President Park Geun-hye once again returned to her main foreign policy doctrine, the Northeast Asian Peace and Cooperation Initiative, and urged the leaders of the four powers and North Korea in Northeast Asia to join her initiative in her speech at the ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Korean National Diplomatic Academy on Nov. 14. Few would dispute her characterization of the nature of the security environment in Northeast Asia: political and security relations and economic relations do

Twelve days are left until the National Assembly is constitutionally obligated to approve the 2014 budget bill. There are many other bills that the administration would like the legislature to pass before it closes its current 100-day regular session on Dec. 10, as scheduled.This is not to say the regular session cannot be extended. On the contrary, it will probably need an extension, with little progress being made in the budgetary process. Barring a sudden breakthrough in the impasse, the best

Chung Joon-yang, chairman and chief executive officer of POSCO, offered to resign last Friday. He did so well ahead of the expiry of his term in office, which had been set for February 2015.But the news did not come as a surprise. Nor would anyone have believed him when he said he was under “no outside pressure” when he decided to step down when the next shareholders’ meeting was held next March.The days of his stay in office were numbered when Park Geun-hye was elected president in December. Ch

NEW YORK ― The 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy provides an opportunity to consider the shifts in consciousness in the United States that have occurred in the half-century since his death. In particular, though Kennedy has entered the pantheon of American heroes, recent data show that women, especially, have been losing admiration for him as a leader. Why?In some ways, Kennedy’s legacy for women was as progressive as his legacy on race and poverty. One genuinely visionary

On Feb. 15, a 13,000-ton rock plunged through the skies above Chelyabinsk, Russia. It shone 30 times brighter than the sun, and hurtled at 68,000 kilometers per hour toward a city of more than a million people.As the rock broke apart during its fiery descent, it dispersed energy equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT, shattering thousands of windows. Some 1,500 people were injured, and shock waves caused a ribbon of damage extending 88 kilometers on either side of the meteor’s path. Witnesses thought

Call it policy presentation with Chinese characteristics. After the meeting of its leadership last week, China’s Communist Party issued a muddled communique that aroused no great excitement. Then, on the weekend, well ahead of the usual schedule for such announcements, the party released a longer follow-up statement worth getting excited about.It’s radical stuff ― in principle, if not (yet) in policy. Maybe China’s new president, Xi Jinping, aspires to be another Deng Xiaoping after all.The “Dec

The celebration of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address offers an opportunity not simply to memorialize an extraordinary speech; it provides a model and a mirror for writing and speechmaking today.“It’s only words”: This phrase captures what many feel about writing today. After all, our casual, rapid-fire communiques are tossed off at the push of a “send” button.Within days of the battle of Gettysburg, plans were put in place to establish and dedicate the first national

The idea is deceptively simple: Because President Barack Obama promised Americans they could keep their existing insurance under his new health-care-reform law, Congress should pass a law guaranteeing that they can.In reality, though, Obama was wrong to have made that promise ― and Congress would be compounding his foolishness by forcing insurance companies to keep it. The primary goal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is to make the health-care system more efficient and comprehe

I hate to admit it, but the paranoid secularists who for a decade have been saying Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbored a secret agenda are being proved right.For years I’ve been gently pointing out to those paranoid secularists that Erdogan has been in power a long time already, and if he was really hiding an Islamist master plan ― as opposed to his declared conservative agenda ― he was doing a good job.Besides, didn’t you hear the man tell Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leaders the

It used to be the tallest building in America. It used to be the tallest in the world. It used to be the Sears Tower.Now Chicago’s Willis Tower is second, um, banana to New York’s not-yet-completed One World Trade Center, which was declared tallest in the nation Tuesday by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the official arbiter of disputes over the height of skyscrapers.Council members from all over the world huddled here last week to decide whether the tower rising from the rubble

BEIRUT ― As Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt serves a sumptuous dinner to a gathering of Lebanese notables here, the talk around the table is about who will fill the power vacuum in the region if America reaches a nuclear deal with Iran ― and accelerates what’s seen as a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. That’s the kind of existential anxiety I encountered across the region recently, as negotiations between Iran and the “P5+1” group moved toward a climax. This is a deal that would alter the powe

As hundreds of thousands of Filipinos struggled to find food, water, shelter and the bodies of loved ones in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, China quickly dipped into its world-leading $3.7 trillion of currency reserves and came up with … all of $100,000.That was Beijing’s first miserly offer of aid to the storm-tossed Philippines. By Thursday, an international outcry over China’s stinginess shamed it into upping its pledge to a modest $1.6 million worth of relief materials such as tents and blanket

NEWPORT BEACH ― History is full of people and institutions that rose to positions of supremacy only to come crashing down. In most cases, hubris ― a sense of invincibility fed by uncontested power ― was their undoing. In other cases, however, both the rise and the fall stemmed more from the unwarranted expectations of those around them.Over the last few years, the central banks of the largest advanced economies have assumed a quasi-dominant policymaking position. In 2008, they were called upon t

Social theorists, above all Duke University’s Timur Kuran, have drawn attention to the phenomenon of “preference falsification.” The basic idea is that when people speak in public, they aren’t always truthful about their preferences. What they say is different from what they really think.In unfree societies, people may be too frightened to disclose their actual views in opinion surveys. But preference falsification can also afflict democracies, if social pressures lead people to misdescribe thei

When both the nation’s top justice official ― Attorney General Eric Holder ― and Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy say there is a problem with criminal sentencing, it is time to take notice. When Democrats and Republicans in a divided Congress agree that our nation’s system of federal sentencing laws is in dire need of reform, it is time to remedy chronic problems in criminal sentencing.Congress enacted federal mandatory minimum sentences beginning in the 1980s in an effort to mitigate what

Pending a court ruling, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers’ Union will be allowed to remain a legitimate trade union and exercise its right to engage in collective bargaining and take industrial action. The conditional permission was granted earlier in the week when the court accepted the liberal union’s request for an injunction against the administration’s move to deprive it of its legal status as a trade union.What the court did on Wednesday was to order the administration to put on ho

President Park Geun-hye’s administration says it plans to balance the national budget in 2017, the final year of her governance. But it is more optimistic in its fiscal outlook than warranted, its critics say.Most notable among the critics is the National Assembly Budget Office, which says the demand for spending on welfare is soaring while tax revenues are not growing fast enough to meet it. If the administration has an earnest desire to balance the budget by the target year, the office says, i

The world is watching the ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. They began days after tens of thousands of Iranian demonstrators screamed “Death to America!” as they remonstrated outside the former United States embassy in Tehran.That’s what the world knows of Iran ― its nuclear program, the resultant economic sanctions and the nation’s turbulent relations with the West. The Iranian government talks about little else. Neither does the Western news media.In the background, howe

The Washington Post called Chris Christie’s huge gubernatorial victory a “clear signal in favor of pragmatic, as opposed to ideological, governance.” But the mainstream media used a different adjective to describe Bill de Blasio, Election Day’s other landslide victor. The New York Times, for example, wrote of “the rise of the left-leaning Mr. de Blasio.”Again and again, Christie is being described as the pragmatist; De Blasio, as the lefty. But in light of America’s surging inequality, the label

The ruling Saenuri Party is seeking to amend the National Assembly Act, which was revised last year to make it virtually impossible for the majority party to pass bills unilaterally. The party is also planning to file a request with the Constitutional Court for adjudication on the constitutionality of the law.The present law was enacted toward the end of the 18th National Assembly to root out violence in the Assembly. At the time, public aversion to lawmakers frequently engaging in unseemly braw