Open Sources: Agreed Framework III Watch
On asylum for North Korean refugees, America leads from behind:
Some 581 North Korean defectors have been given asylum in the United Kingdom, making them the largest group of all defectors in countries other than South Korea…. The U.K. was followed by Germany with 146, the Netherlands with 32, Australia and the U.S. with 25 each and Canada with 23.
I suppose the State Department is worried that if we provoke Kim Jong Il, he might boycott disarmament talks, pursue a uranium enrichment program, or even attack South Korea. Well, thank goodness someone is working tirelessly to those hard-won gains!
The recent meetings between U.S. and North Korean diplomats have given me a sense of unease that this Administration is desperate for an opening that would eventually get us Agreed Framework III. And given the almost universal agreement about what talks and bribes can accomplish, we’re entitled to wonder why they bother:
No one expects North Korea is serious about denuclearization and Pyongyang has done nothing during Obama’s tenure to demonstrate otherwise. At the same time, however, no one wants another North Korean provocation. [Evan Ramstad, Korea Real Time]
In other words, we’re still trying to manage the problem out of the headlines, which not only puts us at the mercy of Kim Jong Il’s temper, it positively incentivizes provocative behavior. It means that no one in our government dares to make make difficult decisions to put the kind of pressure on Kim Jong Il that’s needed for diplomacy to really work, or to alter the North Korean regime enough to make effective diplomacy possible.
At the same time, South Korea shows more signs of dropping its demands for North Korea to apologize for sinking one of its warships and shelling one of its villages. I could only speculate as to whether the State Department applied pressure for South Korea to drop those demands, and you can speculate as well as I can.
It’s as if we invite them to play us. Writing in the L.A. Times, Sung Yoon Lee describes how this all runs on an endless loop.
The Chosun Ilbo has a hit piece on Kim Yong Chol, who heads up the Reconnaissance Bureau, which handles foreign intelligence operations. Kim is called the mastermind of last year’s attacks on South Korea. If you wonder why I’m skeptical about reporting that falls into the kremlinology category, it’s because the very same Chosun Ilbo just reported that Kim Jong Eun was the mastermind of those attacks, and even printed a purported North Korean document to support that theory!
Some good news, for a change: Joshua Pollock argues that North Korea’s missile trade has declined substantially since the 1990’s, in part because the customer nations have all gone into business manufacturing their SCUD-C’s and Nodongs. North Korea still sells parts and technical assistance, but the enforcement of UNSCR 1874 has hurt that trade.
When the New York Times decided to reprint the extraordinarily gullible reporting of the AP’s Jean Lee from Pyongyang, I worried that the readers of the New York Times might be gullible enough to take Lee at her word. I need not have worried. The comment section there is as harsh as anything you can see here.
Eventually, we’ll be rid of them all. For now, Kim Jong Il’s sister and rumored power-broker Kim Kyong Hui is getting medical treatment in Russia.