Search Results for: sunshine lite

January 31, 2013

The Stillbirth of Sunshine Lite

SO PARK GEUN-HYE HASN’T EVEN BEEN INAUGURATED YET, and her plans to engage North Korea — she called them “trustpolitik” — are turning out just as I’d predicted they would, and just how Sung Yoon Lee predicted in the opening paragraphs of this piece — they’re being overcome by North Korea’s own plans: Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has ordered his top military and party officials to take “substantial and high-profile important state measures” to retaliate against American-led United Nations sanctions on the country, the North’s...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
December 15, 2016

What’s that? You want the Sunshine Policy back? Good luck with that.

If Nate Silver is feeling humble these days, just let him try to predict who wins the next election in South Korea. In the 12 months between now and the time South Korea elects its next president, the ruling Saenuri party will probably break up. God willing, new candidates will emerge to supplant the dismal fare it has served until now. Divisions between the pro- and anti-Park Geun-hye factions may or may not heal. Ban Ki-moon may or may not...

Categories Kaesong/Korean Politics/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
February 10, 2016

The End of Sunshine: S. Korea suspends ops at Kaesong, “suspected” of funding N. Korea’s WMD programs

Year after year, and almost alone, I have argued that the Kaesong Industrial Park was incompatible with U.N. Security Council resolutions sanctioning Pyongyang. At Kaesong, “South Korea has 124 companies … employing 54,700 North Korean workers … whose wages are paid to a North Korean state agency.” All told, those fees, taxes, and “wages,” which the North Korean workers probably never saw after Kim Jong-un took his cut, totaled $110 million last year alone. Contrary to Kaesong’s founding purpose of promoting North-South engagement and people-to-people...

Categories Engagement/Kaesong/North-South/Sunshine
July 20, 2008

The End of Sunshine

Don Kirk has some straightforward observations about scholars in Washington, who, remarkably enough, are  still  debating how North might reform its economy, as though the  decade-long Sunshine experiment had never happened.  Kirk saves his most acerbic observation for one of the participants in a recent seminar: Probably no Washington think-tanker has been quite so divorced from reality of late, at least in public utterances, as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. In a recent commentary he held up Vietnam as...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics
May 29, 2006

Operation Sunshine Continues

LiNK is asking for your help to shame South Korea’s government into showing some concern for the 23 million Korean citizens living North of the DMZ: LiNK is amassing a giant collection of “messages to the president” which we shall put on a banner to be delivered to South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to show him that the people of Korea and the world are watching how he deals with the North Korean human rights crisis. Here’s how it works:...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Korean Education/Korean Politics/Korean Society
January 8, 2006

NYT: WFP Operations in North Korea End; A Good Time to Reassess the Sunshine Policy

James Brooke reports: The United Nations World Food Program, which was helping to feed a third of the 22 million people of North Korea as recently as August, has ended all feeding programs there at the request of the government. “Operations are completely halted,” Richard Ragan, an American who represents the agency in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, said Friday in a telephone interview. Noting that government pressure had already forced a cutback this fall, he said: “We were feeding...

Categories Uncategorized
November 7, 2017

The Moonshine Policy failed because Kim Jong-un demands surrender, not engagement

Just before Air Force One took off for Tokyo, the New York Times printed a story by Choe Sang-hun, mourning for Moon Jae-in’s failure to revive the Sunshine Policy, wallowing in self-pitying nationalism, and pinning most of the blame for this on Donald Trump – not Moon, for failing to read the U.N. Security Council resolutions before promising initiatives that would violate them, not Korean voters who don’t trust Pyongyang and don’t want a revival of the Sunshine Policy. Choe...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
October 31, 2016

Why China and North Korea want Park Geun-hye gone

Nearly all of the news from Korea this week is about the scandal that has paralyzed President Park Geun-hye’s presidency, and may even end it. Going by Alastair Gale’s report in The Wall Street Journal, the scandal has three main elements, along with some other (mostly) unspoken elements. First, Park has said that her “friend, Choi Soon-sil, had helped her prepare speeches early in her presidential term.” She has since apologized for this, although I can’t see why. Most American...

Categories Korean Politics/Subversion
January 17, 2016

If S. Korea won’t close Kaesong, let it pay N. Korea in food.

The bad news from North Korea’s nuclear test is that its yield exceeded those of its 2006, 2009, and 2013 tests. The good news is that while the blast wasn’t thermonuclear, it was still hot enough to burn away plenty of policy fog. In Congress, sanctions legislation has sailed through the House, and seems to have good prospects in the Senate. Opinions are shifting among Korea scholars here, too. This morning, I had a chance to finish reading last week’s testimony before the...

Categories Kaesong/Sunshine
November 25, 2015

The Great Engagement Debate: Stanton v. Delury at NCNK

On October 22nd, the National Committee for North Korea invited me and Professor John Delury of Yonsei University to a debate, in which we each offered three proposals for the next president on North Korea policy, all premised on a delusion of grandeur that Donald Trump really cares what either of us thinks. The debate was held in a beautiful conference room on the top floor of the Hart Senate Office Building overlooking the Capitol. There was a great crowd...

Categories Engagement/Sunshine/Washington Views
August 21, 2015

Bullets Cross DMZ: Random Observations

By now, you’ve read the reports of what happened in the last few days, but here’s a quick recap. Last week, South Korea accused North Korea of planting mines near a South Korean border checkpoint, blowing the legs off two South Korean soldiers. Seoul’s response, which I found a bit asinine at the time, was to blare propaganda at a few hundred helpless North Korean conscripts. Yesterday, North Korea shelled the loudspeakers, South Korea fired back and evacuated some civilian...

Categories Korean War II
December 30, 2014

President Park’s unification plan is missing a Phase 2

For months now, we’ve heard Park Geun Hye telling us about how reunification would be a “jackpot” for both Koreas, but we’ve never heard her explain just how she intends to achieve this result. This left some rather important questions unanswered. Having heard so much from President Park about Phase 3 (profit!) and so little about Phases 1 or 2, at least we know that she’s asking us to resume the collection of underpants: South Korean Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae said Wednesday that Seoul and Washington...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
March 31, 2014

Dear President Park: He’s not that into you (updated with N. Korea’s rejection)

In every successful relationship, there are certain things one must not ask the other party to the relationship. No matter how much you may desire it, the answer will never be “yes.” The request itself will not be received well. Depending on the request, the special equipment it would require, and the identity of the other participants, it may even lead to the destruction of property or violence. In the relationship between North and South Korea, it is apparently no...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
December 20, 2012

Park, Lee, and Obama all had big plans to “engage” North Korea. North Korea had other plans.

Robert links to some polling data suggesting the pleasantly surprising fact that not only did North Korea’s missile test fail to swing votes toward Moon Jae-in, the ideological successor and former Chief of Staff to arch-appeaser Roh Moo-Hyun, it may have caused more conservative voters to flock to the polls to vote for Park (or against Moon).  If those voters expected Park to govern as a hard-liner, however, they’re projecting. Park didn’t run as a hard-liner in this election; in fact,...

Categories Appeasement/North-South/Sunshine
November 19, 2012

Open Sources, Nov. 19, 2012

SCOOPING THE AP YET AGAIN, The Onion names Kim Jong Un 2012’s Sexiest Man Alive. —————————————- CHRIS GREEN OF THE DAILY NK writes that the North Korean regime seems concerned about the loyalty of its soldiers. —————————————- WHY SOUTH KOREA’S SWITCH TO DIGITAL TV is bad news for North Koreans. —————————————- I FAULT MYSELF for having been too alarmist in predicting a North Korean famine in 2006, but when Andrew Natsios sounds the alarm, we should take his warning seriously....

Categories Anju Links
July 13, 2012

Open Sources, 13 June 2012

COMMS CHECK:  Some of you are reporting difficulty accessing this site, particularly from South Korea, and my visitors’ log agrees.  I suspect shenanigans, and I’ve been in contact with my ISP, but I’ve just been too busy to pursue the problem.  If you’re reading anywhere in the Asia-Pacific region, I’d be interested in hearing whether you can access this site. —————————————- THIS TIME, THE WOLF IS REAL — HONEST!  I don’t doubt that this is an exceptionally dry year in...

Categories Anju Links
February 20, 2008

The Restoration: More on Lee M.B.’s Cabinet Picks

Lee Myung Bak has announced some more cabinet picks. I’ve already given my strong approval to his pick for Unification, and I like his pick for National Defense, too: Lee Sang-hee, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, will be the defense minister, sources also said. Lee is known for his hard-line stance toward the North. After the North fired seven missiles on July 5, 2006, the Blue House called it “high level political pressure.” Lee openly criticized the...

Categories Korean Politics
October 16, 2006

Grand Nationals Call for Reexamining Aid to North Korea

The GNP had been modestly supportive of “engagement” theories during the high times of the unifiction, but in South Korea, the high has worn off. Park Geun-Hye, an exceedingly cunning sensor of the shifting political winds, is staking out “Sunshine Lite” as something more reciprocal than her previous statements had suggested. Here’s a rough translation of her most recent statement: The Sunshine Policy is necessary for leading North Korea toward change and for releasing tensions between North and South. But...

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/WMD