The Korea Herald

[Andrew Malcolm] Trump’s bid to reshape China policy is dangerous -- and vital

Before he even took office, Donald Trump signaled that his policies toward China would differ drastically from his predecessor. They still do.Less than a month after his shocking 2016 election upset, the president-elect answered his phone in Trump Tower and had a pleasant 10-minute conversation with the president of China.Not Beijing, China. Taiwan, China, as in Republic of. It was the first time an American president or president-elect had talked with that country’s leader in nearly four decade

Oct. 18, 2018

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] People vs. money in America’s midterm elections

All eyes are on the United States as November’s Congressional elections approach. The outcome will answer many alarming questions raised two years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidential election.Will the US electorate declare that Trump is not what America is about? Will voters renounce his racism, misogyny, nativism and protectionism? Will they say that his “America First” rejection of the international rule of law is not what the US stands for? Or will they make it clear that Trump’s win

Oct. 17, 2018

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] People vs. money in America’s midterm elections

[Hal Brands] Saudi crisis shows US needs new way to deal with dictators

The disappearance of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has precipitated a new crisis in US-Saudi relations. Yet that crisis has also revived a much older dilemma in American strategy: How to deal with allies that also happen to be morally abhorrent, even murderous, dictatorships.　The rapid spread of democracy from the 1970s through the early 2000s eased this dilemma, by aligning the frontiers of freedom more closely with the frontiers of America’s European and Asia-Pacific alliances. Yet the proble

Oct. 17, 2018

[Hal Brands] Saudi crisis shows US needs new way to deal with dictators

[Anjani Trivedi] Uncover your eyes. There’s no China car crash

Calm down, the world’s biggest car market isn’t going to drive off a cliff. Sales to dealerships in China fell for a third month in September, dropping almost 12 percent from a year earlier, data showed Friday. Retail sales declined 13 percent. Total vehicle sales could now be on track for their first annual drop in more than two decades. Scary stuff. But much of this is a readjustment after years of outsize growth in an industry that churns out more than 20 million cars a year. It’s perhaps too

Oct. 17, 2018

[Mac Margolis] Brazil’s candidates need to stop violence

It was a busy last week for Brazilian yahoos. In Salvador, a seaside town in Bahia state, a martial arts master was stabbed to death. His offense? Admitting he’d voted for the candidate from the left-wing Workers’ Party. In Recife, a government employee wearing left-wing campaign buttons landed in the hospital after being set upon by sympathizers of right-wing presidential hopeful Jair Bolsonaro. An angry mob of his supporters in Rio de Janeiro also beat up a transgender singer; lesbian, gay, bi

Oct. 17, 2018

[Jennifer Huddleston Skees] Tech is new scary story -- but why?

It’s October, which means our televisions and theaters are full of stories of supernatural mayhem. More recently shows like “Black Mirror” and movies like “Ready Player One” portray mayhem wrought not by ghosts and monsters, but by out-of-control technology that feels just plausible enough to incite a different kind of fear. Even the news stokes worries of new, disruptive technologies: Robots will take our jobs, driverless cars will kills us and, for those who really want a scare, algorithms in

Oct. 17, 2018

[Noah Smith] China is the climate-change battleground

Climate change is a menace. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report showing how serious the situation is. If warming continues on its current trajectory, the report warns, then by the end of this century average temperatures will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.That may not sound like a big rise, but in fact the results will be catastrophic. Already, the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution star

Oct. 16, 2018

[Stephen Mihm] Trump is risking an even greater chicken war

The staggering tariffs being levied on China will almost certainly test President Donald Trump’s claim that “trade wars are easy to win.” He might be right, but the president doesn’t seem to have contemplated a different question: What happens when trade wars come to an end?When one country imposes tariffs on another, the eventual resolution of the conflict does not necessarily mean a return to the status quo. Instead, the penalties levied in the heat of a trade war can have destructive ripple e

Oct. 16, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] The importance of being moderate

When I studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo 40 years ago, my dissertation director, Leslie Fielder, taught me to always stay in the middle, avoiding both extremes. He used to tell me, “In a polarized society, it is not easy to stay in the middle because you will be criticized by both extremes. But that is what an intellectual should do.”When I studied at Columbia later, my academic adviser, Edward Said, also enlightened me, saying, “Although I am a Left intellectual, I am neith

Oct. 16, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] The importance of being moderate

[Lee Jae-min] Better late than never

We were hoping that 2018 was an aberration. That countries were just reacting emotionally. That things would return to normal come next year. Sadly, those hopes were just hopes and recent reports confirm what many of us suspected and still dread: Global trade will not exit the “protectionist” orbit anytime soon, and China-US trade relations will continue on a collision course. To a country struggling to overcome an economic slowdown, with red lights flashing on major indicators, nothing could be

Oct. 16, 2018

[Alan Bollard] A decade of disruption comes home to roost

Over the last decade, we have learned that a serious banking failure with risky balance sheets can feed into a major international financial crisis. That, in turn, is big enough to cause an economic crisis as we saw with the “Great Recession.” The downturn in growth, trade and productivity that followed also opened up the possibility of a new contagion today.The global financial crisis, which I confronted as governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand at that time, masked some very important dev

Oct. 16, 2018

[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