Politics
Worlds Apart: The Two Koreas After Seven Decades of Separation
This article is for subscribers only.
While tensions have eased as President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un prepare to meet for a summit in Vietnam, any prospect of unifying the divided peninsula remains distant and daunting.
Since being divided at the end of World War II and ravaged by conflict in the 1950s, North and South Korea have taken radically different political and economic paths. The South is now a robust democracy that plays a key role in the world economy, while the North is an impoverished dictatorship that presents an outsize military threat.