Why did nuclear cooperation between the United States and North Korea collapse after nearly a decade under the Agreed Framework? Using spoiler theory, this article explains how domestic political opposition can undermine the implementation of nuclear agreements between adversarial states. It argues that when domestic spoilers gain influence over implementation decisions, they are able to disrupt efforts to sustain cooperation. Analyzing the 1994-2002 Agreed Framework, the article focuses on United States-side spoilers and shows that during the Clinton administration, deal custodians contained domestic opposition and maintained cooperation despite persistent resistance. After 2001, however, opponents of engagement captured key implementation levers, and cooperation unraveled. The collapse of the Agreed Framework was thus largely the result of spoiler intervention rather than an unavoidable response to North Korean noncompliance.
South Korea presents a puzzle for threat-centered accounts of allied nuclear politics. Why did South Korea advance into covert state-directed exploration of a nuclear weapons option before North Korea possessed nuclear weapons, yet refrain from renewed state-directed pursuit after North Korea built a substantial nuclear arsenal and posed a grave nuclear threat? This article develops a credibility-constraint framework to explain recurrent nuclear-option salience and variation in whether such salience converts into state-directed pursuit. Extended deterrence simultaneously reassures allies against external threats and constrains nuclear autonomy through alliance governance and associated legal, technological, and nonproliferation restraints. Credibility-constraint decoupling arises when confidence in US reassurance weakens while these restraints remain binding, generating autonomy pressures and heightening nuclear-option salience. Whether salience remains bounded or advances into covert state-directed exploration depends on the density and enforceability of the restraint architecture, access to weapons-usable fissile-material pathways, and domestic political institutions. The framework explains why covert option-building emerged in the 1970s, whereas recurrent nuclear-option salience has remained politically bounded in the contemporary period. This divergence reflects the relatively permissive institutional and technological environment of the 1970s, in contrast to denser restraints, restricted material access, and greater institutional scrutiny in the contemporary period. Threat severity and reassurance credibility alone are therefore insufficient to explain variation in allied nuclear politics. By incorporating the restraint architecture, the framework moves beyond binary accounts that oppose alliance reliance to nuclear proliferation and shows how extended deterrence structures the salience, political expression, and conditional conversion of nuclear options.
Since its revival in 2017, the U.S.-Japan-India-Australia Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) has continued to operate across multiple changes of government in its member states despite the absence of legally binding security commitments, and has extended its cooperation into a range of functional domains. Yet it has never developed into a defense pact carrying mutual-defense obligations, nor into a more tightly binding security-cooperation mechanism. This article understands the Quad as a low-commitment minilateral security arrangement and proposes "platformization without high commitment" as a middle-range analytical framework. The framework explains why a single institutional design can both sustain cooperation under conditions of pronounced divergence in members' preferences and, at the same time, make it difficult for the mechanism to move beyond its existing boundaries into domains that would require members to make explicit security commitments. The article argues that the institutional resilience of platformization derives from the combined operation of three mechanisms-political anchoring, network support, and functional endorsement-rather than from shared threat perception or U.S. leadership alone. At the same time, differences among members in their security concerns and risk assessments, the functional division of labor among Indo-Pacific security mechanisms, and the Quad's deliberate restraint in avoiding the appearance of an exclusive military bloc together limit its functional expansion. Through process tracing of the Quad's evolution from 2017 to 2026, the article shows that the low-commitment design has allowed the Quad to convert member differences into manageable institutional conditions and thereby sustain cooperation; but the same institutional features also delimit its role in collective defense, collective enforcement, and high-risk crisis response.
This article examines the adequacy and state practice of employing trade-related measures to mitigate the global plastic pollution. Trade spans the entire lifecycle of plastics, bringing plastic with high economic value and deep integration within global value chains. As a global environmental crisis, plastic pollution necessitates a synergistic approach to international governance. Discipline in plastic trade under the international legal framework not only helps reconcile the friction between trade and the environment, but also addresses the systemic inefficiencies stemming from regulatory fragmentation. With a focus on three key processes: the Plastic Waste Amendments to the Basel Convention, the WTO Dialogue on Plastic Pollution and Environmentally Sustainable Plastics Trade, and the negotiations toward an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, this paper examines the basic paradigms of plastic trade governance and analyzes the deficiencies and geo-economic obstacles it faces. Given the consideration of global plastic governance's high reliance on state participation, the paper further takes China as a primary case study, analyzing approaches for China to participate in plastic trade governance with the model of foreign-related rule of law.
ABSTRACT This study analyzes portal‐mediated framing of China‐related coverage in South Korea by examining 37,164 news articles collected from two major portal platforms (Naver and Daum) from 2014 to 2024. Using TF–IDF vectorization and K‐means clustering, the analysis identifies three recurring thematic frames: (1) economic sanctions and export controls (38.5%), (2) US–China technology competition (35.4%), and (3) the Korea–US alliance and military cooperation (26.1%). Time‐series patterns in these clusters align with major geopolitical junctures (e.g., THAAD, the US–China trade war, and the COVID‐19 period). Correlation analyses with survey indicators show strong temporal associations between framing frequencies and public attitudes (e.g., pandemic‐related keywords and distrust toward China, r = 0.91), consistent with a mutually reinforcing dynamic rather than a definitive one‐way causal effect. The study theorizes these coexisting patterns as “compound framing” and interprets them as a discursive manifestation of South Korea's structural duality as an East Asian middle power.
