Category: Korean War II

First, the North Korea commentariat told us that the Yongbyon reactor might be for no more nefarious purpose than generating electricity (never mind that it was never connected to the electrical grid). Then, it told us that the North merely wanted aid and recognition by the United States, to better provide for the people it had so recently starved to death in heaps, the dust of whose loves and aspirations now fills a thousand forlorn and forgotten pits in the barren...

Professor Lee raises, if ever so briefly, the standards of a newspaper that is simultaneously America’s most prestigious, and in terms of its North Korea coverage, easily its worst. But a nuclear North Korea is unlike a nuclear China or Russia. During the Cold War, neither Beijing nor Moscow faced an existential threat in the form of an alternate Chinese or Russian state. Pyongyang, on the other hand, has had to live with a far more prosperous and legitimate Korean...

Since North Korea’s sixth* nuclear test, I’ve already read several analyses concluding that North Korea now has the bomb for good, and that we might as well give up on denuclearization — as if Pyongyang’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal ends with us all living happily ever after together. You can only believe that if you either haven’t read much North Korean propaganda — or choose to ignore it, just as much of Europe ignored the words Hitler wrote in Mein...

I’m already on record on the topic of threatening war against North Korea: it scares our friends more than our enemies (who assume, correctly I hope, that we’re bluffing). If we want to threaten the thing our enemies fear most, threaten to sow the seeds of the revolution that the people of North Korea desperately need. Nukes aren’t much good in that kind of war, and China would never tolerate their use so close to its borders. If we can’t...

There is a certain view, popular mostly among the soft-liners who did so much to get us into this crisis and now seek to reassure themselves, that North Korea only wants nukes to protect itself from us. They aren’t wrong; it’s just that they’re less than half right. Pyongyang says it wants nukes as a defensive deterrent, and of course, it does: Pyongyang, April 29 (KCNA) — The Korean People’s Army is providing strong support for the nuclear power in...

Professor Lee and I have a new piece published in Foreign Affairs, a sequel to his piece, “Pyongyang’s Playbook.” In this today’s contribution, we identify a long-standing historical pattern that few others have noticed — that some of Pyongyang’s most violent attacks against South Korea coincide with its charm offensives, suggesting that talks on civil exchanges and “reunions” are (at best) ineffectual in securing long-term improvements in relations, and (at worst) maskirovka to give Pyongyang plausible deniability. To break the cycle of provocation and payment, the U.S. and...

In August, as the most recent skirmish in Korean War II began, I published two posts about the risk that Kim Jong Un would respond to stronger U.S. and South Korean policies with all-out war. Because that risk depends on whether Kim is rational, I used those posts to discuss the implications of answering this question in the affirmative and the negative.  In the first post, I argued that if Kim Jong-Un is rational, then his provocations since 2011 would appear to have been calibrated...

To Kim Il-Sung, Korean War I was a principally conventional and unlimited war whose goal was the unitary domination of the entire Korean Peninsula by force. To Kim Jong-Un, Korean War II is a war of skirmishes, whose less ambitious aim is hegemony over a supine and finlandized South Korea. Korea has changed dramatically since 1953. It should not surprise us that Pyongyang has adapted its strategy and objectives to fit this new reality. For Pyongyang today, survival is the...

They came, they talked, and they signed, but they solved nothing. Plus or minus one piece of paper, three severed legs, and an implicit promise of payment, we are where we were on the morning of August 4th, when Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon embarked on their fateful patrol. As I predicted hours before the deal was announced, Pyongyang didn’t apologize, and Seoul will continue to pay. The loudspeakers will be switched off. There will not be...

They came, they talked, and they solved nothing, but after a tense weekend, at least Korea is not at war. As of this writing, it looks like representatives of the two Korean governments will continue to talk and solve nothing, except to calm South Korea’s foreign investors. The North will not admit that it laid the mines that forever maimed Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon, the South will eventually relent on blaring propaganda to a few hundred...

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...