I recently returned from my usual summer stay in South Korea, teaching international affairs at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Every time I visit that remarkable peninsular nation, I am struck by two things, vastly in contrast.
The first is its prosperity and the people’s very clear economic purpose to drive forward to an even better life. The second is its strategic and military insecurity, its acute sense of precariousness, its daily awareness that military power counts. But this time the fact of this dichotomy — the economic well-being of South Korea, and its apprehensions about war and disaster — was greater than I had ever noticed before.
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