Columns

Washington’s North Korea reckoning

Pyongyang is having its moment. The latest issue of Foreign Affairs, a premier foreign policy magazine that often reflects mainstream debates within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, ran three essays on North Korea, a rare occasion for the publication. Authored by three prominent Asia hands, each essay approached the question from a distinct vantage point, yet together they signal something unmistakable: Washington’s strategic assumptions about the Korean Peninsula are being thoroughly reexamined, and Seoul must take note. Victor D. Cha of Georgetown University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) makes the case for a “cold peace.” After three decades of failed denuclearization efforts, he argues that Washington can no longer treat complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization as a prerequisite for engagement — arms control negotiations, crisis communication mechanisms and limits on missile production are what is achievable now. Jung Pak, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, explains how that momen

Korea needs to fix mobility market before robotaxis arrive

Korea’s autonomous vehicle future will depend less on engineering progress than on whether the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the National Assembly reform the mobility market in advance. The government has sustained its goal of commercializing Level 4 autonomous driving or autonomous vehicle in defined settings by 2027 and has expanded testing zones and regulatory frameworks. Yet these efforts still operate within a passenger transport regime that prioritizes control of market entry control and protection of legacy taxi interests. Without structural reform, Korea risks importing advanced vehicle technology within a closed market design. The core of the constraints are legal and institutional. Under Article 49-3 of the Passenger Transport Service Act, platform transport operators must obtain permission from the land ministry. The framework introduced after the 2020 legislative revision led to a discretionary approval system in which regulators assess business plans based on transport demand, service characteristics, and expected impacts on existing taxi supply. Th

Mythos shift

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the cybersecurity landscape, compressing tasks that once required days of research and coordination into seconds. As a result, corporate cybersecurity has quickly evolved into a national policy concern, fueled in part by a new generation of security-focused AI known as the Mythos model. For decades, cybersecurity has operated along a familiar axis: time. Vulnerabilities were discovered, analyzed, patched and updated in a continuous cycle. The underlying assumption was simple: If defenders could identify weaknesses first, they could secure systems before attackers had the chance to exploit them. The Mythos model challenges that premise. As vulnerability detection, exploit generation and even execution become increasingly automated, cybersecurity is shifting from a question of thoroughness to one of speed. The prospect of attacks succeeding before defenders even recognize the threat is no longer theoretical — it is becoming a plausible reality. This shift matters because cyber incidents rarely stop at a single company. Mode