Improving Obama’s Grade on North Korea
I admit, when things with North Korea under the new Obama administration first started heating up, I was cynical and doubtful due to what I perceived as Washington’s lack of organization on the issue. When the Asia Society gave Obama a “C” on his first 100 days in office with the spotlight on the DPRK, I felt that was being a bit generous.
But I’m now up to entertaining the possibility that I might be growing more cautiously optimistic about his approach. While I believe North Korea wasn’t really a priority on Obama’s list until North Korea made itself a priority, I am starting to like what I see coming from D.C.
So maybe that “C” is now well justified. I would even go as far as saying that once North Korea is back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a “B” would be well-deserved.
But just for the sake of conversation, what would it take for the administration to get an “A” when dealing with North Korea? In my opinion, a “B” represents all the hard work, an “A” would just be going the extra mile and putting the icing on the cake.
I’ve been collecting suggestions:
How about calling their bluff? (We all know that North Korea isn’t serious when it threatens to interpret various actions we take against them as “acts of war” but it continues to use such rhetoric anyway.)
Should we randomly jam all electronic emissions in North Korea? Harass them at sea by dumping stuff in the water right in front of them, maybe throw out a few fishing nets to get tangled in their propellers…jam their radios, use anti-riot sound directional speakers on them to make it impossible to sleep?
Or how about aiding South Korea NGO efforts? We could help darken the skies with more leaflet balloons! (That really got the DPRK going earlier.)
Should we vamp up VOA transmissions? Help South Korea flood the border with banned media to expose North Koreans to the outside world?
What about putting North Korea’s military on constant alert, forcing them to burn valuable fuel and electrical power? (You could argue that we already have done that but maybe we should keep it up.)
North Korea is already super paranoid to begin with so they’d probably fall for such moves.
Any “teachers” out there care to share their suggestions for an “A” mark? Or are there people out there who think more needs to be done to solidify a “B” grade?
Obama is a marxist. I am surprised that someone as savvy as you Joshua could fall for such empty posturing.
Obama has neutered his Secretary of State (who is no real threat to the DPK anyway) and will wilt in the face of real action against NK. He will leave Lee Myung Bak out on a limb, humiliate our closest ally in the region, and then launch an “apology tour’ to North Korea admitting that the DPRK’s wicked human rights abuses are somehow America’s fault.
If you believe one syllable of this Chicago thug politician community organizer (and Jeremiah Wright disciple) you are forfieting a lot of genuinely earned credibility. He is leading the US in the direction Kim Il-sung advocated!!!! Hello!!!!
Obama is more concerned about his pagan belief in global warming than anything related to the security of the US. Surely you are not that naive. Obama’s record on the Patriot Act and GITMO are evidence enough that he is clueless about national security. Or did you not hear the disastrous Cairo apology speech?
Physical confrontation beyond the ‘stalking’ that the USN performed on the Kang Nam I seems too risky for me, so personally I’d rule out the idea of harassing NK ships at sea. I’d be more for psychological warfare, especially given that it more directly affects the NK populace — speakers, jamming, balloons, etc. Heck, it wasn’t that long ago that the North and South had speakers/signs aimed directly at each other at the DMZ, so there’s no harm in firing them up again (and even step that up a notch by deploying these things at sea, if it’s feasible).
One idea however that I don’t think you mentioned (and is my personal favourite) is having a Seventh Fleet carrier task force drive up and down the NK east coast. As long as you stay out in international waters (what is it, 25 km from the coast? UNCLOS confuses me), this is probably the most threatening we can get short of war (from a military standpoint) and would be extremely embarrassing for the DPRK (and we all know how the North has an odd fascination with its world reputation)
This looks like a fun thread; I’m glad to see you are entertaining suggestions.
First of all we have to remember that unfortunately, due to unserendipitous circumstances, there are 2 sick American girls in a Pyongyang hospital right now named Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Therefore the United States should not do anything stupid that might harm our citizens. Any provocative action by US government entities could inhibit ongoing negotiations for the humanitarian release of our 2 California girls. (Only one week before Current TV chairman and Nobel Prize Money Winner Al Gore is scheduled to speak at a July 13 climate conference in Melbourne, Australia!)
We need to be sneakier than our opponent and employ a third party to do our dirty work. Who would be better at this than a country that snuck on us during World War II? Obama needs to use his smarts and get Aso (our main man in Japan) to assist us. Japan has an army of aggressive paparazzi press agents who pursue Kim Jong-il’s eldest son when he goes to Macau or Beijing. It wouldn’t be difficult to recruit similar Japanese operatives to undertake missions of harassment. The Japanese have nothing to lose. The North Korean government already hates them anyway so it’s not like asking the Brits or Swedes to help.
OK, here’s my plan; send a team of Japanese journalists to Dandong, China. This city across the Yalu River from Sinuiju is perfect for interaction with North Koreans. You can easily spot North Korean traders in Dandong wholesale markets by their Kim Il-sung pins.
Why send balloon leaflets randomly across the DMZ when you can literally hand literature to North Koreans on the streets of China? Equip the Japanese with gifts, such as Choco-pies, to give the North Koreans. You can also have them approach North Korean trucks, easily identified by their Korean license plate, while they are queued to cross the Friendship Bridge across the Yalu River.
I have always been a proponent of dropping propaganda from the northern border instead of the 38th parallel. China won’t care if you use remote controlled drone planes and helicopters to drop leaflets on Sinuiju and . The Japanese make really good ones that can reach the distance required for successful infiltration. They can bring them into China as toy merchandise under an umbrella trading company.
“Obama is a marxist.
You’re…joking, right? Real people actually believe that?
I mean, this could be a really good parody, or something much more deeply disturbing. I’m honestly not sure.
Like most ideologies, socialism is a matter of degree. I’d certainly say that Obama is much closer to Scandinavian socialism than to the capitalism of Calvin Coolidge. I don’t think Obama favors achieving his aims violently or establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, but he does favor nationalizing large segments of the economy, and has in fact done exactly that already.
Certainly, Obama has done North Korea policy far better than his predecessors, but I think one can make a strong argument that Obama’s economic policy is socialist. Socialism isn’t entirely synonymous with Marxism, but it does share many common features, such as state control of industry and wealth redistribution.
Well, even Scandinavian ‘socialism’ is a far, far, far cry from ‘Marxism’ in the orthodox sense of the word. Perhaps Obama could be considered a socialist by American standards — but that’s still centrist or centre-right by European standards.
Take it from a man who’s been accused of being a Marxist (for the record, I’m not) – the idea that Obama could be one is nothing short of laughable. It’s worse, it reflects a very very peculiar view of the world.
By American standards in general and my own in particular, Europe is largely socialist. Marxism isn’t a single idea, it’s a collection of economic, social, and political ideas. I believe Obama shares some of those economically, and to a lesser degree socially, and probably few of them politically.
Also, I recall that even Angela Merkel had taken Obama to task for his excessive spending, much of which has a redistributionist character.
I like the calls for a more aggressive information policy to the North Korean people. Balloons, broadcasts, leaflets and the like would pressure Kimmie. A broadcast by Obama? Go for it, and leaflet his speech everywhere you can. The Norks only have a few legal wavelengths for their radios. We ought to have a more powerful transmitter than anything the Norks have. Start pushing content into the Norks own radio system. Speaking of content, perhaps a few Nork refugees now in the South could do testimonials?
Cut off as much of the financial operations as possible. Pressure the banks, cut off financial transactions wherever found, and work on other countries to send home North Korean laborers. Close Kaesong. Better interdiction of the money laundering and counterfeiting, and better interdiction of the drug trafficking. Starve the Norks for cash.
All Nork shipping and aircraft, of course, should be shadowed closely and obviously to the extent possible. Remind the Burmese generals that we can track Nork aircraft into their country.
Start looking for ways to contact certain Nork generals on the sly and see what it would take to get their cooperation. Start to undermine the Nork military in any way possible.
Ridicule works. Our propaganda should make fun of Kimmie and his advisors. Thugs hate being laughed at.
Start using world forums for our benefit (for a change): one could, for example, use human rights forums and journalism meetings to push for the release of our two American journalists currently being held. Find every opportunity to get in the Nork faces at these forums.
Start saying, very quietly, to China that unless they curb their dog that Japan and South Korea might have to go nuclear. The South Koreans are currently trying to renegotiate their agreement with the IAEA — perfect opportunity to remind China of the consequences.
That’s a start, and almost all of it is low-risk to us.
Here is a North Korean now living in Seoul who would appreciate our discussion:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/5758807/North-Korean-labour-camp-survivor-calls-for-end-to-isolation-of-the-population.html
Kang Chol-Hwan, who worked in a remote prison camp for a decade before defecting, warned that the 23 million-strong population was both starving and isolated from the outside world as a result of the regime’s iron fist rule.
“Even sending balloons in from South Korea with bags of rice would make a difference. Making people more aware of the outside world would put further pressure on the regime.”
Spelunker: Once again somebody floats the idea of sending balloons from South Korea.
Bless his heart, but I can’t help thinking those balloons would fall into soldiers hands.
I still think it would be more efficient and practical to send stuff from China instead. From Chinese border towns along the Yalu and Tumen rivers it would be possible to purchase cheap supplies using Dandong and Yanji as bases of operation for missions all along the border. Believe me, the Chinese don’t care at all as long as you’re not shooting bottle rockets across the border.
This is not exactly a secret, folks. President Obama spent 20 years listening to the rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright and imbibing the patently (and unapologetically) marxist black liberation theology of James Cone, a mentor of Wright’s. Dr. Anthony B. Bradley writes,
Keep thinking Comrade Obama is a traditional tax’n’spend old style liberal democrat. What did you think he meant by ‘change?’
hehehehe! Oh, dear.
Anyway, Mr. Stanton, of course I get what you’re saying there — most modernist ideology and even critical theory could be seen as defined by the place it stands on the continuum between ‘marxism’ and ‘capitalism’, or the extent to which it’s influenced by any of Hegel, Marx, Kant, Locke, and so forth. But it remains within the post-cold war paradigm which would have us believe that history is over and there is no alternative to some permutation of capitalist society that Obama and all western states operate, no matter how ‘socialist’ they are. The accusation that he is a marxist in the sense that KCJ means it ( apparently in terms of the Kim Jong-Il school of Marxism, which as you’ve pointed out yourself is not very Marxist at all in the sense that it is fundamentally charactersied by class-based domination and oppression) remains utterly absurd.
Anyway, I feel like this is super off-topic. And FTR, I don’t want to sound like I’m a big fan of Obama or anything — believe me, I’m not.
Back to the issue at hand, I think broadcasts are not going to be that effective. How many radios are there in North Korea? Flooding the market with free radios and Ipods… (You really think these people have INTERNET access to download MP3’s?????) not effective. I guess you could pre-load the Ipod, but how would they recharge the battery? What about that famous satellite image of North Korea at night which showed no lights? Do they have reliable electricity outside the large cities? Inside the large cities?
No personal computers, only 10-15% of the population owns a radio, only 8-10% of the population owns a TV. Broadcasts are fine, but I think you need to get literature to them any way possible. Put pro-democracy messages on a postcard with a picture of Kim Jong-il on it. It’s illegal to have it if you’re North Korean, but also illegal to throw it away because of the picture of the “Dear Leader”, perfect Catch 22.
There was recently a guy who wrote a book about North Korea interviewed on the Daily Show. He says he interviewed a woman who had defected to South Korea. When she was young she was in the North Korean military tasked with picking up the leaflets sent over on balloons by the South Koreans. She said she used a stick to pick up the leaflets because she had been told if she touched anything from South Korea, her hands would fall off, and she believed it. This is the level of paranoia we are talking about. I’m not sure anything we say is going to get through to the North Korean people.
Maybe engaging them in trade so their leaders will have the opportunity to get rich, like we did with the Chinese? Greed is an international currency. The nuclear cat is out of the bag already. That ship has sailed. They know they can’t use their bombs against us or our allies, because if they do we will nuke them ’till they glow. So why not try to open them up like Nixon did with China?
On Obama:
Obama is a member of the DLC, (Democratic Leadership Council), which is the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party (center right compared to other Democrats.) He is not really that liberal.
The only reason he is spending so much is he is trying to prevent us from falling into a depression, using a page from FDR’s playbook. Don’t forget George Bush doubled the national debt while in office. Bill Clinton, who is also a member of the DLC, balanced the budget and lowered the national debt. Bill and Hillary are not really that liberal either when you compare them to other Democrats.
What has he nationalized? The car makers? This is only, what, the umpteenth time we’ve bailed their asses out and then let them buy back the government’s interest. Obama is not in favor of the government permanently being involved in corporate business. That would be nationalization.
The guy who appeared on the Daily Show was Mike Kim.
The anecdote about picking up things that come from South Korea only strengthens my argument that leaflets should be sent over the northern border from China into the cities of Sinuiju and Hyesan and others that are in close proximity to the Yalu and Tumen rivers.