A long time ago, in a university far, far away, I spent late evenings reading dusty and dated international relations texts.
John Mearsheimer makes a lot of sense to me. His work is easy to follow and his ability to communicate to an audience unparalleled. But when talking about the Korean Peninsula, he tends to leave a lot out.
I’m reading acacdemic papers written about Korea from the 1950s. You can tell these papers would have been shared among colleagues, perhaps even discussed in closed-door seminars or cited in speeches. These academic papers mattered.
For a country as geopolitically charged and historically complex as Korea, one might expect a rich tapestry of speculative fiction — alternate histories, emotional futurisms, surreal dystopias — flowing from English-language writers.
Policymakers want something simple. They want a story. One that tells them who’s good, who’s bad, what went wrong, and how to fix it. And they’re not wrong. Stories stick. Data doesn’t. Narrative wins. Every time.
While foreign policy and diplomacy are often used interchangeably (particularly in America), they refer to distinct processes.
How many International Relations (IR) professors have used Google’s new AI tool NotebookkLM? Just wondering, because it basically makes what you do everyday, absolutely pointless!
Single sentence summary
We rarely think deeply about the term middle power, and are prone to ignore its influence, so could using the term blind analysts to changes in South Korea’s foreign policy?
Two decades ago, South Korea was rarely called a middle power. Today, it invites ridicule to suggest South Korea is anything but a middle power.
