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The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread rapidly around the world since it was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019. As of late July 2020, the global number of confirmed cases has surpassed eighteen million, with fatalities reaching 700,000. None of the five oceans or six continents remain free of COVID-19 diagnoses. The pandemic has brought about unprecedented sudden impacts on people's economic, social, and political life. International relations have been equally devastated by the pandemic, precipitating new discourse on world order in the post-COVID-19 era. After having examined five contending scenarios of future world order (walled cities and the new medieval age, Pax American II, Pax Sinica, Pax Universalis, and status quo of asymmetric us-china bipolarity), the article predicts that the status quo order is likely to continue in the post-coronavirus era. Fierce hegemonic rivalry between China and the US will pose a serious existential dilemma to South Korea. In order to cope with the challenge of the worsening status quo order, South Korea is required to seek a sagacious and resolute diplomacy backed up by a broad national consensus.

The hegemonic competition between U.S. and China is deeply rooted in the interdependent relationship which was formed and evolved in the ‘Kissinger order’. However, the interdependence between the two great powers was also instable and vulnerable and the 2007-08 financial crisis revealed this instability and vulnerability. The core of U.S. foreign strategy in the age of Obama, Trump, and Biden administration was U.S. attempt to check China’s rise and seek alternative approaches to revitalize hegemonic power. As China confronts the U.S. squarely, U.S.- China hegemonic competition deteriorated into full-scale conflict around value, identity, and legitimacy of the regime. The most significant change due to the inauguration of the Biden administration restoration of alliance based on democratic values and strong industrial policy to gain competitive edge in state-of-the-art technologies. Moreover, U.S.-China conflict, which is often called the ‘New Cold War’, deepened as the democratic-values alliance is combined with the techno-alliance. Accordingly, China reinforced its attempt to break away from the interdependent relationship with the U.S. The U.S. is an ally of paramount importance for South Korea and China is a neighboring country with deep economic ties. South Korea needs an effective diplomatic strategy to prevent the U.S. and China from being a veto power to its interest, and should enhance its as a moderator or mitigator between U.S. and China.

There are some generalizations about the end of the Cold War which are widely believed but are greatly misleading. The following five are among the most popular misinterpretations of the Cold War’s ending: (1) The Cold War ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991; (2) The Reagan Administration’s military build-up forced the Soviet Union to concede defeat in the Cold War; (3) The Soviet Union’s inability to compete with the West economically left it with no option but to reform; (4) A Western ideological offensive against Communism, led by Ronald Reagan with important help from Margaret Thatcher, forced the Soviet Union to change its thinking; (5) If Mikhail Gorbachev had not been chosen as Soviet leader in March 1985, some other Soviet leader would have had to pursue similar policies and the Cold War would still have ended largely on Western terms.

The Jeju April 3 Incident should be situated in the long history of US imperialist expansion into the Pacific and Asia, a history that began, in part, with the Wilkes Naval Expedition in 1838, intensified during the 1890s as the US colonized the Philippines, Hawai‘i, the Philippines, and Sāmoa, and that exploded during the Cold War when the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The Truman Doctrine and Cold War strategy of containment were used to justify both the Korean War and the invasion of Southeast Asia – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos – the latter an act of imperialist aggression that led Martin Luther King Jr. to declare that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” The path to greatness began on Jeju Island at the dawn of the Cold War. Ever since the publication of Richard Drinnon’s groundbreaking work in American Studies, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980), American Studies scholars have been approaching the intersection of culture and imperialism through the formation of an American empire in the Pacific. And yet the April 3 Incident is absent from transnational, postcolonial American Studies. As the 75th anniversary of the Jeju uprising and massacre approaches, scholars, artists, activists, students, community leaders, religious groups, and peace-loving citizens around the world should come together to learn about and discuss this ongoing history and reflect on how it relates to their own local struggles for peace and justice. Increased international awareness about the April 3 Incident will hopefully condense into a broad movement calling for the United States to apologize to the people of Jeju Island for its role in the bloodshed that devastated the island at the inception of the Cold War.

Since the Taliban's occupation of Kabul, major countries are urgently transporting refugees trying to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and Kabul Airport is running into chaos with less than five days left until August 31, when US forces will withdraw completely. While US President Biden has maintained his firm stance on ending the war in Afghanistan and adhering to the deadline for withdrawal, the US domestic and international community have different views on the US decision to withdraw. This manuscript examines the international community's attitude toward the Taliban and the US government after the Taliban's occupation of Kabul on August 15 through article analysis of using GDELT.

This article explores the evolution of Soviet foreign policy in Asia from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It argues that, unable to contribute much economically, Moscow had had to rely on its military posture to project power in the region. In the 1960s-70s, the main Soviet preoccupation in Asia was the containment of China. To this end, the Soviet leaders pursued regional alliances with India and Vietnam while seeking to engage the United States and Japan in a broad anti-Chinese front. These efforts had mixed results. While the Soviets made impressive gains with India and Vietnam, Soviet-Japanese relations stalled over Moscow’s unwillingness to compromise on the territorial issue, while the US capitalized on the Soviet fears of China in order to play the two Communist countries against one another. Soviet policy began to change in the early 1980s when, in view of the Soviet Union’s growing international isolation, Moscow attempted to re-engage with China. The painstaking process of the Sino-Soviet rapprochement led to full normalization by 1989, opening the stage to a closer relationship between the two countries, which continues to the present day. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev positively responded to South Korea’s normalization probes. Even Soviet-Japanese relations, though still stalled over territorial problem, experienced a degree of revival. However, Gorbachev’s tendency to de-emphasize military power led to the decline of Moscow’s regional influence, which continued through the 1990s. Renewed investment in power projection under Vladimir Putin has brought Russia back to the table in Asia as a generally unloved but respected Asian player.

This article examines the question of how the emerging security dilemma on the Korean Peninsula can be moderated in order to lower the risk of conflict between North Korea and the US-South Korea alliance as they enter into a long-term nuclear deterrence relationship. To address this, the paper proceeds in the following way. The following section II explains why North Korea is extremely unlikely to denuclearize and thus the security dilemma between North Korea and the US-South Korea alliance is likely to continue and become more acute within the context of a long-term deterrence relationship. Section III discusses a range of possibilities that might be employed to attempt to check the security dilemma and reduce the chance of the intentional or inadvertent breakout of conflict (and reduce the danger of escalation if conflict breakout does occur). Section IV concludes with reflections on how the empirical situation of the Korean Peninsula security dilemma—which is asymmetric, insofar as the US-South Korea alliance is far more powerful than North Korea—might affect its dynamics differently than would be expected in a more orthodox security dilemma featuring a conflict dyad of more symmetric power relations.

This article asks whether “principled negotiation” as explained by William Ury and Roger Fischer in their classic book Getting to Yes is possible in the context of negotiations between the United States and North Korea. Answering this question leads to a description of two competing schools of interpretation among American analysts trying to explain why negotiations since the end of the Cold War have failed genres. In the end, however, it seems impossible to judge which of these schools—the comedic and the tragic—is correct. Instead, the article concludes by proposing two principles of interpretation—indeterminacy and entanglement—in place of the two.

The American government’s broad ranging efforts targeting an array of challenges to US interests posed by the policies and behavior of the Chinese government developed through close collaboration between the Trump administration and both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress. Emerging erratically in the first year of the Trump administration in late 2017, the US government’s hardening against China later demonstrated momentum in gaining greater support in the United States. It reached a high point during the heat of the 2020 presidential election campaign as the most important foreign policy issue in the campaign. South Korea has shown more angst over its vulnerability to negative fallout from the growing US-China rivalry than any other regional power. South Korea is very exposed and has few good options for dealing with the intensifying US-China rivalry. Prevailing assumptions are that a tough US policy toward China will continue in 2021 and strong Chinese retaliation will follow South Korean moves to align with the United States in the rivalry with China.

Joe Biden has been emphasizing the value of democracy and the need to defend and spread the political system since taking office as the President of the United States. In addition, Biden continues to emphasize the need for cooperation and ties between democratic countries to check and balance against non-democratic countries such as China. In particular, recently, to counter China's "One Belt, One Road" project, Biden proposed the establishment of a new version of the project led by democracies. In this regard, the author intends to examine what kind of cooperation and solidarity between democracies is Biden envisioning and what effect Biden's initiative will have on the international political order and South Korea's diplomatic strategy.