Elon Musk is the most morally dubious rocket pioneer since Wernher von Braun. And the most successful. With each, we can critique faults and celebrate achievements. Von Braun, who supervised the V-2 weapon program for the Third Reich and once calculated the number of slave laborers needed for more efficient production of the system, went on to supervise America’s Saturn V moon rocket. The latter was laudable. The former probably would have led to Von Braun’s arrest by the Allies had

North Korea is no stranger to chronic food shortages. For the past 17 consecutive years the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has placed the North on its list of countries in need of external assistance. The FAO’s latest quarterly review, “Crop Prospects and Food Situation,” issued last month, says, “A large portion of the population suffers from low levels of food consumption and poor dietary diversity. The food security situation is expected to remain fragile, given

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the South Korea-US alliance. To commemorate the invaluable friendship of these two countries, US President Joe Biden will host a state visit of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Wednesday. As international crises have loomed here and there and disrupted world peace lately, this upcoming summit in Washington is certainly very timely. In the past, when South Korea was underdeveloped and weak, it was almost the sole beneficiary of the Mutual Defense T

Something about China encourages grandiose predictions. Just a few years ago, the US Intelligence Community forecast China would emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic economically and politically stronger than the United States. Now a popular view in Washington is that China will soon pass its economic and military peak, and the US will confront a declining power willing to take desperate measures, especially in the event of a confrontation over Taiwan. Beijing’s military exercises following T

Following its energy transition strategy, the European Union has announced that the production of petrol cars within the EU market will be halted after 2035, as confirmed by the European Parliament last week. Overall adherence to this goal among EU member states has thus far been encouraging. In 2021, 19 percent of all newly registered passenger vehicles in the EU were electric, with more than 1.2 million EV cars sold. In some countries, such as Norway, 75 percent of all newly registered cars we

Ukraine is hoping for South Korea's defense support in its fight against Russia, said the Ukrainian Embassy in Seoul on Monday. The comments came after President Yoon Suk Yeol said that South Korea could provide aid beyond humanitarian or financial support if Ukraine comes under large-scale attacks against civilians in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. Korea can support Ukraine by providing state-of-the-art Korean-made defense equipment, said the embassy. "The continuation of tim

I’m not surprised that Fox News settled the Dominion defamation lawsuit, though like everyone else I’m taken aback by the amount. My suspicion is that the decision to drop the defense stemmed less from a fear of the jury verdict -- which might have been much lower -- than from the reputational toll a trial would have caused. And if there’s a lesson here, it’s not so much about Fox News as such but about the growing costs of pandering to your audience. If you’re r

Come July, NATO allies will gather in Vilnius for their second summit since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his genocidal war of aggression against Ukraine. There’ll be 31 of them this time, after Finland joined the club in direct response to Putin’s bellicosity. What should they decide? One way or another, every discussion will touch on Putin. The neo-Tsarist, imperialist, irredentist and atavistic threat he represents menaces not only non-NATO countries such as Ukraine or

Perhaps no image better captures the shifting dynamics in the Middle East than that of Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s security council, and Musaad bin Mohammed Al Aiban, Saudi Arabia’s minister of state, shaking hands in Beijing, with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, smiling between them. The officials were celebrating a China-mediated deal restoring diplomatic ties between the two rivals. In the process, China solidified its reputation as a global powerbroker and under