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ARCHIVED The View from the Korean Peninsula with Chung Min Lee and John Nilsson-Wright
Date
Thursday 2 July 2020
Time
11.00am to 12.00 noon (BST)
Booking Details
Free – Donations Welcome
Registration essential
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For our 2 July webinar, we turn our eyes to the Korean peninsula, when we welcome Chung Min Lee and John Nilsson-Wright to join Japan Society Chairman, Bill Emmott in conversation.
After 2018-2019 dominated by the three historic but ultimately inconclusive meetings between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, 2020 has seen a revival in tensions both between North Korea and the US and between the two Koreas. The destruction by the PRK on 16 June of the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong marked an escalation in already tense relations and prompted the usual speculation about motive and the nexus of power within North Korea. On 24 June we learned that plans for military action against the South had been suspended, which raised the question of what those plans might have been.
As usual, the speakers will await your questions, following initial remarks and opening discussion which will doubtless encompass not only North-South relations but an assessment of the situation within the North, the notion of denuclearisation, US-Korea relations beyond November’s election and the implications for Japan’s relationship with both the PRK and the Republic of Korea.
Chung Min Lee is Chairman of the international advisory council of the IISS and a Senior Fellow, Asia Program, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Carnegie in July 2018, he taught for 20 years at Yonsei University in Seoul and spent a decade at leading think tanks and universities including the RAND Corporation, the Sejong Institute (Seoul), the National Institute for Defense Studies (Tokyo), and the National University of Singapore. Lee served as the ROK’s Ambassador for National Security Affairs (2013-2016) and Ambassador for International Security Affairs (2010-2011). He is a leading expert on Asian security and defense policies and his most recent book, The Hermit King: The Dangerous Game of Kim Jong Un (St. Martin’s Press) was published in November 2019. Lee is also the author of Fault Lines in a Rising Asia (Carnegie, 2016). He is currently working on an Adelphi Book for IISS entitled Pyongyang and Beyond: South Korea’s Defense Challenges and Choices in the 2020s.
John Nilsson-Wright is Senior University Lecturer in Japanese Politics and International Relations at Cambridge University, and Korea Foundation Korea Fellow and Senior Research Fellow for Northeast Asia at Chatham House. As Korea Foundation Korea Fellow he is responsible for work on the Korean peninsula, including inter-Korean relations, the foreign policy and domestic politics of the Republic of Korea (ROK), and also ROK-Europe and ROK-UK relations. He has been a visiting fellow at Tohoku University, Yonsei University and Seoul National University, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Agenda Council (GAC) on Korea.