Between Scandals And Nukes Summary

Andrew Yeo, an Associate Professor of Politics & Director of Asian Studies, spoke at the “Between Scandals and Nukes: Navigating U.S. Policy on the Korean Peninsula” event on campus. Yeo began the seminar with the question, “how many people in this room have traveled to Korea?”. After seeing several audience members raise their hands, Yeo then stated that he assumes they all went to South Korea instead of North Korea. He would then transition into talking about North Korea and how the division of Korea took place in 1945. Yeo then stated that his talk would be divided into three parts which include the history of Korea, political scandals and lastly, international relations. Beginning with the history, Yeo stated that South Korea is described as “shrimp among whales” by the natives. This

Yeo then began his next section on political scandals. He mainly focused on the Choi Soon-sil scandal which revolved around the influence that Choi Soon-sil had over President Park Geun-hye. Park would share confidential documents with Choi with Choi even reviewing/editing a speech regarding national security even though Choi didn’t have security clearance. Over one million protesters would call for Park's impeachment and she would later be impeached for violating the Constitution. A new election is taking place in May with Moon Jae-in, a member of the Democratic United Party, predicted to win. Moon wants some variation of the “Sunshine Policy” implemented which led to Yeo moving on to the last section of the seminar. Beginning this section, Yeo discussed the threat of North Korea and how the U.S. has had no serious bi-lateral discussions with the country since February 2012. The U.S. had asked North Korea to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons although as the U.S. waited for North Korea to turn a new leaf, they increased their nuclear