In Dobong-gu in northeast Seoul, the Seoul Robot & AI Museum (Seoul: RAIM), which was built mostly by robots and drones, is nearing completion. Scheduled to open this fall, the museum represents a daring effort to integrate robotics into the construction of a public building. Experiments in robotics development and implementation are active in South Korea and hold the potential to turn the country into the undisputed leader in robotics. In 2021, South Korea ranked first in the world in robot de

President Yoon Suk Yeol completed a surprise visit to Tokyo last week. The two leaders of South Korea and Japan agreed to finish the 12-year-old confrontation and open a cooperative relationship toward the future. As a result, GSOMIA, or the Military Information Protection Agreement, was normalized. Japan will lift export restrictions on Korea, while Korea will drop its WTO complaint over Japan's unfair trade practices. Japan welcomed the Korean government's proposal for a significant

In the brief but spectacular collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, we may just have witnessed the best banking crisis ever. It might even have been useful. Nobody got seriously hurt, except bank executives who made bad decisions and shareholders who weren't paying attention. Those Silicon Valley libertarians who spent years demanding that government get out of the way earned their comeuppance when they begged the Federal Reserve to save them. "Where is (Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H.) Powe

According to newspaper reports, today’s young people in Korea feel lucky and proud to be born in South Korea. There is a plethora of reasons. For example, recently, the United Nations dubbed South Korea as a developed country, which suits the country in every sense. Indeed, South Korea has now become a fully developed, advanced country both economically and technologically. South Korea’s economy is the 4th largest in Asia and 13th in the world. Its military power, too, ranks 6th out

Fifty years ago this month, in March 1973, the Bretton Woods arrangement of fixed exchange rates was abandoned, and the world’s major currencies -- including the US dollar, pound, yen, and Deutsche Mark -- were allowed to float. At the time, the system’s demise was generally considered a policy failure. But the shift from fixed to flexible exchange rates was probably inevitable. The international monetary system that was designed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, helped lay t

There was a time, only a few short years ago, when Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman thought Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was worse than Adolf Hitler. “I believe that the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good,” Prince Mohammed told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a 2018 interview. Hitler may have tried to conquer Europe, he said, but Iran is “trying to conquer the world.” Contrast those alarmist words with a dip

Ken Salazar, the US ambassador to Mexico, met with the Los Angeles Tiems for more than an hour while visiting California in November. Her was eager to talk up the celebrations surrounding the US-Mexico diplomacy bicentennial. We were eager to talk about the border. The pas de deuk featured a lot of platitudes, a couple of tense moments, and a number I can't shake: 13,000. That was the estimate Salazar gave for the number of Mexicans who were studying at our universities at the time. Many of

It is exactly one month ago that I gave a speech on the eve of the Munich Security Conference. Since then, so many remarkable things have happened -- and have happened so fast -- that it is worth comparing my predictions of a month ago with the actual developments. The biggest changes have occurred in the global climate system. By this, I mean actual climate events and climate scientists’ understanding of those events. The main message I wanted to convey in Munich was that the global clima

Since the dawn of international politics, smaller states have faced the formidable challenge of navigating great-power rivalries. Today, it is the geopolitical contest between the United States and China that has compelled countries to balance their competing national interests. Toward which side they gravitate depends on domestic and external circumstances. Consider the Philippines, which has an interest in maintaining both its growing economic ties with neighboring China as well as its half-

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s controversial speech on the 104th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement prompted me to watch two movies: “A Resistance” and “Anarchist from Colony.” Both are based on the heart-wrenching fate of courageous Koreans who as teenagers joined the massive anti-Japanese protests of March 1, 1919. A presidential speech customarily marks the watershed event. Yoon, no stranger to delivering fuzzy logic, kept his first March 1 address so

Following a year of halting negotiations, six of Turkey’s opposition parties have finally united behind a single presidential candidate in the election this May, with the hope of ending Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic and repressive two-decade rule. This month, the so-called Table of Six converged on Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the social democratic and secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), after having sidelined younger, more charismatic contenders s

In the late 19th and early 20th century, foreign adventurers, reporters and missionaries visited Joseon, which is now Korea. During their stay in the “Land of the Morning Calm,” they wrote some penetrating accounts describing pre-modern Korea. Some of them were favorable remarks, and others were somewhat negative observations, though amusing. For example, they unanimously praised the Korean people’s exquisite handcrafts such as pottery, and their superb skills at archery. They

Too many people are dying every week in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and millions are living in fear and hopelessness. The world’s response has been characterized by too many statements and too little action. That must change. We in the European Union and the wider international community need to do more. We know that people around the world expect us to work for peace, justice and international law everywhere. But to act successfully, we first must be honest with each

A year ago, two of us (Fedyk and Hodson) co-authored a commentary arguing that Russians would not rise up to stop President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. There was too much suppression of dissent in Putin’s Russia, we noted, and too much real support for the war among the public. That assessment proved correct. Still, there is a lingering question: What role are Russian “opposition” parties playing in the conflict? While Russian opposition figures like the jailed