For the record, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did not say this:
The United States has named China, Iran, Libya, North Korea and 10 other nations that it wants the U.N. to hold accountable for alleged human rights violations. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council said Wednesday “too many governments repress dissent with impunity.”
[....] She said the U.S. opposes China’s “growing number of arrests and detentions of lawyers, activists, bloggers, artists, religious believers, and their families.”
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did say this, however:
“Taiwan inspires all victims of Beijing’s totalitarian oppression that they need not be faint of heart. It is for this very reason, this shining example of liberty, that the cynical old men who still rule in Beijing are so fearful of Taiwan. It is for this very reason that they strive to eliminate this beacon of democracy. And it is for this very reason that Congress, through the Taiwan Relations Act, must strive to help preserve a Taiwan that reflects the aspirations of its people.
Video of her full statement here. Taiwan’s government occasionally makes itself look silly. By contrast, Beijing’s government frequently makes itself look brutal, thuggish, and far too arrogant to concern itself with such trivialities as the consent of the governed. What legitimacy does the Chinese government have to rule, and on what basis can it be said that the Chinese people want that rule to endure? I can see that these are questions that some people would rather not ask or answer, but they’re dispositive to the destiny of China, and consequently, all of Asia.
Today, the grievances against Beijing are widespread, yet fragmentary and isolated:
Who supposes that a government with no legitimacy can suppress those grievances forever, or prevent the fateful day when they coalesce, probably with the assistance of new technologies that the government won’t be able to suppress?
Some cynics will say that the growing hostility of both political parties toward China means that it’s now election season. Other cynics will say that the absence of visible hostility until recently could only mean that it wasn’t election season, though the chairmanship of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has clearly has an outsized effect on our national debate about China. The greater truth is that both trends reflect the deep suspicion and hostility most Americans feel for the Chinese government, trends that Beijing’s recent behavior has amplified, and not just in the United States. My suspicion is that the 2008 Olympics and the Olympic torch relay in particular were a turning point in global perceptions, and there is some evidence that the games coincided with a downturn in global perceptions about China.
There are several ways, none of them very precise or useful, to define the perjorative “neoncon,” but if you define it to mean someone who believes that democratic, representative government is superior to all other forms of government and destined by some Hegelian process to supplant them, your definition includes the entire American political mainstream, and for that matter, probably includes most of the developed world.
I believe that history will eventually record this little-noticed policy decision as the game-changer in America’s half-century standoff with North Korea. No one can predict when we’ll see the result, but for all their imperfections of vision and execution, the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Clinton in particular deserve tremendous credit for this.
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe. [NYT]
Needless to say, this will have vast implications around the world. The effects may well catalyze significant political change in China before they reach North Korea, but when they do reach North Korea, they’ll hit like a shock wave for the very reason that North Korea’s extraordinary isolation has created such a powerful pent-up demand to speak freely, to trade freely, to love freely. Clandestine journalism has already had a tremendous impact our understanding of North Korea is the last two years. It may soon have an even more revolutionary impact on North Koreans’ understanding of us.
[T]he latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.
Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.
Here, I want to credit a reader and friend I won’t name, but who read this small post and began to proselytize the idea it raised at multiple layers within the U.S. and South Korean governments. No doubt, he wasn’t the only one talking about the potential impact of so many ideas like this that are only now congealing in the minds of right-brain policy-makers who are usually at least a generation behind this new, left-brain technological revolution. It is to the immense credit of those policy-makers that, despite those limitations, they’re capable of seizing on ideas like recycling old cell phones, increasingly inexpensive satellite phones, portable DIY base stations, and mesh networking, which is particularly interesting for its potential for North Korea:
The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.
Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.
Until now, all that these ideas lacked was a modest amount of seed money for testing and evaluation, and enough political will for governments to pursue them. Markets — both commercial and political — will assuredly be much faster to seize on these concepts once they’re proven and ready for use. And once North Koreans can speak, trade, and organize without fear of detection or interference by the regime, the regime is doomed.
In an incident reminiscent of the Kang Nam I incident, a U.S. Navy ship has forced another suspected North Korean arms ship to turn around at sea, rather than face the risk of being searched in port. David Sanger of the New York Times reports:
The most recent episode began after American officials tracked a North Korean cargo ship, the M/V Light, that was believed to have been involved in previous illegal shipments. Suspecting that it was carrying missile components, they dispatched a Navy vessel, the destroyer McCampbell, to track it.
“This case had an interesting wrinkle: the ship was North Korean, but it was flagged in Belize,” one American official said, meaning it was registered in that Central American nation, perhaps to throw off investigators.
But Belize is a member of the Proliferation Security Initiative, an effort begun by President George W. Bush’s administration to sign up countries around the world to interdict suspected unconventional weapons. It is an effort that, like the military and C.I.A. drone programs, Mr. Obama has adopted, and one of the rare areas where he has praised his predecessor.
According to American officials, the authorities in Belize gave permission to the United States to inspect the ship.
On May 26, somewhere south of Shanghai, the McCampbell caught up with the cargo ship and hailed it, asking to board the vessel under the authority given by Belize. Four times, the North Koreans refused.
As in the 2009 case, which involved the North Korean vessel the Kong Nam 1, the White House was unwilling to forcibly board the ship in international waters, fearing a possible firefight and, in the words of one official, a spark “that could ignite the Korean peninsula. Moreover, the Americans did not have definitive proof of what was in the containers — and a mistake would have been embarrassing.
Wait till you read what happened when the White House confronted the Burmese with the evidence.
Various nations have now intercepted multiple North Korean arms shipments since the passage of U.N. Security Council 1874, which prohibits North Korea from selling weapons. In some cases, the cargo was seized; in other cases, because of a loophole in the resolution that prevents the boarding of the ships on the high seas, the shipments were merely turned around and forced to return to North Korea.
- June 2009: In the first test of UNSCR 1874′s interdiction provisions, the U.S.S. John S. McCain, Jr. shadows the North Korean Kang Nam I, suspected of carrying arms from North Korea to Burma. The North Korean ship eventually turns around and heads home, reportedly after the Burmese authorities accede to U.S. demands to “search” the ship in port.
- August 2009: In an incident that’s never fully explained, Indian authorities search a North Korean ship in their territorial waters after ferry passengers point to the ship’s suspicious behavior. No word on what was found on the ship.
- August 2009: The UAE searches several containers aboard a Bahamian-flagged ship that are headed from North Korea to Iran. They containers are filled with rocket-propelled grenades of the same kind that Iran manufactures, but which are perfect for terrorist use in a less traceable form. And as I’m sure most of you have heard, North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss.
- October 2009: South Korea seizes four North Korean containers; no word on what’s inside.
- December 2009: An Soviet-built Il-76 cargo plane makes an emergency landing in Bangkok. Authorities search the plane and find it filled with weapons bound for Iran, including ballistic missile parts and man-portable surface-to-air missiles.
- February 2010: South Africa seizes containers filled with tank parts, shipped under a false bill of lading, for one of the warring parties in the civil war in D.R. Congo.
To an extent, North Korea has been able to evade the effect of sanctions by shipping its cargo through China, which turns a blind eye to North Korea’s proliferation whenever it can get away with it. That previously included occasions when suspicious North Korean planes were sitting on the tarmac at Beijing, while Condi Rice was cabling the Chinese government.
For all of the criticism from the Bush Administration’s adventurism, its record of enforcement against the North Koreans was flaccid. Recall that Bush himself allowed the So San to deliver its cargo of missiles to Yemen, even after Spanish marines forcibly boarded it. For all the hyperventilations from future Obama voters about Bush’s supposed unilateralism, he decided to let the shipment go (a) to appease the Yemeni government, which probably was worth something to us, but also (b) because he didn’t have a U.N. resolution authorizing the boarding. The latter defense can’t be offered for his 2007 decision to green-light a shipment of tank parts to Ethiopia, just months after John Bolton pushed through UNSCR 1718. But at least Bolton’s legacy has found new life — ironically, during the Barack Obama Administration. Who’d have guessed?
In the short-term it may yield diplomatic agreements, but in the longterm it only makes the country’s political and military leaders increasingly arrogant, determined to be even more provocative so that they can extort still-larger concessions from their adversaries abroad and portray themselves at home as giant-killers.
The above statement, in rough outline, would now draw agreement from the majority of serious North Korea watchers — including quite a few of us who used to caution that it was important to give negotiations a reasonable chance before turning to a hawkish solution. The country’s current series of provocations is a textbook illustration that the leadership wants and needs expanding confrontation and is not likely to decide on its own to reverse its militaristic thrust.
Martin goes on to advocate info ops against North Korea, and I agree. I also think we need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that North Korea will react violently, perhaps by shelling a balloon launch. As the events of last year teach us, more North Korean aggression is probably an inevitable consequence one way or another, as the regime becomes unstable and vulnerable under the weight of its own internal contradictions and blames outsiders for not paying enough tribute, and for the hunger of its subjects for knowledge about life on Earth.
When this comes to pass, the usual suspects will assuredly blame the victims first, including those who were driven from their homeland by Kim Jong Il’s oppression and refuse to be victims anymore. One lesson of the Muslim cartoon controversy was that too many of us would sacrifice our own freedom to appease the intolerant. For some, it is just too tempting to make the easy choice to become proxy censors for foreign tyrants, but that only sends them out in search of the next excuse to take offense. What we need instead is a swift and effective deterrent that will do serious harm to something Kim Jong Il values (his palaces?) with the lowest possible risk of escalation.
“North Korean soldiers have developed a way to determine whether the food that got carried over to North Korea along with propaganda leaflets from South Korea is poisoned by digging the ground a little bit, putting the food there, and waiting to see whether ants congregate around the food or not,” the source said.
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The Washington Post remembers Jaehoon Ahn, a North Korean defector who ended up founding Radio Free Asia’s Korean-language service. Ahn, a perfect gentleman whom I met on a number of occasions, passed away last week at age 70.
One Korean-Chinese man engaged in business in Pyongan and Hwanghae Provinces told The Daily NK on June 11th, “They’re cracking down hard on products from the Kaesong Industrial Complex in the jangmadang, and are reacting more strongly than before to South Korean products, too. There are no South Korean goods on sale openly.
Sources say that in many cases this means that traders are being told to remove tags indicating South Korean origin.
The same trader explained, “Community watch guards come to the jangmadang and tell us to remove tags written in Chosun then sell them. They are thoroughly cracking down on things saying “˜Made in Korea’. Even though the clothes are of good quality, and therefore clearly South Korean, if there is no tag, then they are not prohibited.
So the tags from Kaesong still say “Made in Korea?” Great. And to make matters worse, they’re also putting “Made in China” tags on garments made in North Korea from Chinese fabric. In other words, the whole region’s garment industry is steeped in country-of-origin fraud.
China is still blocking that U.N. report that implicates China in allowing North Korean missile technology to pass through its territory on its way to Iran.
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Strategy Page has a roundup of rumors about the goings-on inside North Korea. Among the rumors is one that holds that China is exerting more pressure on the North. Believe that if you must; to me, it’s just so much Chinese disinformation. I don’t doubt that China puts pressure on North Korea, but I’d bet good money that the pressure is only designed to secure Chinese economic interests or promote people who are beholden to China. I strongly doubt that the objectives of Chinese pressure coincide with U.S. political or diplomatic interests.
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From The Onion: “Pakistani Intelligence Announces Its Full Cooperation With U.S. Forces During Upcoming Top Secret June 12 Drone Strike On Al-Qaeda At 5:23 A.M. Near Small Town Of Razmani In North Waziristan.”
It has become almost impossible to imagine a positive outcome to the long-festering problems that center on North Korea as long as the Kim dynasty reigns, enforcing the disastrously failed policies of the late “Great Leader,” President Kim Il Sung. [....]
So why not just come out and say it?
Not only would perennially hungry North Korea benefit from the removal of the founder’s son and heir Kim Jong Il, the “Dear Leader. But so would most of, if not all, the other countries with major interests in the region (perhaps even China). One could say the same about Kim Jong Il’s own son and heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, who has shown no inclination to jettison the policies he’s likely to inherit.
Why not acknowledge, also, as Washington seems to have done in the case of Osama bin Laden, that there are reasons why removing them dead might be better than removing them alive?
If you’re a North Korea watcher, it will probably surprise you to see who wrote those words, particularly if you’ve read his book. Pointing out that contrast isn’t meant as criticism; I have only respect for those who bow to the facts and acknowledge that this regime can’t be “engaged” into anything but a better-funded version of itself. That said, I will offer another criticism: knocking off Kim Jong Il would be unduly risky and more difficult that the author imagines, and by itself, might not even solve the bigger problem if other generals or puppets of the Chinese feel they can step right in and take his place. I’m afraid we’ll have to kill more than just one man to kill this regime. We’ll also have to kill its delusion of internal invincibility.
What I’d like to learn from this event is whether the conventional wisdom continues to migrate toward the view that North Korea is incorrigible and too big a proliferation risk to leave be. I don’t think the conventional wisdom is capable of reaching the conclusion that naturally follows, which is that we ought to be catalyzing a revolution in North Korea. It’s easy to pronounce this impossible, especially if your analysis of North Korea is still stuck in the 1980′s and hasn’t caught up with how much hunger, black markets, smuggling, trade, and information have changed North Korea, especially since the Great Confiscation. But then, even a year ago, most of the conventional wisdom would have pronounced the revolutions in Libya and Syria impossible, too. My fear is that when it does happen in North Korea, we’ll be caught flat-footed, paralyzed by indecision, and unprepared to move swiftly enough to influence events.
“We urge transparency, extreme caution and vigilance in any business dealings with North Korea,” said Mark Toner, a spokesman for the State Department, in response to the reports.
Remember the days when liberals all agreed that the only way to change North Korea was to strengthen its trade links with Earth? Me neither.
Toner said the U.S. urges “all United Nations member states to fully implement” Security Council resolutions that “target North Korea’s continued involvement in proliferation, nuclear weapons development and luxury goods procurement.
Also on the topic of engagement, Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard are out with a new paper concluding that it doesn’t work:
As an empirical matter, there is little evidence that sanctions had effect, or did so only in conjunction with inducements. However, inducements did not yield significant results either, in part because of severe credibility and sequencing problems in the negotiations.
But on the subject of sanctions, that’s not exactly the position that Noland has taken in the past. He has consistently said that he found no evidence that U.N. sanctions had much of an effect, but Noland has previously argued that Treasury sanctions against Banco Delta Asia worked:
Other measures have also worked in the past. In 2005, for example, the US Treasury Department acted against a small Macau bank holding North Korean assets, including profits from missile and gold sales and possibly even including Kim’s personal political slush fund. This one measure tanked the black-market value of North Korea’s currency, disrupted legitimate commerce, and reportedly necessitated a scaling back of festivities associated with the Dear Leader’s birthday. And Pyongyang got the message: It soon made concessions, such as shutting down the Yongbyon nuclear facilities and permitting the return of international inspectors.
See also. I hope Marcus doesn’t bristle at this too much, but there can be not-too-subtle differences in what he writes on his own, versus what he co-authors with Haggard. Co-authorship, I suppose, inherently involves compromises.
Recently, a friend provided me a bootleg copy (thanks) of an International Atomic Energy Agency report implicating North Korea and its Syrian client in violating IAEA safeguards by developing a clandestine nuclear weapons capability. The IAEA doesn’t appear to have released the report publicly; it appears to have been leaked. With that said, it’s really nothing we haven’t known since the spring of 2008, when congressional pressure finally forced Chris Hill to lift his embargo on all information related to the North Korea-Syria connection. The greater significance of the report, if you can call it that, is the likelihood that it will soon reach the Security Council, thus giving China another opportunity to block, stall, water down, and generally provide further proof of its irresponsibility, bad faith, and malice. And for Russia to grasp at some degree of diplomatic relevance.
The Syria report concludes that all evidence points toward the site bombed by the Israeli Air Force in September 2007 being a nuclear reactor under construction, with North Korean assistance (the site is called Dair Al Zour in the IAEA report, and Al Kibar in this CIA video briefing for the U.S. Congress). Although the report says initially that “no nuclear material had been introduced” to the reactor, it later notes that the IAEA found traces of natural uranium nearby. Syria has repeatedly refused the IAEA access for follow-up inspections, something that isn’t likely to change as long as its “security” forces are fully occupied with machine-gunning demonstrators and torturing children to death, but I digress. The IAEA pronounces Syria’s explanation implausible: “[T]he features of the destroyed building and the site could not have served the purpose claimed by Syria.” It concludes that “the dimensions, shape and configuration of the destroyed building are comparable to those found in reactors of the alleged type,” specifically, the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon.
In spite of this overwhelming evidence, the IAEA Director General would like everyone to know that “he did not say that the IAEA has reached the conclusion that the site was definitely a nuclear reactor.” Thanks for that.
As an added bonus, I’ve also provided a similar report on Iran’s compliance with IAEA safeguards. Read both reports in full here:
Here’s more information about China’s growing impatience and frustration with North Korea:
They seem to be expressing their frustration with high-profile photo ops and by pouring more cash into the 288-square-mile Rason zone, which is completely surrounded by a fence that may or may not be electrified (but then, pretty much all of North Korea may or may not be electrified). Unlike South Korea, expect China to hold onto whatever real estate it buys from North Korea’s failing regime.
KCNA is also promoting these ceremonies quite lavishly, probably in an effort to manipulate the South Koreans. The Chosun Ilbo speculates about the current standing of Jang Song-Thaek, the senior official present. Jang is seen by most as the power behind the scenes in North Korea, but that’s a matter of intense debate among the experts I’ve spoken with. ta
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The Unification Ministry has appointed a North Korean to lead a group that teaches South Koreans what to expect during reunification.
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South Korea’s Unification Minister has again called on the National Assembly to pass a North Korean human rights law. Meanwhile, the left-wing Democratic Party appears to have succeeded in watering down the long-debated, long-delayed human law by shifting its focus to aid. What is implied rather than clearly stated in the Times’s report is that the original circa 2005 bill’s emphasis on monitoring that aid will be diluted or dropped. Adding to this confusion, it’s still not clear what the current version of the bill actually says, or whether the watering down will suffice to get the bill passed.
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The Economist takes an early look at the next South Korean presidential election. I have a very bad feeling about this one — call it Spidey sense — though I’ll predict nothing except that several things will happen between now and election day to completely transform the character of the race.
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Is North Korea turning to sex tourism to raise cash? This would seem easy enough to verify, given that it’s supposedly happening at the Koryo and Yanggakdo hotels. Anyone want to fill me in, anonymously if need be? No matter how libertine or puritan your views on the sex trade may be as a general matter, it’s just breathtakingly irresponsible to risk fathering a racially mixed child to face an uncertain fate in North Korea. This is to say nothing of the obvious risk of getting your Anthony caught in a honey trap engineered by the Reconnaissance Bureau.
According to a transcript released by the US defense department on Sunday, Gates, speaking at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore Saturday. said that Washington has no interest in carrying out regime change against Pyeongyang. Rather, the defense secretary stated that the US is interestsed (sic) in helping that regime become a normal state abiding by the norms of the international community.
This is disappointing because I actually admire Gates very much; I’d be even more disappointed if I thought Gates still actually believed that North Korea had the slightest inclination to become “a normal state, abiding.” But that realization is only the beginning. If Gates can’t see that a coup, uprising, or insurgency is the only way we ever resolve the North Korean problem, can he at least see the diplomatic utility in subtly threatening to support anti-regime forces and sow chaos inside North Korea, and along China’s borders?
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Don Kirk doesn’t see Robert King’s visit to Pyongyang as much of a diplomatic coup; instead, Kirk thinks King is going to be the next American diplomat to get rolled by the North Koreans:
North Korea’s ace is the relationship that its skilled negotiators appear to have struck up with the US envoy on human rights to North Korea, Robert King. His quick trip there, on a “fact-finding” mission about the North’s need for food and other forms of aid, was only the beginning.
Back in Washington, King is saying the North Koreans would like to have him back there – not just to talk about food but to get into the topic of “human rights”, the whole reason for whatever he’s doing. King thinks he’s made headway just by getting into North Korea for an initial visit – an opportunity, he notes, that was consistently denied to the United Nations’ rapporteur on human rights.
A North Korean official, he said, specifically invited him back to talk about “human rights,” and he’s “looking forward to the opportunity”. In other words, while spurning President Lee’s hesitant overtures in no uncertain terms, North Korea is happy to chat it up with a representative of the regime that’s seen as pulling the strings on the South Korean marionette.
The question South Koreans are asking, as they’ve asked regularly over the years, is how do North Korean negotiators manage to con their American interlocutors so easily.
In July 2009, the United Arab Emirates stopped another CMA CGM shipment of weapons from North Korea destined for Iran in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1874, which bans all North Korean arms exports. This time, CMA CGM apparently was fooled (again) by a false manifesto declaring the shipments to be “oil boring machines.
The international security implications of these incidents are obvious, as is the need for private-sector companies like CMA CGM to stop helping serial proliferators such as North Korea and Iran from arming the world. In the case of the North Korean shipment to Iran, it is believed that it also contained parts for the BM-25, a nuclear-capable missile based on original Russian technology with a presumed range of 2,400 miles. [....]
In commenting on the activities of IRISL, former Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart A. Levey remarked, “IRISL not only facilitates the transport of cargo for U.N.-designated proliferators, it also falsifies documents and uses deceptive schemes to shroud its involvement in illicit commerce.
If that’s true, CMA CGM ought to be to staring down the barrel of an indictment that includes some severe asset forfeiture counts.
A staffer for the new, improved, media-savvy Republican Staff for the House Foreign Affairs Committee forwards some interesting video clips of its senior members talking about U.S. policy toward China. First up is Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who calls President Obama’s treatment of the Dalai Lama “shameful.”
Next, Dan Burton contrasts this with the effusive welcome given to the ChiCom emperor, who used the occasion to embarrass his hosts and score points with nationalist, anti-American netizens at home.
Finally, Chris Smith called Obama’s failure to raise human rights issues during Hu’s visit “a grotesquely missed opportunity.”
You can easily predict the reaction from certain quarters to this sort of rhetoric — that strident criticism of China’s domestic abuses and its foreign mischief hinders the all-important goal of “harmonious” relations, to which some of them seem to assign more value that the very values of our nation. This criticism comes into two flavors. The first of these discounts the very legitimacy of the issues that the members raise. Its arrogance is to squander the right of free speech by insisting that the same right should be denied to everyone else. But that is a view held mostly by inhabitants of the political fringes and those who would only visit a site like this one to gather open-source information.
The second view nominally accepts the legitimacy of the issues, but prefers to downplay them while questioning the stridency of rhetoric raising them. When pressed, these Downplayers usually insist that their criticisms originate from a sincere desire to help the United States to acquire influence, improve relations, and ultimately advance its national interests, but the criticisms lack mutuality when it’s China that commits the effrontery. For example, you’d expect to hear these critics express a little more dismay when China it engages in gratuitous antagonisms like having a pianist play “My Motherland” at a White House state dinner. It’s hard to see what legitimate national interest that advanced. Or, you’d expect them to advocate America’s interests to the Chinese when China is repeatedly exposed enabling North Korea as a proliferator and aggressor. If that is happening, I’m not seeing it, and furthermore, China clearly isn’t listening to it. But unlike the state dinner fiasco, you can at least rationalize these provocations-by-proxy with China’s national interests … provided that you interpret China’s view of its interests as a zero-sum competition with the United States. So much for harmonious relations. Meanwhile, as the Downplayers held functional control of U.S. policy in Asia, we have moved further from the realization of America’s interests, not closer.
The Obama administration initially appeared to accept the counsel of the Downplayers, but to its credit, it shows signs of having since learned that its obsequiousness toward China gained us nothing more than an intensification of human rights abuses, more Chinese bullying of its neighbors, and more money in Kim Jong Il’s bank accounts. Indeed, the main flaw in the Republicans’ criticism is that parts of it now seem stale — I mean, have you read what Hillary Clinton has said about China lately? It almost makes Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s words seem mild:
The Obama Administration has been ratcheting-up the rhetoric on China’s human rights record lately, especially since the arrest of the dissident Ai Weiwei, but Secretary Clinton, in our interview, went much further, questioning the long-term viability of the one-party system. After she referred to China’s human rights record as “deplorable” (itself a ratcheting-up of the rhetoric), I noted that the Chinese government seemed scared of the Arab rising. To which she responded: “Well, they are. They’re worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it. But they’re going to hold it off as long as possible.”
That is a welcome change. Deferential policies by both Obama and his predecessor, a slower learner when it came to perceiving China’s malicious intent, contributed to North Korea’s confidence that it could attack South Korea with diplomatic and financial impunity. China obviously concluded that there would not be tangible consequences for its own role in supporting and underwriting North Korea’s crimes, and nothing that the United States has done in the last two decades has really suggested otherwise. The effect of this has been to reinforce China’s arrogance, not its interest in compromise. Maybe what more members of Congress are thinking is that it’s time for a new approach that threatens to impose some consequences for China’s bad faith. Such as? Such as:
The United States is considering expanding sanctions on North Korea to the same level as those imposed on Iran. Legislation, called the ‘Iran, North Korea, and Syria Sanctions Consolidation Act of 2011′ that has been submitted to the US Senate, introduces tougher sanctions on the communist stateand aims to increase pressure on companies doing business with the North. The bill, which is currently imposed on Iran, would expand an asset freeze on companies, groups or individuals selling military goods or technology to Pyeongyang and ban their access to the US banking system.
The bill to “expand sanctions imposed with respect to the Islamic Republic of Iran, North Korea and Syria and for other purposes” calls for the freezing of assets of any company trading technology and equipment with the countries and banning their access to the U.S. banking system.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced the bill Monday with the sponsorship of 11 other senators. Among them are Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME), Bob Casey (D-PA) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ). The bill comes one day ahead of the Obama administration’s announcement to blacklist Korea Tangun Trading Corp. of North Korea and 14 other foreign firms for their involvement in weapons of mass destruction programs in North Korea, Iran and Syria. North Korea has been under sanctions by the United Nations for its nuclear and missile tests.
The bill also coincides with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s ongoing tour of China, his third visit within a year, apparently to seek economic cooperation and China’s support for the third-generation power transition to his youngest son, Jong-un.
This looks like nothing more than a refined form of item six of Plan B, yet another idea whose time might just have finally come. Given the mood among House Republicans, who ran out of patience with China’s North Korea mischief years ago, there’s little question that they’d support a similar bill. The more interesting question now is whether the President is prepared to sign it into law.
Clearly, China is the country whose parastatals and businesses would be most affected by this legislation, which might be why China now feels the need to lie to us about all the pressure it’s really putting on North Korea. Alarmists will predict that sanctions like these would cause a dangerous financial rupture between China and the United States, but they forget that such a rupture would also be harmful to China economic and political stability. Even most Chinese entities that currently have investments in North Korea, faced with the choice of cutting their financial links to North Korea or the United States, would escape any ill effects by simply choosing the former. The consequence would be capital flight from the North Korean regime’s banks.
Bonus points for any guesses as to how this might affect Kaesong.
The bill, co-drafted by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) calls for the expansion and strengthening of sanctions against the so-called rogue states.
Among a set of stipulations in the bill is to tighten reporting requirements in the existing nonproliferation act to include information on persons who have acquired materials mined or otherwise extracted within the territory or control of the three nations.
It also sanctions any entity that is selling conventional military goods or technology to them.
“The continued collaboration between Iran, North Korea and Syria helps drive the dangerous programs and policies of each of these rogue states, and endangers the United States and our allies,” Ros-Lehtinen said in a press release. “The threats posed by these rogue regimes to free nations and to the oppressed people of these three countries grow every day.”
She added the measure will “strengthen laws already on the books which seek to prevent these rogue states from sending dangerous materials to one another, other rogues and extremist groups.”
Chinese companies are heavily involved in mining in North Korea, and those operations are a major source of income for Kim Jong Il, but without reading the bill, it’s hard to determine the effect it would have on those operations. The bill is still so new that the text isn’t on Thomas.
The announcement that Sung Kim will be our new U.S. Ambassador to South Korea suggests continuity if a comparison of his background to Kathleen Stephens’s tells us anything. Like Stephens, Kim is a protege of Chris Hill* and comes from the State Department’s Korea Desk, which has long favored appeasement, agreed frameworks, and a peace treaty with North Korea, and had previously been caught trying to water down language in the State Department’s annual human rights report.
My own fears about Stephens — who had been a strong advocate of a peace treaty with the North during the Roh years — went largely unrealized because of North Korea’s recent aggressive behavior, and because of the profound influence South Korean elections have on U.S. policy toward North Korea. Like Stephens, you can expect Sung Kim to represent the State Department’s desire for Agreed Framework III, and you can expect that desire to remain latent absent a major change in North Korea’s behavior or South Korea’s government.
It is disturbing, nonetheless, that Sung Kim’s entire rise to policy prominence arises from the flawed and failed Agreed Framework II, and that Kim increasingly became the public face of the agreement as it collapsed. As of June 2005, Sung Kim was a virtual unknown in Korea policy circles in Washington, and the brevity of his official bio reflects this. The Dong Ilbo reports that his Korean name is Kim Sung-Yong, is a graduate of Loyola Law, attended the London School of Economics, and served briefly as a prosecutor in Pennsylvania before joining the State Department as a career foreign service officer. (In Washington, you’ll sometimes hear talk that the Ambassador to Korea should be a political appointee, as is the case with most higher-profile diplomatic posts.)
Here, in brief, is a chronology of Sung Kim’s role in Agreed Framework II. As you read this, ask yourself if this is merely the work of a civil servant doing the work assigned to him or whether this represents something more like the obsessive pursuit of a fantasy. Read more
The announcement that Sung Kim will be our new U.S. Ambassador to South Korea suggests continuity if a comparison of his background to Kathleen Stephens’s tells us anything. Like Stephens, Kim is a protege of Chris Hill* and comes from the State Department’s Korea Desk, which has long 
