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The Korea Times

Entertainment & Arts

SCMP
Asia

The Korea Times

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Columnists

2. John Burton

Lessons of Euromissile crisis

In the early 1980s, Western Europe was engulfed in a political crisis over the U.S. deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles to counter a move by the Soviet Union to base SS-20 theater ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe. I'm reminded of the lessons that event, known as the Euromissile crisis, holds as South Korea confronts China's opposition over the planned deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system to counter North Korea’s nuclear program.

2016-08-10 16:56

North Korea is often described as being unpredictable, but much the same can be said about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump when he is talking about North Korea.

2016-07-27 16:50

Oops...I did it again

The sudden announcement that Korea has a new national slogan - Creative Korea - shows once again the pitfalls of leaving international branding decisions to a bunch of insular bureaucrats. For a country that now proclaims it is “creative,” the process reinforces the perception that Korea lacks creativity when it comes to branding itself. We have been down this road many times before with embarrassing results. “I.Seoul.U,” anyone?

2016-07-13 16:19

Korea in an uncertain world

“Stop the World - I Want to Get Off” was the name of a 1960s Broadway musical. It also sums my feelings in this year of Trump and Brexit. What the world - at least the developed part of it - is witnessing is a populist backlash against three global trends that have accelerated since the early 1980s.

2016-06-29 16:45

Clinton and North Korea

Korea watchers in Washington DC are debating what policy Hillary Clinton will adopt toward North Korea if she is elected the next president of the United States as I found out during a recent visit to the nation's capital. Her stance is being closely watched since North Korea is likely to receive a higher priority in her administration than it did under President Barack Obama, who pursued what has been called a position of “strategic patience” by largely ignoring the North Korean issue for eight years as he focused on dealing with the growing power and possible nuclear breakout of Iran in th...

2016-06-15 16:27

To paraphrase Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca: I was shocked, shocked to learn that the foreign media scrum that recently descended on Pyongyang to cover the Korean Worker's Party was subject to tight control by their minders. This at least appeared to be news to the 130 foreign journalists who were invited to North Korea, judging by the kvetching they expressed on social media and which rapidly become a dominant theme in their coverage.

2016-05-18 16:44

Korea's economic frog

I spoke recently with a former presidential economic advisor who compared the economic situation in 1997 with the current one. While the corporate debt crisis in 1997 led to a sudden economic implosion, he predicted a gradual deterioration in economic conditions this time. “It's like the famous story of the frog being slowly boiled alive in a pot of water. He only realizes too late what is happening.”

2016-05-04 16:17

Social democratic moment?

Has the progressive wave that swept the left-wing Syriza party into power in Greece, elected Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the British Labor Party, and supported the insurgency of Bernie Sanders as the U.S. Democratic Party presidential candidate reached Korea? That would appear to be the case based on the surprise victory of the opposition in the April 13 parliamentary elections.

2016-04-20 16:15

Can Samsung become Swedish?

As a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times who covered both Korea and Sweden, I wrote a lot about the biggest business group in each country. That was because both groups were controlled by a single family who dominated their national economies on a scale unmatched anywhere else in the advanced world.

2016-04-06 16:35

Korea's stake in US elections

The most important election that will affect Korea this year will not be the upcoming parliamentary polls on April 13. Instead, it will be the U.S. presidential and congressional elections in November. The reason these elections are so crucial is they could signal a change in U.S. policy on global free trade, which has been one of the key supports for Korea's economic success. Almost all of the leading Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are now attacking free trade. That should worry Korea, which has one of the most trade-dependent economies in the world, with exports accounti...

2016-03-23 16:22

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