Global Asia Magazine - September 2021

In this issue

After a lull of roughly half a year, North Korea this September reverted to a familiar pattern and launched tests of two ballistic missiles and what it said was a new long-range cruise missile. This time, South Korea within hours engaged in its own display of weapons capabilities, testing for the first time an underwater-launched missile, catapulting it into the small club of countries with the capability to fire ballistic missiles from a submarine. These moves were a stark reminder that the Korean Peninsula remains a dangerous place.
Pyongyang’s latest tests were also a reminder that amid all the other sources of global concern, including efforts to revive the Iran nuclear accord and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, highlighted by the ignominious American withdrawal, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continues to lurk in the background, a force that ultimately must be reckoned with if peace is ever to be achieved on the peninsula.
But as this cover package of Global Asia illustrates, resolving the issues that plague the Korean Peninsula requires a fundamental understanding of Kim’s North Korea, an enigma that has tripped up a generation of foreign policymakers and negotiators and riddled the history of diplomacy in this area with repeated missteps, misunderstandings and failures. The dozen articles on North Korea that we feature in this issue include some of the world’s leading experts on the country from South Korea, the United States and Europe, providing a truly global perspective and drawing on an unprecedented level of knowledge. The articles are the outgrowth of a project sponsored by the Institute for National Security Strategy. We are grateful to them for their support, and for the assistance of Robert Carlin in marshalling the contributions to this package of articles...

Global Asia Magazine Description:

Global Asia is a quarterly publication of the East Asia Foundation. The foundation, established in Seoul in January 2005, strives to promote peace, prosperity, security and sustainability in East Asia by creating an open and creative forum for the exchange of ideas on regional co-operation and integration, among other goals.
The mission we have set for ourselves with Global Asia is both bold and urgent: It is to provide a compelling, serious, and responsible forum for distinguished thinkers, policymakers, political leaders and business people to debate the most important issues in Asia today.
Global Asia is not a journal with a fixed point of view, or a particular agenda. Our aim is to give voice to the global dimension of what is happening in Asia. In our pages and on our web site, we aim for Asia to speak to the world, and the world to Asia. That is important at a time when this region is playing an ever greater role in world affairs.
There are other fine publications on international affairs. What sets us apart is our focus: Asia. We believe that the world is moving into “the Age of Asia,” to borrow a phrase from one of the articles in the inaugural issue of Global Asia in September 2006. This transformation is not going to occur overnight, but it has already begun.
The region’s dynamic economic growth, stable and accountable political systems, maturing democracies, and evolving sense of community are giving Asia greater weight in the world. These developments will have enormous implications for governments, businesses, societies and individuals across the globe. How that transformation is viewed, and shaped, from within Asia and how it is perceived outside Asia is an essential part of the story we have to tell.
The forces of globalization are having a profound impact throughout the world. And they are being influenced and channeled in different ways in different parts of the world. Ours is the story of Asia’s experience with globalization, and the ideas and debates influencing it. In pursuing our mission, we aim to play a part, however modest, in helping to shape the future of Asia.