Archive for Appeasement

Joel Wit: Agreed Frameworks “Worked Very Well”

March 30, 2013 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks No comments

Fortunately, Sung Yoon Lee is there to remind us of the reality of Mr. Wit’s sterling record. Depending on your perspective, you may wish to avert your eyes:


Watch Kim Jong-un Orders Rockets Ready to Strike United States on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Some viewers may judge Wit a bit too boastful about the length of his experience dealing with the North Koreans, but on closer examination, he understates his experience almost as much as he overstates his success. According to some reports, Wit was meeting with Kim Gye Gwan in January 2007, and seemed familiar with the terms of Agreed Framework II, which the North Koreans and Chris Hill signed the following month.  It’s reasonable to infer that Wit was, at the very least, greasing the wheels for Hill’s deal.  As late as February 2008, after North Korea was caught lying about its HEU program, after North Korea refused to provide a full disclosure of its nuclear programs as agreed, and even after the Israeli Air Force destroyed the reactor Kim Jong Il was building for Bashar Assad, Wit was quoted as saying that “the level of cooperation is very good, better than I have seen it in 10 years.”  (Wit was an avowed denier of North Korea’s HEU program, at least before the North Koreans showed Sig Hecker an underground complex filled with thousands of centrifuges.)  In his eagerness to bolster the length of his experience dealing with North Korea, Wit also takes responsibility for a longer list of misjudgments and failures.

So if Wit’s approach is the right one, why, after all these years of brilliantly successful diplomacy, is he on the PBS News Hour talking about North Korean nuclear blackmail?

 

North Korea’s cash-for-summit demands put 2010 attacks in a new light

March 15, 2013 Appeasement, Cheonan Incident, North-South, Sunshine, Terrorism (NK), Yeonpyeong Attack No comments

WERE THE 2010 ATTACKS North Korea’s way of making good on extortion?  Stephan Haggard, not widely know for his hard-line views, cites an article in the Chosun Ilbo revealing that Kim Jong Il wanted a summit with Lee Myung Bak, but at a price.

The sticking point was money. How much? According to the Chosun Ilbo, $500-600 million in rice and fertilizer aid, which had effectively been cut from the first of the year, and perhaps some cash too; that was about the price that Kim Dae Jung paid for the first summit. Negotiations continued through November at Kaesong, when the North Korean delegation even presented a draft summit declaration including a resumption of aid.  [Stephan Haggard, Witness to Transformation]

The Chosun Ilbo story adds this important piece of evidence:

In January 2010, after the secret contacts ended and North Korea realized that it was impossible to extract any aid from Seoul, it vowed to launch a “holy retaliatory war” against the South and fired multiple artillery rounds at the Northern Limit Line, a de facto maritime border on the West Sea.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Haggard makes a compelling (if circumstantial) argument that the attacks were meant to demonstrate that North Korea’s extortion should be taken seriously. We now know that two months after Lee refused to pay up, North Korea sank the Cheonan.

Wondering if I could make this case a bit less circumstantial, I decided to consult my archives and see what else North Korea said and did in the months between Lee’s refusal to pay and the Cheonan attack. I didn’t find what I expected.  Although there were certainly some menacing acts and words by North Korea, the threats were nowhere near as extravagant or as frequent as those issued in early 2009, after President Lee cut off aid, and as President Obama warmed up his chair.  What’s interesting, however, is that in early 2010, North Korea was facing a severe popular backlash against The Great Confiscation.

In November, of course, North Korea followed up with the Yeonpyeong attack.

Let me take Haggard’s point a step further:  if he’s correct in his inference, this course of conduct would be a good fit for the legal definition of “international terrorism.”  Some commenters have suggested that the 2010 attacks — particularly the Cheonan attack — are not a basis (not that another is needed) to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, but fresh evidence of a motive to extort merits reconsideration. The key element is that the violent act must have been intended to influence South Korean government policy, and some of North Korea’s statements from 2009 provide additional evidence of North Korea’s intent.  The evidence is circumstantial, but somewhere in North Korea are people with direct evidence, and one of them is probably thinking about defecting.

This Just In: North Korea fails to absorb any of Dennis Rodman’s tact, class, gentility, or gravitas.

February 27, 2013 Appeasement, Humor/Satire, Useful Idiocy 6 comments

So yet again, we learn that visitors do not change North Korea. The tricky part is getting out before North Korea changes the visitor.

Since I broach the engagement-versus-isolation debate, it’s been argued enough times that I seldom hear any new arguments, but this one by Michael Totten, in response to the reliably trite Nick Kristof, is a terrific deconstruction of mirror-imaging by both the North Koreans and the Americans who don’t understand how they think.

The answer to the debated question, of course, is “both,” but we’ve gotten the mechanics of it exactly backwards.  By engaging North Korea’s regime on its terms — lots of cash, no questions asked — we’ve provided it the financial and political means to isolate and immiserate its people, the ones we should have been finding ways to engage in spite of the regime.

What would be the death blow for totalitarianism in North Korea?  Aid workers from free societies — kindly Bible-thumping missionaries from Missouri and Busan, side-by-side with German hipsters with pierced lips and eyebrows — all passing out humanitarian aid in the bleakest quarters of Hamhung and Wonsan, unimpeded by the regime’s minders.  That will only be possible when the regime is so constricted financially that it is forced to allow that to save the residue of its elite.

Update:  Via Spencer Ackerman, Rodman can’t even keep his Koreas straight, so he may also be ignorant of how conditions are for most of the North Korean people.  Kudos to Ackerman for trying to shift the focus back to that.

Breaking: North Korea Still Poor, Ignorant, and Run by Narcissistic Assholes

January 11, 2013 Appeasement, Useful Idiocy 3 comments

I’ve never expected anything good to come from a Bill Richardson visit to Pyongyang, and this visit fulfilled my expectations. A lot of journalists, bloggers, and academics in Washington and New York made a big deal out of this. (It was good for our traffic.) But in the places that really count — in Chongjin and Hamhung and Uijongbu and even in Pyongyang — it didn’t change a thing.  It will not reduce the black market price of corn, it will not improve conditions in the camps, it will not save a single kkotjaebi from an early and lonely death, it will not crack open the borders or let in the truth, it will not slow the crackdowns on defections or South Korean soap operas, and it will not reduce the risk of a nuclear test or an attack on South Korea. It did not free Ken Bae or any of the Japanese or South Korean abductees or signal a Pyongyang Spring. But there was one delightful surprise in this — it did cost Kim Jong Bill his cred.

Maybe this post isn’t a complete waste of time after all.

Just a few years ago, Richardson was in the running for Secretary of State. Sure, we hard-line types have always loathed Richardson, but the appeasers loved him, and he was at least respected by the center-left swing voters of the North Korea Industry. Judging from the tone of the commentary coming from the swing voters now, Richardson has lost them. I usually agree with Don Kirk, so I’m not surprised that he sees the trip as a failure. On the other hand, when the New York Times scores your “engagement” trip 1-0 Pyongyang, your wardrobe has malfunctioned. At least one swing voter, Nir Rosen, was inspired to completely rethink engagement and aid in this thoughtful essay. Stephan Haggard admits to scratching his head at the futility of it all. With few exceptions, those who didn’t criticize the trip ridiculed it.

Worse for Richardson, even the North Koreans gave him the Rodney Dangerfield treatment. Consider: KCNA is reporting today that a Vice-Premier met with a visiting Chinese delegation led by a Vice-Minister of Commerce. What North Korean of any stature met Richardson? The Rodong is touting that Kim Jong Un received a gift from the Chicoms; but characterized the Richardson visit as one to pay “tribute,” and said nothing about who greeted him. (As for Schmidt, KCNA reports that some North Koreans taught him a thing or two about technology.) Moving on to quasi-official media — that is, a certain foreign-owned news service that employs KNCA “reporters” – AP Pyongyang says they “met with officials,” but doesn’t identify anyone of significance. Why, when Richardson visited in 2010, he at least rated Ri Yong Ho. That’s no way to treat your favorite tool. 

We know Richardson’s score, but how did the North Koreans do? That depends on what you think they wanted, and that question gets to the heart of a long-standing debate about the motivations and pathology behind North Korea’s foreign policy. Is it (a) all about domestic reenforcement, are they (b) trying to improve relations with and extract aid and investment from us, or do they (c) really want a Grand Opening to the world? (These theories aren’t mutually exclusive — myself, I’m 85% (a), 0% (c), and 15% (b), provided that (b) supports (a) and excludes the possibility of (c). Still with me?)

Let’s take these theories in inverse order, starting with (c). Schmidt’s pleas notwithstanding, the North Koreans certainly didn’t show any hint that they intend to open their society or economy in any meaningful way.  (The better reporting on the subject strongly suggests the very opposite.) They may want their own people to think that Google and the U.S. recognize them as global technology leaders, but that would only reenforce a North Korean sense of self-reliant isolation.  Also, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because that goes back to (a).

If (b) or (c) were true, you’d think the North Koreans would have at least empowered a proponent of (b) and (c) in America’s public debate in America about the utility and timing of the visit. The most obvious way to do that would have been to release Ken Bae, who is currently doing time in a North Korean jail for being dumb enough to believe (c).* Releasing Bae would have swung the argument in Richardson’s favor with a certain percentage of the audience. True to my previous prediction, however, the North Koreans aren’t letting Mr. Bae go just yet, at least until his captivity helps ensure that Susan Rice gives in to the Great Wall of China and abandons all hope of getting the U.N. to sanction it for that missile test.

Also, if (b) or (c) were true, this was a huge lost opportunity for the North Koreans. Imagine the reaction here if Kim Jong Un showed up unexpectedly, shook the hands of Richardson and Schmidt, and spent just five minutes talking about some hobby of his — say, Starcraft or the NBA or bondage porn or assassinating your siblings — in front of David Guttenfelder’s fully erect lens. This wouldn’t have made the visit any less meaningless, but it would have caused a mediagasm of talk about how enlightened and open-minded Kim Jong Un is as the dying went on unimpeded and safely out of our sight. That didn’t happen — praise be to Zeus — because sending His Porcine Majesty to meet some has-been ex-governor would have lowered His stature. Not that further proof is really needed, but this tells us that North Korea isn’t terribly interested in (c) or even that much (b), no matter how fervently some of us may want it. It is also is our segue to (a).

A lot of us hard-line types have been talking about what a great propaganda victory this was for North Korea, but we seldom explain our argument very well.  How, specifically, does facilitating propaganda that Kim Jong Un is the Man of the Year, the Sexiest Man Alive, and the object of global respect, fear, and adoration stabilize the North Korean regime? Why, indeed, is KCNA filled with reports about delegations from Juche societies in Burkina Faso and Ecuador? Could any North Korean possibly believe that for the rest of the world, excluding Korea bloggers, it’s all about North Korea?

Oddly enough, I believe the answer is “yes.” Unfortunately, this isn’t a uniquely North Korean phenomenon.

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[Hat Tip]

This is one of those things that’s about 50% less mysterious to me for having lived in South Korea. For most Americans, it really isn’t all about Korea, but Koreans continue to expend finite diplomatic and financial resources on billboards, front-page newspapers ads, wines, and essay contests about two uninhabited lumps of guano that South Korea already occupies. The Tokdo Complex is diagnosed by one’s sincere and emphatic belief that people all over the world obviously care much more deeply about Korea than they do about other places, and therefore they must care deeply about Tokdo than they do about Darfur, Tibet, or less explicably, Camp 22. Now, as the former owners of Dokdo Sushi in Rockville, Maryland must realize by now, we really don’t. But the emotional roots of the Tokdo Complex must run deeper than 1945 and must also appeal to a powerful psychological need. If I’m right about that, North Korea’s propaganda machine feeds this, and probably also believes it to a certain extent. I can even believe this propaganda is an effective adhesive for people who latently despise the regime and His Porcine Majesty, and who would actively participate in its violent overthrow if they saw any prospect that this could be accomplished successfully.

What I can’t explain is why the Tokdo Complex doesn’t apply to China’s moves on Mount Paektu, its lease of Rajin to China, or China’s treatment of North Korean women like comfort women, or worse. All of these things seem like important matters of territorial integrity, nationhood, sovereignty, and humanity, yet they hardly exist in the public consciousness of South Koreans. For that matter, I’ve never known of a place so obsessed with the atrocities of the past, yet so apathetic about the atrocities of the present.  If you can explain that, then for God’s sake, do.

 

* Assuming, of course, that Ken Bae’s purpose for being in North Korea really was to be a tour guide.  I don’t really know what he was doing there or why he was arrested. He’s not my client.

State Department Disses Kim Jong Bill, and There Is Much Rejoicing

January 3, 2013 Appeasement No comments

So, to answer those of you who asked, I don’t know why Google’s Eric Schmidt is flying to Pyongyang with Kim Jong Bill, but whoever is in charge of the State Department these days doesn’t sound very happy about the visit, or by the timing of our least favorite camera-hog has-been ex-governor.  Says State’s mouthpiece –

As you know, they are private citizens. They are traveling in an unofficial capacity. They are not going to be accompanied by any U.S. officials. They are not carrying any messages from us. Frankly, we don’t think the timing of this is particularly helpful, but they are private citizens and they are making their own decisions.

Why am I smiling?  Because I voted for a government that has no use for washed-up politicians who think that mass murderers make good props for their self-aggrandizing photo ops, and that their capacity to appease them is a qualification.  My best guess is that Richardson is trying to spring Kenneth Bae, which he probably thinks would make him relevant again.

Schmidt’s game is harder to guess, but he has a history of what one informed OFK reader calls “war tourism” and naive altruism.  The fact that he’s well known as a big Obama donor probably required State to distance itself from him.  At the same time, Google has sometimes made gestures toward advocating human rights and internet freedom in North Korea. For example, Google even flew 10 North Korean defectors to a Google Ideas INFO Summit in California last year.  One of them related this story:

When he entered the camp for the first time, he was terrified at the sight of emaciated prisoners with hollowed eyes and no human dignity. They performed meaningless and arduous labor tasks from sunrise to sundown, and suffered from not only physical torture, but also excruciating mental pain. People whispered to him that they did not know what crimes they were being sentenced for, yet they did not have the strength to complain. One day, he was sent to the prison ‘hospital,’ where people laid on wooden boards shoulder to shoulder. He saw people cultivate diseases in their own bodies so that they could expedite their deaths, since committing suicide was considered a crime that would punish their loved ones living outside the camps. At the young age of 17, he developed the sense to predict when somebody would die, based on their breathing patterns. Paul recalls thinking, “that man has about two more days left before he leaves this earth.” After a bedmate would pass, Paul would not report his/her death because he would be able to eat the corpse’s food ration. He would continue to sleep next to corpses and eat their foods until nurses noticed the rotting bodies, after which patients would be tasked with carrying the stiff corpses out into a mass open grave. He left the hospital, and went back his barracks, even more determined to survive and defect from this country.

Bill Richarson was unavailable for comment.  Schmidt, on the other hand, actually spoke at the opening of the conference. (HT to a reader and friend for this information).

If you forced me to wager, I’d bet Richardson doesn’t bring Bae back.  North Korea still hasn’t exhausted his hostage value yet.  They’ll probably want to keep him in a cage until they’re secure in their knowledge that Susan Rice has failed to secure any meaningful U.N. response  for their missile test.  Then, they’ll summon someone of higher status to fetch him.  When they do, I hope our State Department will issue a travel advisory like this one:

The Department of State strongly advises U.S. citizens to stay the fuck out of North Korea.  You have no business there.  Nothing good will come of your visit.  Did your hippie professors, your pastor, and your mom tell you that you could change the world? They were all full of shit.  Actually, you are incapable of changing the world.  If you were capable of changing the world, you wouldn’t be going to North Korea; you would be gainfully employed as an electrical engineer.  Your visit will not make peace.  That “Three Cups of Tea” guy?  A fraud.

This regime will milk you for cash until it decides that it can milk Uncle Sam for even more cash by entrapping you into doing something stupid.  Have you heard about the Fiscal Cliff?  It means we’re done done filling suitcases with the taxpayers’ hard-earned, non-counterfeit cash for Jimmy to come ransom you out.  North Korea would only use that cash (or yours) to buy sarin and incubators from a scientist in Uzbekistan who borrowed money from the mob and lost it playing Texas Hold’Em online.  So don’t say we didn’t warn you.

That goes double diplomats and ex-presidents.  We had to cut the travel budget this year.  That’s why you all have e-mail accounts.

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

December 20, 2012 Appeasement, North-South, Sunshine 5 comments

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, she avoided creating much daylight between herself and Moon on North Korea policy.  Park has advocated Sunshine Lite for years, and even if (like me) you don’t agree with Park’s positions, at least acknowledge her consistency.

People have a tendency to project policies they want on candidates they prefer to other candidates — just look at how disappointed the left is at Barack Obama, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize at around 4 p.m. on Inauguration Day for promising to close Gitmo. It’s possible, of course, that Park comes to office with a secret hidden agenda, or with an enduring grudge for the fact that Kim Il Sung sent the assassin who killed her mother on live television.  It would be nice to think that the evil that men do eventually returns to them.  But that’s not how I assess Park.  Park is all about expediency and pragmatism.  She’s competent, tough, and honest, an will be an effective and cool-headed executive, but isn’t ideological (another adjective we could substitute, given the awful realities of life for most North Koreans, is “principled”).

If you forecast Park’s policies based solely on the evidence she’s offered us, at this moment she intends to give North Korea aid, but not without some return on her investment, not at the expense of South Korea’s own economy, and not at the expense of its relations with the United States.  Sound familiar?

In his inaugural speech, Lee reiterated his willingness to engage North Korea economically as long as it gave up its nuclear program. Unlike Roh, who always emphasized that North Korea was a small country that felt threatened by the outside world, Lee placed the onus on North Korea.

“Once North Korea abandons its nuclear program and chooses the path to openness, we can expect to see a new horizon in inter-Korean cooperation,” Lee said, adding that he was willing to help North Korea raise its per capita income to $3,000 within 10 years.

Considered a moderate in his party, Lee, unlike some South Korean conservatives, does not call for regime change in Pyongyang and is not expected to emphasize human rights violations in the North. During the presidential transition, he signaled that he might take a harder line on the North by eliminating South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, which critics consider soft on the North. But he eventually decided to keep it.

Like his left-leaning predecessors, Lee said that policy toward the North should “prepare the foundation for unification.”

“Unification of the two Koreas is the long-cherished desire of the 70 million Korean people,” he said.  [NYT]

Like Lee, Park doesn’t want to expend political capital on a pissing match with North Korea, and she might even have convinced herself that she can avoid one.  She’ll soon learn that she can’t. North Korea isn’t interested in what Park is offering.  It demands aid, and it refuses conditions.  North Korea will provoke her because that’s what North Korea does when it doesn’t get what it demands.  And when it does — key point — Park Geun-Hye will not just take it. Consequently, her North Korea policy will turn out to be something completely different than what she promised and still expects.

Today, the left is painting a revisionist image of Lee Myung Bak as a “hard-liner” for falling victim to the very same cycle.  On North Korea, however, Lee advocated a more generous brand of Sunshine Lite than either Park or the ultra-conservative offshoot Liberty Forward Party.  Lee was never an ideologue on North Korea. All he really cared about was bulldozing out big ditches and helping the chaebol make lots of money.  He was ready to give North Korea its own piece of the action by employing cheap (read: forced) North Korean labor in the service of the chaebol.  Here it is, all spelled out in detail, in a form that hardly seems less aggressive than Roh’s model.  Unlike Roh and like Park Geun-Hye, however, Lee demanded disarmament and reform in return.  He wanted a North-South relationship without the co-dependency and abuse, he wasn’t interested in spending his term wearing a ball gag, and he assumed that Kim Jong Il would accede to that.  When Lee entered office, the head of his transition team made this telling comment:

“In evaluating the past five years, the ministry admitted there had been no visible reforms in the North and that their policies had lacked effectiveness,” said Lee Dong-gwan, the transition team’s spokesman.

At about that time, an American president was also entering office hoping that he could reduce tensions with North Korea where his predecessors failed. Like Lee, he also favored economic outreach. Both presidents’ plans were almost immediately overcome by events:

Jan. 2008:  Incoming Lee Administration reviews aid programs for North, including massive last-minute aid commitments by outgoing President Roh Moo-Hyun.  Lee indicates he will link further aid to nuclear disarmament and return of South Korean abductees and POWs.

July 2008:  North Korean soldier shoots and kills South Korean tourist Park Wang-Ja at Kumgang.  South Korea demands that North Korea cooperate with an investigation into Park’s death; North Korea refuses.  South Korea halts tours out of concern for its citizens’ safety.

Jan. 2009:  Barack Obama takes office and asks North Korea to unclench its fist. North Korea says it will no longer recognize the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the de facto sea boundary between the Koreas, and unilaterally withdraws from a 1991 inter-Korean non-aggression agreement.

Mar. 2009:  North Korea detains U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee along its border with China, an incident that Ling later suggests was a trap.

Apr. 2009:  North Korea tests an Unha-2 long-range rocket, in violation of UNSCR 1695 and 1718. The following week, it orders U.N. inspectors to leave Yongbyon, signaling the final collapse of George W. Bush’s Agreed Framework II.

May 2009:  North Korea tests several short-range missiles, restarts the reactor at Yongbyon, conducts an underground nuclear test, then unilaterally withdraws from the 1953 Korean War cease fire.

June 2009:  U.N. Security Council responds to the nuclear test with Resolution 1874.

Aug. 2009:  North Korea frees a South Korean Kaesong manager after 137 days in custody, and  bills her employer $20,000 for the cost of his room and board.

Sept. 2009:  South Korea accuses the North of intentionally releasing water from a dam and killing six South Koreans.

Nov 2009: North Korean ship crosses the NLL and gets the worst of it.  North Korea vows to take revenge.

Jan. 2010:  North and South Korea exchange artillery fire near their maritime boundary.

Mar. 2010:  North Korea torpedoes the ROKS Cheonan south of the NLL and kills 46 South Korean sailors.

Apr. 2010:  North Korea announces that it will confiscate South Korean property at Kumgang.

Oct. 2010:  Two shots are fired from a North Korean DMZ guard post.

Nov. 2010:  North Korea shells a civilian village on Yeongpyeong Island, South Korea, killing four and causing the evacuation of the island’s entire population.  The attack causes a significant shift in South Korean public opinion, away from giving unconditional aid to the North.

What’s amazing in retrospect is that Lee still kept the aid flowing until North Korea attacked South Korea on its own territory, and even then, he never shut down the Kaesong Industrial Park, a massive indirect subsidy for North Korea.  (Meanwhile, North Korea regularly blocked or restricted South Korean access to Kaesong, and levied confiscatory taxes against companies located there.)

So what hints do we have about where things are headed now?  First, KCNA has already been antagonizing Park and equating her with “traitor” Lee Myung-Bak (and Park’s own father, of course).  Remember how KCNA called for tearing out the throat of “rat-like” Lee?  North Korea will provoke — if only to test Park — and I’m betting that Park won’t take their shit.

Then, consider that second terms are policy tipping points for American presidents. Second terms are characterized by centrist, “stewardship” policies as weakened presidents try to keep the focus on a few second-term agenda items.  Obama’s team would have tipped toward engagement but for the missile.  Now, they feel they have to sanction.  I predict they’ll swing and miss at the U.N., which will give people like Ed Royce and John McCain a chance to voice a more conservative alternative policy for dealing with the North.  Obama may not want to argue the point.

Right now, everyone is predicting a softer line toward North Korea.  I don’t think it matters much what plans Obama and Park have right now.  Events will overcome those plans, too.

Did Obama Buy North Korea’s Pre-Election Silence?

December 1, 2012 Appeasement, Diplomacy, U.S. Politics 5 comments

I’m not fond of conspiracy theories, and I’ve credited President Obama with a “not bad” North Korea policy so far, but when the evidence right before your lying eyes begs for an inference … well, I’ll stop short of answering my own question and say that Congress ought to inquire further.  Exhibit 1:

SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Yonhap) — A White House delegation made a secret trip to North Korea in August in what might be an attempt to discourage it from taking provocative steps ahead of the U.S. presidential elections, a South Korean newspaper reported Thursday.

If confirmed, it would mark the second known visit by U.S. officials to Pyongyang this year, following the previous one before the North’s rocket launch in April.

“A U.S. Air Force plane flew into Pyongyang through the Yellow Sea route after leaving Guam on Aug. 17,” the Dong-A Ilbo quoted an unidentified diplomatic source as saying. “This jet stayed in Pyongyang for four days and flew out of the city on Aug. 20.”

The source was quoted as adding it took the same route four months earlier.

Given such a relatively long journey, the newspaper said, the Barack Obama administration might have attempted “in-depth negotiations” with North Korea prior to the Nov. 6 elections.

“Chances are high that the U.S. sought to curb North Korea from taking military provocations and offered some measures in return,” the source said, according to the daily. [Korea Times]

Less than a month after America’s election, Kim Jong Un announces his next great erection.  Exhibit 2:

North Korea announced Saturday that it would attempt to launch a long-range rocket in mid-December, a defiant move just eight months after a failed April bid was widely condemned as a violation of a U.N. ban against developing its nuclear and missile programs.

The launch, set for Dec. 10 to 22, is likely to heighten already strained tensions with Washington and Seoul as the United States prepares for Barack Obama’s second term as U.S. president and South Korea holds its own presidential election on Dec. 19.

This would be North Korea’s second launch attempt under leader Kim Jong Un, who took power following his father Kim Jong Il’s death nearly a year ago. The announcement by North Korea’s space agency followed speculation overseas about stepped-up activity at North Korea’s west coast launch pad captured in satellite imagery.  [AP]

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, to reward it for its progress toward disarmament.  Discuss among yourselves.

There is a distinctly murine odor to all of this.  A Grand Bargain with North Korea would be a diplomatic policy choice and debatable on its own terms, but that isn’t what this story suggests.  No fair-minded citizen — regardless of whether you voted for this President — should tolerate the use of our diplomats as partisan political bagmen to buy the temporary silence of the world’s worst despots with taxpayer funds.  Democrats who are old enough to have condemned arms-for-hostages can’t offer a principled defense to buying Kim Jong Un’s pre-election silence, if that is what the evidence shows.  If Republicans are an effective opposition, then it is their duty to the people to explore this question at confirmation hearings for the next Secretary of State, if not sooner.

For the Administration, shooting the North Korean missile down over the Yellow Sea would be an excellent way to show North Korea and China that there are limits to our patience without attacking North Korean soil.  It would also be a good way to show Japan and South Korea that if they’re not willing to defend themselves, they need us.

Nuke Test Watch: One Disease, Many Symptoms

May 25, 2012 Appeasement, China & Korea, Diplomacy, Missiles, Proliferation, WMD 5 comments

OK, I admit it — I’m disappointed in the North Koreans for wimping out:

North Korea on Tuesday ruled out an imminent nuclear weapon test, but vowed to expand and bolster its nuclear deterrence as well as its sovereign right to launch satellites, while slamming the Group of Eight nations’ condemnation of its failed long-range rocket launch in April.

In a remark given to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, a spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said that the North didn’t have a plan for a nuclear test from the beginning, because it sought to launch a scientific and technical satellite.

“From the beginning, we did not envisage such a military measure as a nuclear test as we planned to launch a scientific and technical satellite for peaceful purposes,” said the official.

“Several weeks ago, we informed the U.S. side of the fact that we are restraining ourselves in real actions though we are no longer bound to the February 29 DPRK-U.S. agreement, taking the concerns voiced by the U.S. into consideration for the purpose of ensuring the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula necessary for focusing every effort on the peaceful development.” [Yonhap]

Well, damn. I wanted an election-year demonstration of how our desperate diplomatic appeals and offers failed to buy North Korea out of the headlines. I wanted someone else to point out how we allowed our obsession with treating each symptom to interfere with our diagnosis and treatment of the disease. I wanted someone else to wonder how it is that even now, our diplomats seem befuddled that North Korea doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to when appeased. And maybe I’ll still get what I want. Keep hope alive!

If North Korea puts this off, the most plausible reason is that China pressured North Korea to put it off. This will be both temporary and inadequate. If the North Koreans don’t test a nuke before Election Day, it’s a safe bet they’ll test one shortly thereafter.

Earlier Tuesday, James Hardy, an analyst at IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly said that images taken by two satellite companies, DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, in the past month showed more earth being removed from a tunnel at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea’s northeast.

There is a trope in this town that China — despite being the portal for the vast majority of North Korea’s regime-sustaining trade and aid, both legal and illegal — really can’t control North Korea. I’ve long suspected that China merely chooses not to control North Korea, except just before American and South Korean election seasons. But we’re never more than one excuse way from North Korea doing something completely different from what it just said.

Of course, most diseases have many symptoms. Have a look at what the North Koreans are doing at the Cape Musudan test site. Yes, 38 North can be interesting when it’s adding something new to the discussion.

On October 11, 2008, North Korea was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism for its progress toward nuclear disarmament. Discuss among yourselves.

Nobel Prize Winning President Ignores World’s Worst Human Rights Violations

May 8, 2012 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Human Rights 2 comments

Most of the people reading this blog probably have no idea who Robert King is, and that is a sad comment in itself.  King’s title is Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, a position that was created back in 2004, under a mostly forgotten and disregarded law called the North Korean Human Rights Act. In the Bush Administration, the office was initially filled by Jay Lefkowitz, a well-meaning man who initially came to Bush’s attention for his opposition to stem cell research. Lefkowitz came to the job with little subject matter expertise, no political juice, and a part-time portfolio.  Yet Lefkowitz was a quicker study and more perceptive of North Korea’s pathology than the State Department had expected.  When he spoke cogently about that pathology, including its effect on the diplomacy to which human rights was made a subordinate priority, Lefkowitz was publicly humiliated by Condi Rice and rolled by Christopher Hill.  Lefkowitz nearly resigned, and should have.  He might have made a real impact with a very public resignation, but instead, he served out his term in obscurity as Rice’s (and Bush’s) diplomatic initiative to North Korea ended, predictably, in a fiasco.

Here are King’s bio and the web page the State Department set up for him. But what you really want to read about is how King is carrying out the mandate Congress has given him — his policy initiatives and plans to mobilize the consciousness of the world to ease the suffering of the North Korean people. I suppose that would be at the link called “releases,” where we find the evidence of all that Ambassador King has accomplished in his three years in office:

Jesus wept.  Where are the plans to mobilize global opinion, bring Twitter to North Korea, sanction the leaders of North Korea’s internal security forces, or bring Chapter VII sanctions at the Security Council over the matter of North Korea’s concentration camps?  There isn’t even a schedule of the conferences King attends to strike a sagacious pose and avoid saying anything controversial or newsworthy.  At one of these recently, I asked King to demonstrate or defend the effectiveness of his tenure.  What accomplishments, or alternatively, what specific initiatives, can King point to?  He couldn’t.

I suppose it’s unfair to lay all of this at King’s feet.  Back when he was a diplomat working European issues, King had a solid reputation as an advocate for human rights in diplomacy.  Like all diplomats, King is a civil servant who answers to a bureaucracy, which answers to the President.  Clearly, this president has made a strategic decision to downplay human rights as an issue with North Korea.  His State Department believes that to raise human rights would hinder nuclear negotiations with North Korea, but that wasn’t true in the case of the U.S.S.R., China, or Burma, because negotiations work best when the people negotiating with us feel pressure to change, and believe that we mean what we say.

Instead, what we’re left with is a policy that is functionally indistinguishable from — and almost as unsuccessful as — the North Korea policy of our last president.  In fact, the only difference I see between Bush and Obama on their approach to the world’s worst human rights violations is that when one of them was inaugurated, he was awarded a preemptive Nobel Peace Prize and a preemptive pardon by the Human Rights Industry.

And now, the painful burning sensation: N. Korea announces long-range missile launch

March 16, 2012 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Missiles 7 comments

I have to admit it — even I’m surprised by how quickly the North Koreans reneged on this one:

North Korea announced plans Friday to blast a satellite into space on the back of a long-range rocket, a provocative move that could jeopardize a weeks-old agreement with the U.S. exchanging food aid for nuclear concessions.

The North agreed to a moratorium on long-range launches as part of the deal with Washington, but it argues that its satellite launches are part of a peaceful space program that is exempt from any international disarmament agreements. The U.S., South Korea and other critics say the rocket technology overlaps with belligerent uses and condemn the satellite program as a disguised way of testing military missiles in defiance of a U.N. ban.

Thanks for the food, you brigandish imperialists. Now, watch us launch this long-range missile in violation of our two week-old deal and three U.N. Security Council resolutions! 소를 가져와!

So much for buying North Korea out of the headlines until the election is safely behind us. North Korea’s determination not to be ignored may be greater than our government’s political will to buy its silence. For those of you still keeping track, the aforementioned resolutions would be 1695, 1718, and 1874. Resolution 1695 says that “the DPRK shall suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching. Resolution 1718 “[d]emands that the DPRK suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme, and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launching. Resolution 1874 “[d]ecides that the DPRK shall suspend all activities related to its ballistic missile programme and in this context re-establish its pre-existing commitments to a moratorium on missile launches.”

This is a moment of risk and also a moment of opportunity for this President. Either he can allow the Republicans (and the Washington Post) to attack him for being weak and gullible enough to keep buying the same old horse and achieving the same old results, or he can use this occasion to show that he’s tougher than his critics and the North Koreans think he is. Expect the ongoing talks over the delivery and distribution of food aid to break down over technical details and monitoring. That will allow State and USAID to maintain the fiction that there is no food-for-arms quid pro quo going on.

If North Korea goes through with this launch, President Obama could use his rumored visit to the DMZ to use the North Koreans as a campaign foil, in the spirit of “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” or “Tear down this wall!” And at least until the election is safely behind us, has plenty of options for increasing economic and political pressure against the regime. For their part, the Republicans ought to demand that President Obama be clear about where that pressure is leading. Will it be Agreed Framework III, or will we finally implement a long-term contain-constrict-collapse strategy that will have some chance of really disarming this regime?

Update: Former Ambassador Thomas Hubbard, responding to this WaPo editorial, argues that there is much to be gained from a deal with North Korea, and manages to have his letter to the editor published just before the North Koreans have the final, conclusive word. Brilliant timing, Mr. Ambassador.

When I look at men like Hubbard and Donald Gregg, who flirted with 3/26 conspiracy theories in the pages of the New York Times, I can’t help but wonder why America has traditionally picked such sub-par minds to serve as our ambassadors to the ROK. James Lilley is the only exception who comes to mind. Within Korea policy circles, there has been an ongoing debate about whether our ambassadors to Korea ought to be political appointees rather than career foreign service officers. The term “political appointee” carries connotations of “political hack” in this context, and that’s true enough of many ambassadorships to low-threat assignments that have been given out as rewards for political contributions. Our ambassadors to China, by contrast, have traditionally been political appointees with strong backgrounds in the military, foreign affairs, or whose background otherwise qualifies them to understand China and its people. There’s something to be said for picking a strong- and serious-minded representative who has the President’s confidence and loyalty, rather than someone whose entire career has been a series of calculations to avoid offending the wrong attache.

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