I understand what President Donald Trump was trying to express in his now-famous “Mission Accomplished” tweet Saturday.Trump said in the tweet, “A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!”And in fairness, in the military we often do use that expression to convey the successful completion of a discrete tactical task.　But he should have understood

Thanks to its miraculous economic success, South Korea has now become one of the most affluent countries in the world. With an economy ranked 12th largest in the world, South Korea is admired as a role model by many developing countries and praised for its advanced technology and Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, that have enhanced its prestige in the international community. Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched to say that today’s South Korea is an advanced country in terms of economy, technology,

As Artificial Intelligence is rippling through every corner of our lives, ethical challenges and philosophical issues are also coming our way. The most important question is: what is the outer limit of the AI technology? Recent incidents involving AI in the military sector offer some silhouette of a possible answer.Now, AI is making an inroad into the defense industry. Autonomous weapons are becoming a reality. Taken to its technical extreme, it will not be too long before we see fully autonomou

Some strategic games are too complex to be readily modeled, and when we see such games in the real world that’s exactly when we should be the most worried. That’s my immediate reaction to the situation in Syria and environs.　Consider the distinct yet interrelated clashes going on. Not only did the US strike early Saturday at Syria’s chemical weapons facilities after the regime used such weapons against its citizens in Douma, but tensions between Israel and Iran have been escalating. It seems tha

Give John Bolton credit for one thing: He knows how to make an entrance. During his first week on the job, the new national security adviser has initiated a purge of the National Security Council staff, pushing several top aides to resign, with more departures likely on the way. This internal shakeup is fully within Bolton’s prerogatives, and it is surely intended to get a notoriously discordant administration singing from the same sheet of music. In reality, however, it may just exacerbate the

Spring is the season of big meetings -- Davos, Boao and coming this weekend, the Spring Meetings of the IMF/World Bank in Washington. Here, the Davos men (and increasingly women) gather with central bankers, ministers of finance, bankers, policy wonks and academia to debate the state of the world. These are often casts of thousands, listening to the latest guru expounding on technology, politics, trade and finance.I was in Lake Como last week at a smaller conference hosted by the Italian think t

Markets are quivering as fears of a US-China trade war ebb and flow. Thus far, they’ve mostly been focused on tariffs that President Donald Trump wants to impose on a range of Chinese goods, and China’s threats to retaliate. But investors may be overlooking a bigger risk in this dispute.　It’s true that duties on US imports would hurt -- hands are already wringing in farm country -- but there’s a limit to how much pain they can really inflict. The persistent worry that China will dump its mammoth