Donald Kirk

By Donald Kirk

China's President Xi Jinping makes a careful distinction between U.S. President Obama and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It's OK to talk to the former, just not the latter. But China still isn't happy about what the Chinese see as the U.S. mixing it up where it has no  Read More 

Thursday, 03 July, 2014, 12:18pm
Comment›Insight & Opinion
Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk analyses the politics of friendship in northeast Asia amid the subtle diplomacy and dramatic policy shifts over the past two weeks
Alliances and policies have a way of shifting quickly, at opportune or even inopportune moments. What  Read More 

Special to WorldTribune.com
By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com
Alliances and policies have a way of shifting quickly, at opportune or even inopportune moments. What’s China’s President Xi Jinping doing in Seoul this week, and why are the Japanese talking to the North Koreans?
For that matter, how come Japan is revising  Read More 

Special to WorldTribune.com
By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com
WASHINGTON — U.S. foreign policy these days is so confusing and conflicting that it’s impossible to figure out where the U.S. is going, whether in the Middle East, Eastern Europe or Northeast Asia.
The U.S., which has suffered a catastrophe in Iraq  Read More 

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com
Remember the great “surge” of U.S.forces in Iraq that Gen. David Petraeus believed would finish off the bad guys before the U.S. scaled down and then withdrew its forces? It was as though the U.S. wanted to declare a victory and go home.
Anyone would  Read More 

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com
In all the stories I’ve been reading about the Tiananmen massacre 25 years ago, one element seems to have been missing. That’s the comparison between Tiananmen and Gwangju, South Korea.
When I got to Beijing in May 1989 and saw these students taking over the square, I was thinking  Read More 

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com
WASHINGTON — Winston Lord, a retired senior U.S. diplomat with wide experience in Asia, is “shocked” that President Barack Obama, in his much criticized commencement address at West Point, failed to say a single thing about the “pivot” of U.S. forces to Asia.
Ralph Cossa, president of the  Read More 

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

NEW DELHI — The division between India-held and Pakistan-held Kashmir ranks with that between North and South Korea as long-running, bloody and dangerous.

The two were divided at about the same time — Kashmir in “partition” of the Indian subcontinent that gave birth to Pakistan as a separate nation at a  Read More 

By Donald Kirk

NEW DELHI – The United States has to go through a skillfully choreographed diplomatic dance as a prelude to making up with India's incoming prime minister, Narendra Modi.

That's because Washington refused for more than a decade to grant a visa to Modi for his failure as  Read More 

The anguish over the April 16 sinking of the Sewol ferry will never go away. That’s because almost all of the 304 victims were high school students  Read More