North Korea has transformed into the perfect “Hollywood” cyber villain. From ransomware outbreaks to phishing operations and crypto heists, North Korea is now cited so frequently in attribution reports and press briefings that its involvement often appears less as an empirical finding than a rhetorical reflex. But this ease of attribution—often accompanied by scant verifiable detail—carries consequences, especially for South Korea.

Significance. Observers consistently make the mistake of assessing South Korea’s foreign policy trajectory based on campaign rhetoric and election-period positioning.

So, you completed your liberal arts degree and discovered there were no jobs. You enrolled in a master’s degree in international studies and at the halfway point with poor grades, realized there are still no jobs. What do you do?

Yoon has left the building - but what happens to his foreign policy ideas? What happens to closer South Korea - U.S. relations, closer South Korea - Japan relations, and closer trilateral relations?

Ideas in foreign and strategic policy are no longer formulated in academia and passed to the government in cheap lunchtime meetings or over stale coffee at poorly catered academic-government 1.5-track conferences.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. (Biden Administration), NATO, and European governments worked tirelessly to rally support from democratic allies around the world.

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.

Read about Korea policy for more than ten minutes and you’re head explodes in a cloud of tedious talking points, over-technical documents, and dense strategy papers that have not changed for 30 years. If the goal is to craft better policy, then traditional methods are no longer enough. It is time to embrace a sharper tool: speculative fiction.

Every funded op-ed adds more distrust to the world of misinformation, disinformation, and post-truth society where scholars are less respected and repeated talking points more effective.

The passing of Richard Armitage, Joseph Nye, Henry Kissinger, and just under ten years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, marks more than just the end of an era of iconic U.S. foreign policy thinkers. It symbolizes a broader intellectual shift.