi had left the consulate. But with the Turkish government revealing lurid details of the murder, they finally acknowledged that he had died, claiming his death

Nov. 14, 2018

[Jeffrey D. Sachs] Trump’s diminishing power and rising rage

The drama of Donald Trump’s presidency has centered on whether an extremist president would be able to carry out an extremist policy agenda against the will of the majority of Americans. So far the answer has been no, and the midterm elections make it far less likely. Yet Trump’s rising frustrations could push him over the edge psychologically, with potentially harrowing consequences for American democracy and the world.None of Trump’s extremist policy ideas has received public support. Trump ha

Nov. 14, 2018

[Steve Lopez] One California calamity after another, and yet we always endure

We have no hurricanes, cyclones or statewide freezes in California.Everything else, we have.Earthquakes, yes. Torrential downpours, yes. Mudslides, yes. Extended droughts, yes. A president who kicks us when we’re down, yes.All that, as well as mass shootings and wind-whipped killer firestorms that devour parched vegetation, homes, people and everything else in their path.A town named Paradise has been reduced to ash.More than three dozen are dead in the Tubbs fire.The Woolsey Fire marches on Wes

Nov. 14, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Native sons and daughters of Korea

In his monumental novel “Native Son,” Richard Wright depicts the tragic life of an African-American boy named Bigger Thomas who has to survive in the hostile environment of the white-dominant American society of the 1930s. It was the Great Depression era, and African-Americans were particularly in trouble because they were “last hired and first fired” at the time. Unable to get a job, Thomas is forced to live with his family in a one-room tenement in a slum district on Chicago’s South Side. Natu

Nov. 13, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Native sons and daughters of Korea

[Anjani Trivedi] Rules of the road evade driverless cars

People have been imagining driverless cars since at least 1958, when Walt Disney Co. aired “Magic Highway U.S.A.” It’s been almost five decades, and we’re still talking about them.Initially, evolution in transport had been a product of necessity: As we moved from horse-drawn carriages to horseless ones, from steam engines to internal combustion, each development improved distance and speed. Then came luxuries like comfort and fuel-efficiency.Driverless cars could become more convenient than conv

Nov. 13, 2018

[Mary C. Curtis] Did politics of division work? Yes and no

Donald Trump is a celebrity president, more interested in declaring a “great victory” after the 2018 midterms than in vowing to bring the country together. As he sparred with the media Wednesday and bragged about outdoing Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and famous folks who stumped for the other side, he did his best Rodney Dangerfield routine, playing the aggrieved president who has all the power but gets no respect.When asked about the violent episodes that shook America in the weeks before Nov. 6

Nov. 13, 2018

[Lee Jaemin] New technology, the new economy and overregulation

Korea is a “fast” country. Everything is quick and speedy, with one exception: The regulatory framework. By and large, laws and regulations fall way behind technological development in the market. Startup companies’ first encounter is regulatory red tape. How ill-matched for a country that excels in information and communication technology. The tricky part is, these regulations have legitimate objectives. In particular, they are intended to mitigate risks, known and unknown. The default answer i

Nov. 13, 2018

[Lee Jaemin] New technology, the new economy and overregulation

[James Stavridis] Today’s armies are still fighting World War I

A hundred years ago today, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the First World War in Europe ended. It had cost tens of millions of lives, utterly destroyed the existing political order, and paved the way for the rise of fascism and a repeat performance of global conflict in the form of World War II. Barbara Tuchman, in her peerless book on the outbreak of the war, “The Guns of August,” said, “Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.” In the

Nov. 13, 2018

[Adam Minter] Your old smartphone is a security risk. Live with it

That obsolete smartphone stashed away in a drawer or closet may not look like a national security risk, but the Trump administration is contemplating treating it as one.Unscrupulous Chinese recyclers and manufacturers could transform old phones into “counterfeit goods that may enter the United States’ military and civilian electronics supply chain,” according to a draft rule. To prevent that from happening, the Department of Commerce proposes to severely restrict the export of used electronics.I

Nov. 12, 2018

[Adam Minter] Your old smartphone is a security risk. Live with it

[Leonid Bershidsky] 80 years after Kristallnacht, I call Berlin home

I’ve been asked time and again how, being Jewish, I could choose to live in Berlin, of all places. The 80th anniversary of an event known in modern Germany under the unwieldy German-Russian name Novemberpogrome, is a good day to attempt an answer.The English-speaking world refers to it as Kristallnacht. The word Reichskristallnacht was first heard in 1939 from Nazi functionary Wilhelm Boerger to describe the events of Nov. 9, 1938, when Nazi storm troopers throughout Germany and Austria staged a

Nov. 12, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] 80 years after Kristallnacht, I call Berlin home