Mr. President (aka @realDonaldTrump),After the inauguration, you pledged to treat Dreamers with “great heart.”You might have heard the collective sigh of relief around the nation from the White House. But, a mere month later, you were giving mixed signals.“DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me,” you said. “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids, in many cases not in all cases. In some of the cases they’re having DACA and they’re gang

President Donald J. Trump’s tweet this weekend that the US might terminate all trade with countries doing business with North Korea was widely derided on the grounds of realism. Given that 90 percent of North Korea’s trade is with China, the tweet was little more than a veiled threat to terminate all US trade with Beijing, ending a bilateral trade relationship valued at $650 billion a year. It would, as many correctly pointed out, mean economic disaster for North Korea -- and also for the US.The

Characterizing himself as “America’s first Pacific president,” Barack Obama tried to shift America’s focus, strategic commitments and resources to Southeast Asia. Hillary Clinton was all for it, too, authoring a 2011 vision for an Asia-focused foreign policy titled “America’s Pacific Century.”President Donald Trump — consciously or not — is now suddenly fast-tracking the Obama-Clinton policy goal with his new, crisis version of the “Asia Pivot.”North Korean nuclear blasts and missile testing met

When today’s historians look at the confrontation between the United States and North Korea, they’re likely to hear echoes of ultimatums, bluffs and botched messages that accompanied conflicts of the past, often with catastrophic consequences. “The one thing that’s certain when you choose war as a policy is that you don’t know how it will end,” says Mark Stoler, a diplomatic and military historian at the University of Vermont. This fog of uncertainty should be a caution for policymakers now in d

Two earlier columns (“Baekbeom and NK human rights” & “Baekbeom would free NK’s political prisoners”) maintained -- on the basis of a dispassionate analysis of Kim Koo’s verified words and by weighing the factual trajectory of his life and thought -- that the independence and unification advocate would have exhibited the profoundest concern and compassion toward North Korea’s political captives if he had lived to see the situation develop. In fact, before his assassination, he called for the rel

For nearly 70 years, the Korea-US alliance has stood strong. More than 30,000 US military personnel are stationed in Korea to deter North Korea. The two countries have fought together on the Korean Peninsula and in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.In the decades since the Korean War ended in an armistice signed by the United Nations Command, North Korea and China, South Korea has made great economic development and achieved stable democracy. Korea is one of the best proteges of the US, it could be

The otherwise blue and crispy Sunday afternoon was juxtaposed against the shocking news from the North. The now familiar veteran lady newsreader appeared on the North’s state television channel to announce the successful blast testing of a hydrogen bomb. The latest test has brought North Korea one step closer to the completion of its nuclear program and military deployment of nuclear arsenal.With the sixth nuclear test, North Korea again thumbed its nose at the international community. This late

In his monumental essay, “the American Scholar,” Emerson wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Indeed, a truly great man can easily be misunderstood by his contemporaries. In English, there is a maxim, “Where everyone is one-eyed, having two eyes is a handicap.” There is a matching maxim in Korea, “How can a sparrow understand eagle’s eye-view?” Perhaps that is why a great man is always alone, surrounded by the people who do not and cannot understand him. In today’s Korea, we urgently nee