The United States may be facing a perfect storm with an end-of-year deadline for North Korea diplomacy and strained burden-sharing negotiations in South Korea. In this episode, Mike sits down with former National Security Council official Victor Cha, CSIS's Korea Chair and a professor of government at Georgetown University. Mike is also joined by former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, a senior fellow at the CSIS Korea Chair. They discuss how Sue's background in intelligence analysis and Victor's background in academia prepared them for a career in Korea policy. The trio then take a look at the Korean peninsula from a big-picture analysis of the peninsula's place in American grand strategy, to an examination of a possible alliance decoupling of the U.S. and South Korea.