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Monthly Archive: August, 2011

August 22, 2011

What Qaddafi’s Fall Means for North Korea

As I write this morning, the Libyan rebels are battling to seize Colonel Qaddafi’s surrounded Furhrerbunker, and the Untergang seems near. Yes, the differences may be as great as the similarities, but the similarities are still significant. The fall of the Libyan government to a popular uprising would have been unthinkable a year ago. Libya was a totalitarian state with no opposition movement, in which subversive ideas could not circulate freely. Like Syria, where recent events have been just as...

Categories Regime Change
August 15, 2011

Light Blogging for the Foreseeable Future

You’ve no doubt noticed the relative lack of postings in the last few months, and that trend is going to continue for the next few months. This is the collateral effect of good things happening in the family and work parts of my life. Unfortunately, as those responsibilities grow, they leave relatively less time for other things. So for the foreseeable future, my prime blogging time — my commute — will have to be spent reading and studying other things,...

Categories Blogs & Blogging
August 12, 2011

Who’s Borking Sung Kim?

So months after Chris Hill protege Sung Kim was nominated to be our Ambassador to South Korea, I’d assumed that he must have been confirmed in the dark of some night when I was too busy to read my news aggregators. Not so: The official confirmation for the next U.S. ambassador to South Korea designate, Sung Kim, is unexpectedly being delayed although it seemed a mere formality. Apparently some senators are stalling because they worry about the direction of the...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Politics
August 8, 2011

Open Sources: Agreed Framework III Watch

On asylum for North Korean refugees, America leads from behind: Some 581 North Korean defectors have been given asylum in the United Kingdom, making them the largest group of all defectors in countries other than South Korea…. The U.K. was followed by Germany with 146, the Netherlands with 32, Australia and the U.S. with 25 each and Canada with 23. I suppose the State Department is worried that if we provoke Kim Jong Il, he might boycott disarmament talks, pursue...

Categories Anju Links