Eye on Korea

The U.S.-South Korea technology relationship is roughly 85 percent collaboration and 15 percent competition, according to Timothy Hwang, Co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Nitra. He argues that the two countries’ cultures and economies have grown so intertwined that no Korean administration has much room to tilt away from Washington. That collaboration runs through chips, batteries, and critical minerals, through electric vehicles and AI, and through GLP-1 drug partnerships with Korean companies.

Hwang also discusses Korea’s startup culture and why the country has produced so many unicorns, weighing the roles of capital markets, government investment, and the path dependency of a postwar economy. He explains why the size, diversity, and complexity of U.S. consumer spending make America the market Korean founders build toward.

On the government’s role, Hwang argues that Washington’s job in innovation is to set the right incentives for innovators. He draws on his companies in healthcare, cybersecurity, and AI to describe how the private sector and government can work together. He also covers how U.S. and Korean industrial policies interact, why AI belongs in the defense conversation, and where biotech goes next.

Hwang spoke with KEI President and CEO Scott Snyder on this episode of Eye on Korea. In addition to leading Nitra, he is the founder and managing partner of Inauguration Capital, co-founder and chairman of Jericho Security, Vibranium Labs, Amber, Exponent, and Ceno, and the founder of FiscalNote. He has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and Goldman Sachs's 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs, and was an EY Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mid-Atlantic region. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard Business School.

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

The United States and South Korea agreed long ago to transfer wartime operational control (OPCON) of South Korean forces once a set of conditions had been met, replacing a fixed date that was already pushed back once. Now, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung aims to complete the transfer before his term ends in 2030. U.S. Forces Korea Commander Xavier Brunson has said the allies aim to meet the conditions no later than the first quarter of 2029, and the two countries’ defense chiefs may recommend a target year to both presidents after their annual Security Consultative Meeting this fall. Meanwhile, the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy assesses that South Korea can take primary responsibility for deterring North Korea with “critical but more limited’ U.S. support.

In Hyo Seol is Professor in the Department of Strategic Studies at Korea National Defense University and Director of its National Defense Policy Research Center. He previously served as an advisor to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a visiting fellow at the U.S. National Defense University. In his July 2026 article for KEI’s Korea Policy journal, he argues that alliance modernization need not mean a smaller U.S. commitment and can instead rest on a redistribution of roles grounded in converging military interests.

In this episode, he explains why OPCON transfer has taken two decades. He points to the scale of the change itself, North Korea’s advancing weapons programs, the shifting relationships of Beijing and Pyongyang with the West, and the different priorities and sequencing of elected governments in Washington and Seoul. He opens up the combined command structure that remains a black box to many researchers and even policymakers, weighs the distinct benefits of the conditions-based model and a fixed timeline, and considers what would change with a South Korean four-star general in command of combined forces and a U.S. four-star as deputy.

He also takes up burden-sharing, the Donald Trump administration’s defense priorities and what it expects of allies, and what institutionalizing alliance modernization would require. On North Korea, he discusses how the regime may read a transfer, whether it would test the new arrangement, and why the status quo may make it less cautious.

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

The Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs on February 20, 2026, holding that the statute never authorized the President to impose them. The tariff era did not end there. It moved to other statutes. First a 10 percent Section 122 surcharge, then a Section 301 forced-labor action took effect, imposing duties of 10 to 12.5 percent on roughly sixty economies covering the overwhelming majority of U.S. imports. Korea is on that list, and Korea is also one of sixteen economies under a second Section 301 investigation into structural excess capacity in manufacturing.

Barbara Weisel spent thirteen years as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific and served as the U.S. chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership from its inception through its signing. Earlier at USTR she held the Korea portfolio as Deputy Assistant USTR for Bilateral Asian Affairs.

In this episode she takes up the legal durability of the authorities now carrying U.S. tariff policy, how Section 301 differs from IEEPA and Section 122 in ways that may make it harder to challenge, the widening use of Section 232 across metals, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, and the tension between tariffing the inputs American factories need and the reshoring those tariffs are meant to produce. She also assesses whether the U.S.-China truce holds through the fall summitry, what it will take to move Korea's investment commitments from memorandum to disbursement, and what Seoul should do differently in Washington.

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

President Donald Trump said South Korea’s nuclear-powered submarines would be built at the Hanwha Philly Shipyard. Joyce Connery explains why they may not be built there, and what the actual construction path means for a U.S.-South Korea nuclear agenda that has grown beyond the agreement governing it.

Connery is Principal Owner of Connery Strategies and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council. She served as Chair of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and was the first Director of Nuclear Energy Policy at the National Security Council (NSC), one of three NSC tours in a federal career of more than two decades that also included roles at the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Connery discusses why a commercial shipyard is not a facility qualified for naval nuclear work, implications of the AUKUS precedent for South Korea, and why naval propulsion falls outside the 2015 Agreement for Cooperation Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, also known as the 123 Agreement.

They also cover the June 2026 working-group consultations in Seoul, Korea’s near-term fuel assurance arrangements, the restructuring of South Korean reactor export governance, what allied deterrence consultation can deliver as North Korea’s arsenal expands, and more.

The conversation follows Connery's July 2026 ROK-U.S. Policy Brief, “Operationalizing U.S.-ROK Nuclear Cooperation,” published jointly by the Seoul National University Institute for Peace and Unification Studies and the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies. Click here to read the full brief:

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

South Korea is running a deliberate grand strategy, pursuing autonomy and freedom of action while keeping the U.S.-South Korea alliance intact and turning the trade power and influence it has built into real leverage, says Dr. Andrew Yeo on this week’s Eye on Korea. In this episode, he lays out what that strategy looks like and whether a country constrained by larger powers can actually pull it off.

Drawing on his forthcoming book on South Korean grand strategy, Yeo details the assets Seoul holds to manage its external security environment and uncertainty from the Donald Trump administration.

That strategy is being tested against a fast-moving backdrop, as North Korea runs its most active diplomacy in years. Yeo unpacks how leader Kim Jong Un is managing his two great-power patrons at once, whether he is playing China and Russia against each other or charting a new approach, and what the North Korea-Russia relationship has done for the country domestically and abroad. He also weighs the prospects for an inter-Korean summit between South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Kim, the conditions for renewed diplomacy between the United States and North Korea, and the role denuclearization can realistically play in U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula.

Andrew Yeo is Senior Fellow and SK-Korea Foundation Chair at the Brookings Institution's Center for Asia Policy Studies and Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America. He is co-editor of Great Power Competition and Overseas Bases: Chinese, Russian, and American Force Posture in the 21st Century.

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

South Korea’s democracy has weathered stress tests few others have—moving from a night of martial law to a presidential impeachment and a snap election—causing the V-Dem’s 2025 report to downgrade the country from “liberal democracy” to “electoral democracy” amid a broader democratic retreat.

Derek Mitchell, former U.S. Ambassador to Burma and former President of the National Democratic Institute, argues that South Korea is demonstrating precisely what a strong democracy is capable of through accountability, reforms, and transparency. Mitchell also widens the lens to the global picture, weighing the forces that could threaten a worldwide tide of democratic decline and the resilience of democracies like South Korea and Taiwan as geostrategic competition in Northeast Asia intensifies.

The conversation also examines how South Korea is managing U.S.-China competition, from the weaponization of trade to the prospect of a Taiwan contingency, U.S. expectations of South Korea in a regional conflict, and the priorities underlying the Trump administration’s call for alliance modernization.

The episode also includes discussion on the warm South Korea-Japan relationship, the more fraught state of South Korea-China ties, defense exports, North Korea, and more.

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

South Korea’s defense industry has gone from supplying its own military to arming others, and “K-defense” is now one of Seoul’s fastest-growing exports. Rob Rapson, a career U.S. diplomat who spent decades shaping the U.S.-South Korea relationship, joins Scott Snyder to trace how South Korean arms sales went global and their implications for the country’s relationship with Europe as it competes for, and supplies into, the region’s rearmament.

Xi Jinping just spent two days in Pyongyang, his first trip to North Korea in nearly seven years, and the message was hard to miss. China is reinvesting in a relationship it had let cool, and the military side of that reinvestment is exactly what should worry Washington and Seoul.

Youngjun Kim of the Korea National Defense University joins us to unpack these developments. The episode begins with the summit itself and what Xi and Kim actually signaled to one another, then gets into whether warmer ties could eventually produce something as concrete as joint China-North Korea military exercises. Kim walks through North Korea’s long habit of hedging between China and Russia, why North Korea’s deepening partnership with Russia complicates that balancing act, and how the so-called axis of upheaval is starting to chip away at U.S. primacy across the Indo-Pacific.

Kim lays out North Korea’s growing uranium stockpile and what it means for the nuclear picture, why intelligence-sharing among U.S. allies has stopped being optional, and where South Korea fits in the region’s security architecture. 

He argues that China is too powerful for South Korea not to continue building its own defenses, weighs whether South Korean nuclear-powered submarines are really aimed at China rather than North Korea, and closes on the commercial side of the partnership and the issue of OPCON transition.

Youngjun Kim is Dean and Professor at the Korea National Defense University’s School of Strategic Studies, a Non-Resident Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, a member of the ROK-US Nuclear Energy Cooperation Advisory Board, and Vice President of the Korea Nuclear Policy Society.

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

Former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Philip Goldberg returns to Eye on Korea, making the case that South Korea has become a legitimate middle power with one of the fastest-growing defense-industrial bases, growing its reach from Africa to the Middle East while recalibrating the U.S.-South Korea alliance at the center of its security posture.

Ambassador Goldberg traces how pragmatism has come to define the Lee Jae Myung administration’s outreach to Japan and policies toward the U.S.-South Korea alliance. Along with KEI President and CEO Scott Snyder, Ambassador Goldberg discusses South Korea’s interpretation of the Iran war, its ambiguity regarding a Taiwan contingency, and its read on a Trump trade policy Goldberg calls “extortionist.” 

The episode also digs into the harder questions, including whether a seventy-year-old U.S. nuclear guarantee still carries the same weight, what the recent Xi Jinping-Kim Jong Un meeting in Pyongyang signals for a future Trump-Kim summit, and why OPCON transfer keeps slipping, a delay Goldberg argues is driven more by the military than by politics.

Philip Goldberg served as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea from 2022 to 2025. Over a decades-long diplomatic career, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, the Philippines, and Bolivia; as Chief of Mission in Pristina, Kosovo; as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research; and as the coordinator for implementing U.N. sanctions on North Korea. Earlier in his career, he was a member of the American negotiating team at the Dayton Peace Conference, serving as chief of staff for the U.S. delegation. Ambassador Goldberg has received numerous honors, including Presidential Distinguished and Meritorious Service Awards and the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award.

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[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]

Wartime operational control, or OPCON, should have been transferred from U.S. to South Korean forces. That is the case Ambassador Joseph Yun makes on Eye on Korea—South Korea must take primary responsibility for conventional warfare on the peninsula, and the alliance may be overdue for rebalancing.

Like and subscribe to the Korea Economic Institute of America on YouTube for more U.S.-South Korea news, analysis, politics and more!

Social Links:

Website: https://keia.org/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/korea-economic-institute-of-america/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KoreaEconInstitute/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/koreaeconinst/

Twitter/X: https://x.com/koreaeconinst

[This material is distributed by KEI on behalf of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.]