Category: Appeasement

Hanoi Redux: the Senate, the Supremes & Pompeo (also, Trump!) on the Iran deal

SAY WHAT YOU WILL ABOUT OBAMA’S DEAL WITH IRAN; what Trump signed with Kim Jong-un in Singapore makes it look like a model of clarity and specificity. For all its flaws, the Iran deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), undeniably gained us something. Its inspection terms and sunset clause were serious flaws and might have proven to be fatal ones. Even so, it got Iran to surrender a big stockpile of enriched uranium and make some useful concessions...

New head of S. Korea’s ruling party once said North’s abuses were “not something other countries can intervene in”

ON SATURDAY, SOUTH KOREA’S RULING “DEMOCRATIC” PARTY PICKED LEE HAE-CHAN as its new Chairman. Lee, who previously served as Prime Minister under Roh Moo-hyun, promised “unwavering efforts toward … inter-Korean peace.” The Joongang Ilbo calls him “a staunch liberal.” Lee replaces Choo Mi-ae, another “liberal” who was fond of making public threats to sue opposition politicians for criminal libel. In South Korea, the term is also broad enough to include the President’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, who as far...

If the deal-maker didn’t make a deal & the peace-maker didn’t make peace, could Twitter be wrong?

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually believe that Agreed Framework III proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. It often seems that everyone on Twitter but me belongs to one of these tribes, which...

The Trump-Kim Pact was a con by both men. We’re the marks.

WHEN I FIRST WROTE ABOUT THE TRUMP-KIM NON-AGGRESSION PACT, I expressed pessimism but reserved judgment until I knew more about its vague terms. I now wonder if history will record it as the most disastrous international agreement since Molotov-Ribbentrop, one that will put the U.S., South Korea, and Japan forever under the shadow of North Korean nuclear blackmail, forever break the global nonproliferation regime, mark the beginning of the end of South Korea’s experiment with liberal democracy, and put us...

Agreed Framework III: A fisking

Yesterday, I said the best we could hope for from the Trump-Kim summit would be “a vague agreement that North Korea will denuclearize, without Trump making any concessions for such a nebulous promise.” We have that vague agreement (full text here). It is so vague, in fact, that it’s hard to even say what concessions were given, implied, or will be given in the coming months. Historically, vague agreements are the agreements Pyongyang loves. One the one hand, it will...

Why Trump can’t lift North Korea sanctions unilaterally

THE HIGHEST EXPECTATIONS WE SHOULD HAVE FOR THE UPCOMING CIRCUS IN SINGAPORE are low expectations – that the summit breaks with, at most, a vague agreement that North Korea will denuclearize, without Trump making any concessions for such a nebulous promise. No one deserves a Nobel Prize for trading away our last chance to disarm Kim Jong-un peacefully for more lies, or for excusing Kim Jong-un from the few consequences he faces for proliferation, crimes against peace, organized crime, and...

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s...

Moon Jae-in’s vision for reunification means One Slave Korea

LAST DECEMBER, I PUBLISHED A SURPRISINGLY CONTROVERSIAL HYPOTHESIS that Korean War II would not be a conventional war, but is a hybrid war to alternately cajole and coerce South Korea into gradual submission to the North’s hegemony, aggressive implementation of a series of joint statements, and eventual digestion into a one-country, two-systems confederation. I argued that this plan would only work if a sufficiently submissive government in Seoul yielded to Pyongyang while going only so far and so fast as...

On the contrary, it is North Korea that refuses to talk to us

Whenever North Korea tests a nuke or a missile, like the rest of you, I immediately turn to the very people who got us into this mess for their sage wisdom … You were Secretary of State for four years, had no North Korea policy & invented “strategic patience” to fool shallow minds into thinking you did. At least have the humility & self-awareness to start with an apology. https://t.co/KzYb2R6tEB #FoxNews – Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) November 29, 2017 and to...

The freeze fantasy: Don’t tell us to talk to North Korea if you aren’t listening to North Korea

A weird logic prevails among certain North Korea-watchers, to whom Pyongyang’s every violation of the many disarmament agreements it has already signed becomes “fresh” evidence that we must pay it to sign yet another disarmament agreement. Thus, every time Pyongyang launches a missile or tests a bomb, we can expect a new crop of op-eds making shopworn and increasingly oblivious arguments for a freeze deal that Pyongyang has said — clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly — it doesn’t want and won’t...

Sung-Yoon Lee: Why do we appease N. Korea?

Professor Lee recounts the long history of North Korea committing outrages against peace, international order, and every standard of human civilization, and of American presidents of both parties doing approximately nothing about it. Pyongyang’s countless provocations since the Korean War have never set off a meaningful punitive response. Even in egregious cases like assassination attempts against South Korean leaders or the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane in international airspace in 1969, the United States and its allies have...

Our grand plans to engage North Korea must learn from their failures and evolve with the evidence

One of my cruel habits lately has been to ask the holdouts who still advocate the economic, cultural, and scientific “engagement” of Pyongyang to name a single significant, positive outcome their policies have purchased at the cost of $8 billion or more, over 20-odd years, as thousands of North Koreans died beyond our view and our earshot. I’ve yet to receive a non-sarcastic answer to that question. Yesterday, I salted this wound by pointing out that the largest remaining engagement...

To prevent a larger hostage crisis, shut PUST down now — all of it.

The news that North Korea arrested its third American hostage over the weekend ought to change the shape of our discussion about PUST, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Kim Sang-duk, a U.S. citizen and professor at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST) in Yanji, China, was detained in North Korea on Saturday at Pyongyang’s Sunan airport, a source familiar with the case confirmed to NK News on Sunday. Chan-Mo Park, current chancellor of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology...

Stop the war. Enforce sanctions.

If Kim Jong-un’s strategy is what I think it is, it involves provoking a series of escalating security crises, with a plan to “de-escalate” each one through talks, or ideally, though an extended-yet-inconclusive “peace treaty” negotiation, in exchange for a series of pre-planned concessions that would amount to a slow-motion surrender of South Korea. I say “escalating” because Pyongyang’s provocations have escalated in recent years, and because it’s a sure bet they’ll escalate even more after Pyongyang has an effective nuclear arsenal....

North Korea should negotiate with the U.S.: No Rodong Sinmun op-ed, ever

This was supposed to be a big week for talk-to-North-Korea crowd, a constituency that’s well-represented in certain academic circles and op-ed pages … and pretty much nowhere else. Track 1.5 talks between current North Korean diplomats and former U.S. diplomats were supposed to begin tomorrow — in Washington, no less. This aroused certain Nobel Peace Prize aspirants and their megaphones in the New York Times and the AP about the prospect that Donald Trump want to might cut a deal...

Kim Jong-un flips the freeze deal crowd the Hawaiian good luck sign

Unlike most of the appease-now scolds, Jeffrey Lewis also writes things that are worth reading. He can snark with the best of them. He can be genuinely interesting when he sticks to technology, despite his occasional lapses into tendentiousness. His imagery analysis and geolocation are as persuasive as his policy views are surreal. If Lewis never talked policy at all, frankly, I might never question him, but when he talks about what a swell and moderate guy Shen Dingli is,...

There’s no appeasing North Korea

North Korea has violated or summarily withdrawn from an armistice, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, two IAEA safeguards agreements, an inter-Korean denuclearization agreement, two agreed frameworks, a joint denuclearization statement, the Leap Day agreement, and six U.N. Security Council resolutions — and yet, the most stubborn “engagers” of Pyongyang look on this clear historical record and declare that it calls for yet another piece of paper. Now that calls to negotiate a peace treaty with Pyongyang are metastasizing from the pro-North...

Pyongyang’s peace trap: What is N. Korea’s asking price, and who will pay it?

In 1994, one might have been forgiven for believing that for the right price, an isolated, famine-stricken, and potentially unstable regime in Pyongyang might have agreed to trade a nascent nuclear weapons program for the financial foundations of a new stability. Much harder to accept, given subsequent experience, is how the Bush administration could have reached the same conclusion in 2007, when North Korea’s nuclear program was no longer nascent, and when (thanks to the Sunshine Policy’s unconditional aid, and...