Professional Affiliation

International Crisis Group

Expert Bio

Kim was born in Charleston, Illinois. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geography and foreign languages from Clark University, studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and graduated from Central European University in Budapest with a master’s degree in nationalism studies. He started his career as a journalist in 1996 as Berlin correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, covering Germany, eastern Europe and Central Asia. In 2003, he first moved to Moscow, where he became the business editor and a columnist for The Moscow Times. From 2006 to 2010, he reported on Russian energy giant Gazprom and Putin’s government for Bloomberg News. He later covered the Ukraine conflict for BuzzFeed, Newsweek and Germany’s Zeit Online and became a regular contributor to Slate and Reuters. He joined National Public Radio as Moscow correspondent in 2016.

Expertise

• Cold War
• Democracy
• History
• Security and Defense
• U.S. Politics
• Europe
• Russia and Eurasia

Wilson Center Project

Converging Worlds: How Globalization Destroyed the Soviet Union and Turned on the West

Project Summary

Kim argues that the explanation for today’s crisis of democracy is the same as for the collapse of Communism 30 years ago: convergence. The flows and pressures of globalization that first brought down the Soviet empire are now releasing authoritarian currents into the Western mainstream. Following the Cold War, the underlying assumption in the West was that eastern Europeans would become more like us—in their values and politics, economies and business practices, popular culture and consumer habits. Many in the West could not imagine that convergence might also imply meeting our former rivals somewhere halfway. In their certainty of being on the right side of history, people in the West were blinded to the possibility that their societies could become more like those that had emerged from behind the Iron Curtain.