Mark Lippert, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, left his post on January 20 last year.

Since then, Park Geun-hye was impeached, Moon Jae-in rose to power, and North Korea conducted over 20 missile launches as well as its sixth nuclear test.

And yet as international sanctions correspondingly strengthened – spearheaded in large part due to pressure from Washington – inter-Korean talks came almost out of nowhere this January, something the South Korean president was, however, quick to credit to Donald Trump for personally.

Yet throughout this one year period – one of the most turbulent