The State of Play in North Korea

Progress is possible, but expect a lot of tests from Pyongyang early in Biden’s tenure.

By
Phillip Orchard
-
3026

In a White House meeting just weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, then-President Barack Obama warned the president-elect that the North Korean nuclear threat would be the thorniest national security challenge he would inherit. Kim Jong Un then welcomed Trump to office with nearly two dozen ballistic missile tests in 2017 alone, showing off increasingly sophisticated […]

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Phillip Orchard
Phillip Orchard
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/author/porchard/
Phillip Orchard is an analyst at Geopolitical Futures. Prior to joining the company, Mr. Orchard spent nearly six years at Stratfor, working as an editor and writing about East Asian geopolitics. He’s spent more than six years abroad, primarily in Southeast Asia and Latin America, where he’s had formative, immersive experiences with the problems arising from mass political upheaval, civil conflict and human migration. Mr. Orchard holds a master’s degree in Security, Law and Diplomacy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, where he focused on energy and national security, Chinese foreign policy, intelligence analysis, and institutional pathologies. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas. He speaks Spanish and some Thai and Lao.