Axel Berkofsky
North Korea will continue to remain East Asia’s trouble-maker. Pyongyang’s active missile and nuclear programs leave the region’s main powers - China, Japan, South Korea and the ‘offshore balancer’...
Japan is facing hard times. Domestic politics is stuck in a stalemate and is as ever replacing Prime Minister every 12-18 months. Economic growth remains sluggish, the country is burdened with public...
China matters globally. Not only in international trade and economics, but also and increasingly in international politics and security, be in East Asia, Central Asia and further away from home in...
2010 was a bad year for the Korean Peninsula. Unless there are dramatic policy changes in North Korea related to the development of its missile and nuclear programs, 2011 could become an equally...
From September 2009 to May 2010, Japan-US relations were dominated by a controversy regarding a 2006 base relocation agreement – the so-called “Futenma issue”. Whereas Japan’s newly-elected...
Gone are the days when Brussels and Beijing referred to each other as ‘strategic partners’ – a formula ‘invented’ in 2003 to pay tribute to the admittedly impressive expansion of EU-Chinese...
In 2010, Japan and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK - hereafter North Korea) are as far away as ever from maintaining anything resembling “normal” relations, let alone official...
Yukio Hatoyama whose Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide general elections victory over the incumbent Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) 9 months ago announced to resign yesterday citing his...
This paper will seek to do two things: Firstly providing the reader with an overview and an analysis of the EU’s political, economic and security relations with Japan, China and North Korea.
What...
Japan has experienced a political earthquake last Sunday. Japan’s 45th Lower House elections marked the end of almost 54 years of uninterrupted rule of the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP). The...
The EU's North Korea policies do not hit the headlines. That is mainly due to the fact that Brussels is not part of the so-called 6-Party Talks, a multilateral forum established in 2003 to convince...
Notwithstanding the recent cancellation of the EU-China summit, the amount of EU political and diplomatic energy and resources invested into expanding relations with Beijing is second to none on the...