Smooth Sailing Ahead or Rocky Waters?: A Look at U.S.-Korea Relations in the 21st Century

By Michelle Kwon

Photo taken by The Brookings Institution

At a 2013 Georgetown University dean’s symposium, former Minister of Trade Bark Tae-ho highlighted South Korea’s three trade-related goals: revitalize trade and exports with the United States, increase the number of free trade agreements South Korea enters into, and secure continued market competitiveness via foreign investments. This three-pronged approach provides Korea the increasing momentum to secure its position as a leader within the Asia Pacific, and pursue a greater, more aggressive trade policy agenda in the 21^st century[1]; a successful conclusion and reception of the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) represents the first necessary step in helping Korea achieve its short-term and long-term goal. 

Life as a Peninsula, Part I: The Five Korean Wars

By John Lee

The following is part of an occasional series where we will analyze the history of the Korean peninsula as a geographic space. Part One takes a look at the peninsula’s position between the Asian continent and the western Pacific and how wars have shaped Korea’s position therein.

Geography does not make its own history, but it shapes history’s contours and colors in its definitions. Belgian historian Henri Pirenne famously argued that the Mediterranean Sea had existed as a single cultural and economic unit from Roman times onward until two seismic events in the eighth century – the rise of Islam on one side of the Sea and Charlemagne’s consolidation of Christendom on the other – split the Mediterranean into two distinct civilizational zones for rest of history. Though Pirenne’s thesis has been critiqued from multiple angles, his work helped lay the roots of the Annales School of historical analysis that emphasizes long-term perspectives into oft-overlooked structures such as geographic space.

The Korean peninsula can attract a similar line of analysis. Ever since the thirteenth century, the peninsula has lain between two distinct geographic zones. On one side