
Commentary / World Mar 13, 2017
Dealing with Pyongyang
Any new U.S. policy approaches or initiatives must await the selection of a new South Korean president, and must then be closely coordinated with Seoul and Tokyo.
For Ralph Cossa's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Any new U.S. policy approaches or initiatives must await the selection of a new South Korean president, and must then be closely coordinated with Seoul and Tokyo.
Experience tells us to discount at least half of what is said during presidential campaigns. The challenge is predicting correctly which half to discount.
The international community should agree upon the consequences of the next North Korean provocation, so that the next action brings it together rather than provides yet another opportunity for Pyongyang to divide and conquer.
Rather than send Japanese ships to conduct freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea, Japan should continue to focus its efforts on maritime capacity building in Southeast Asia.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe needs to dramatically and definitively address the "comfort women" issue head on.
The chances of Deng Xiaoping-styled reform in North Korea may have just died along with the regimes No. 2 leader, Jang Song Thaek.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. North Korea decides, for whatever reason, that it is time to once again challenge the international community by conducting missile and nuclear tests. It announces a "satellite launch" and proceeds, despite international condemnation and warnings of ...
North Korea's new supreme leader Kim Jong Un conducted two missile tests last year. The first, in April, failed. The second, in December, was by all accounts a huge success. But it was not just a test of North Korea's ability to put an ...
Enough is enough! Obviously, the political leadership in Tokyo and Seoul never learned about the First Rule of Holes: When you find yourself in one, stop digging. Each side seems to be going out of its way to make a bad situation worse, even ...
There is an old Russian proverb that applies to current Japan-South Korea (ROK) relations: "Forget the past and lose an eye; dwell on the past and lose both eyes!" The Japanese, it would appear, are eager to forget the past, while the Koreans seem unable ...