Looking Back, Posting Forward

Jottings in 2025 and Things To Come in 2026

I arrived late to the Substack party but am very glad to be here.

As the year ends, I’m grateful to everyone who has read, commented and subscribed. Unless my logarithm is messing with me, it appears Thoughts from Seoul is now on the list of Rising in World Politics accounts—which is all thanks to YOU. And of course I’m especially grateful to my angel investors, aka “paid subscribers.”

Over the last couple years, I made a mid-career leap into the unknown, leaving my comfortable, tenured professorship at Yonsei University for una selva oscura. The leap not only allows me, it forces me to experiment with new forms of learning, teaching, writing and communicating, like Substack.

Subscriptions keep me posting forward, and I am grateful. If you are enjoying what I’m doing, please spread the word; and if you think it worthy, please consider officially becoming an angel.

I thought as the year ends I would take a second to look back, a quick Substack Year in Review, which thankfully only requires making sense of four months of postings.

My first foray came on September 18. A Visit to Yongsan Family Park, the museum-ified US military base in the heart of downtown Seoul, hints at the principal theme of my thinking these days, empire, something I also wrote about over the summer for my essay How To Hide a Chinese Empire for China Books Review. Empire is something I will be writing about a lot in the year to come.

September 18^th happens to be the anniversary of the Mukden Incident in 1931, arguably the start of World War II in Asia. My second post was about another WWII anniversary in September, not the beginning but the end: Xi Jinping’s Military Parade on September 3^rd celebrating victory over Fascism and Japan in 1945. In I Watched This Kim Jong Un Documentary So You Don’t Have To, I examined the (DPRK state media projection of the) experience of the North Korean guest of honor, finding intriguing contrasts in Kim’s closeness to Putin versus the aloofness with Xi.

The Beijing parade was fascinating for me to watch and reflect upon from a historical point of view. I also wrote an essay on the Cold War muscle memory—and atrophy—in Beijing’s Parade May Not Be the Show of Unity That It Seems, published by New Lines Magazine.

In retrospect, I think one thing I got wrong in my parade-ology was underestimating the degree of anti-Japanese sentiment generated domestically within China by the campaign around the event—a factor that may be fueling the current Sino-Japanese tensions.

Oh, speaking of Sino-Japanese tensions, I just made my Korean YouTube debut! I was invited as a guest on a great show, 교양이를 부탁해, talking about the Takaichi Defends Taiwan spat with Beijing. You can watch here (in English w/ Korean subtitles). A second episode will drop in January talking about Korean Peninsula security, the US-ROK alliance, and nuclear submarines. Stay tuned.

Ok back to Substack. My goal starting in October was a post a week, and I pretty much kept that streak through to now. Looking back, the posts cluster around a discrete set of topics and events.

Some posts were textual exegesis trying, like everyone else, to make sense of US foreign policy in Trump’s second term. In American Mao and His Lin Biao, I compared Pete Hegseth’s speech to the generals at Quantico to Lin Biao’s role in promoting Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. In My Warm Take on Trump’s National Security Strategy, I compared the NSS of 2017 and 2025, reading the erasure of North Korea as a warning for Taiwan, and noting the amplification of culture war on the battleground of Europe.

Europe is an ongoing preoccupation for me, coming off two beautiful years in Rome. Three fortuitous meetings—an invitation from the Asia Society and Sunnylands Foundation to join a stellar group of China experts in Berlin, a workshop of European Korea experts hosted in Seoul by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and SIPRI, and a forum of China experts hosted in Seoul by the Swedish Foreign Ministry and German Marshall Fund—were fodder for a pair of posts (Sinologists in Berlin, Koreanists in Seoul and Getting Along in a G2 World) pondering connections between the Transatlantic and the Indo-Pacific. I also contributed an essay for Engelsberg Ideas on What China Wants from Europe.

My trip to Berlin also spurred reflections on reunification. Tbh I’ve long thought Koreans overthink the German analogy. I’ve nudged colleagues to look at the ‘imperfect’ Irish peace process, for example, instead of the ‘ideal’ German reunification model. But actually going to Berlin myself, walking the streets east and west, especially with Barbara Demick as Virgilian guide, forced me to rethink that bias. I’ll be reading, writing and reflecting more in the year to come about reunification, with Reveries of Reunification as a starting point of sorts.

Unsurprisingly, the APEC summit in Korea and flurry of sideline summitry (and non-summitry) connected with Donald Trump’s visit to the region, elicited a string of posts. Four, in fact!

My curtain raiser prediction in The World System Comes to Gyeongju that the dominant narrative would end up as “America AWOL as China steps into the shoes of APEC leadership” was born out after Trump left before APEC even really began.

In Trump and Kim Back to the DMZ?, I laid out prospects for US-DPRK diplomacy, whether they met or not, using shorthand for three scenarios: Back to Singapore, Back to Hanoi, and Back to Guam. So far, none have borne out.

As speculation of a last-minute Trump-Kim Halloween-Eve meet-up intensified, tbh I thought it might really happen. That’s because I didn’t see much downside for Kim to take the meeting, in a power move kind of way.

But I was wrong. Kim ghosted Trump. He let Trump’s sly invitations to meet in comments to the media just sit out there and then evaporate. Kim never replied, never directly answered the question of to meet or not to meet, leaving us to continue to ponder Why Wouldn’t Kim Take the Meeting?

This is a critical question here in Seoul, where the government hopes Trump will be more successful luring Kim to a meeting in April, when Trump is scheduled to back in the neighborhood for a state visit to Beijing. (South Korean president Lee Jae-myung is heading to meet Xi in Beijing this week—no doubt North Korea will be somewhere on the agenda for their summit. Incoming post alert.)

Speaking of Trump and Xi, my fourth APEC post was a quick reaction to their armistice agreement in the US-China trade war, a truce that has held up thus far. In While America Slept, I noted the historical resonance of their meeting on what during the Korean War was known as the Pusan Perimeter, an irony probably not lost on Xi.

As winter hit, I turned to topics in South Korean politics and foreign policy. A Bipartisan Break in South Korea took the mundane occasion of a ROK parliamentary committee conference to reflect on how the stress on the Alliance is generating a rare source of unity in Seoul.

South Korea’s Day of Infamy is my short remembrance marking the one-year anniversary of the shocking attempt by then-president Yoon Suk-yeol to put this country under martial law, and the resilient response of the citizenry. Can South Korea’s Democracy Survive?, I asked in Foreign Affairs at the beginning of this year. Yes, It Can, was the answer.

My penultimate post of 2025, War, Rivalry, Family, Democracy, introduces my latest book reviews in the winter issue of the journal Global Asia. I wrote short reviews of four great reads mostly on China and US-China relations, plus a long review of a provocative new book about flaws in the US military strategy to defend Taiwan.

Then, days after publication, the PLA held large-scale live-fire drills encircling the island, as a warning to Taiwanese “separatist forces” as well as external forces, ie the US and Japan. The English translation of the war games codename, “Justice Mission 2025,” sounds like a new Marvel movie or Batman remake. But the Chinese term, 正义使命, made me think of the ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius and his teachings on 义战, “just war.”

Not a great way to send off 2025. Let us hope for better from the world in 2026.

In the meantime, I plan to keep posting here, mostly on history, geopolitics and diplomacy involving China, the Koreas, the US and Europe. I hope to start peppering text with a bit of video content—I’ve got a list in my head of thinkers and writers, experts and artists, I’d love to engage in short conversations. I’m also tempted to mix things up occasionally by writing on topics outside my professional lane. Like Basketball, or Surfing, or Buddhism, or Rome.

All to say, thanks for being here and Happy New Year.