South Korea is a country with a big headache: North Korea. The North has lately been more intensely provocative. This week, it fired a short-range rocket. Two weeks ago, it was medium-range ballistic missiles. Before that, it was a nuclear test.And now, U.S. President Barack Obama, President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are meeting in Washington on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit. While this is a welcome development because it means the world leaders are actu

What makes Seoul? Back in town after a 10-month absence, I have been obsessed with the question as I meet old friends and visit places that feel as familiar as the town I was born in. I have toyed with the question before, but the struggle to find an answer seems more intense this time. To answer the question, I have been working on the outlines of a “theory of Seoul” that can explain the past and present while offering a window into the future.I have always thought of Seoul as a jumble. The rap

Recently, North Korea threatened the South by carrying out military drills that involved simulated attacks on Seoul using more than 100 pieces of long-range artillery. The North insolently declared it would turn the South Korean capital into “a sea of flames.” Strangely, no one in the South seemed to care or be on alert. Clearly, this situation posed a serious threat to South Korea’s national security, and yet the people in the South seemed completely oblivious. But what if the North were to act

The relationship between South Korea and North Korea is unique in modern world history. The Korean people are perhaps the only ethnically homogeneous nation in the world living in two separate states in the same territorial sphere. Until the end of the cold war there were two more such peoples -- the Germans and the Vietnamese, but the Vietnamese division was resolved by the joint action of the armed revolt of the South Vietnamese communists and North Vietnam, while the German division was ended

After Brussels, President Obama’s strategy of gradually degrading the Islamic State group looks terribly risky. And much too slow.　Yes, IS has lost around 40 percent of the territory it seized in Syria and Iraq, much of it retaken by Kurdish forces with U.S. air support. But it still holds the cities at its heart: Raqqa in eastern Syria and the major urban area of Mosul in northern Iraq. Right now, it appears unlikely that either will be liberated in the near term.　That cross-border territorial

Astronomer Fred Hoyle famously quipped in 1982 that the odds of a simple living thing assembling itself from inanimate chemicals were as slim as the chance that a tornado passing through a junkyard would leave in its wake a Boeing 747.The statement reflects the 20th-century understanding that even pond scum was composed of cells of mind-boggling complexity. Today biologists believe that modern cells evolved from much simpler ancestors -- organisms that no longer exist.Now scientists have used ge

The Harvard education professor Howard Gardner once advised Americans, “Learn from Finland, which has the most effective schools and which does just about the opposite of what we are doing in the United States.”Following his recommendation, I enrolled my 7-year-old son in a primary school in Joensuu. Finland, which is about as far east as you can go in the European Union before you hit the guard towers of the Russian border.OK, I wasn‘t just blindly following Gardner -- I had a position as a lec

Alarmist is when you overestimate a strategic risk. Conversely, underestimating that risk is naive. A sound strategic analysis always falls between these two extremes. It’s about maintaining a delicate balance between appreciating and courting danger.　The latest incident between China and Indonesia near the Natuna Islands incurs the risk of underestimating Indonesia’s strategic impotence against Beijing’s growing maritime assertiveness. 　When China published its “nine-dash,” or U-shaped line, ma