Open Sources, April 21, 2014

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THOSE NORTH KOREAN UAVs look exactly like a model manufactured in China. Not that it’s needed, but it’s yet more evidence that China isn’t enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions on North Korea. I hope the U.N. Panel of Experts is paying attention.

Speaking of which, the POE’s new head will be French missile expert Erik Marzolf. I wish him luck in his important work.

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PUTIN IS BECOMING A PROBLEM ON NORTH KOREA: It looks like Russia is shifting from “mere annoyance” to “obstruction” on North Korea. First, Russia has just forgiving $10 billion in North Korean debt. It’s debt that they’d never have collected anyway, but forgiving it improves North Korea’s balance sheet, and makes it more attractive to especially gullible lenders.

Second and more worrisome, Russia is allowing North Korea to settle payments in rubles, which sounds like a scheme to circumvent the dollar-based financial system. And after all, Ocean Maritime Management ran its MiG-smuggling operation out of Vladivostok.

Presumably, this is in retaliation for our refusal to accept Putin’s land grab in the Ukraine, which we shouldn’t accept. I suppose you can’t blame a wolf for being a wolf. At some point, we have only ourselves to blame when countries like Russia and China subvert lawful, non-violent ways of resolving conflicts, and we fail to turn to other tools at our disposal to make North Korea a security and economic liability for them.

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HUCKABEE’S SELF-REFUTING HYPERBOLE: As most of you have probably heard, last week, Republican presidential contender and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said he is “beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States.” You can watch Huckabee’s remarks yourself and decide for yourself if he’s joking or serious. I think he’s engaging in some deliberate hyperbole, but as one who has some sympathy with the grains of truth in Huckabee’s arguments about P.C. and the excesses of the security state, I think his comments were ill-informed, in poor taste, and a sop to any conspiracy lunatics who aren’t on Rand Paul’s wagon yet. Not surprisingly, Huckabee’s comment isn’t going over well on the left, but it’s welcome news that it isn’t going over well on the right, either. Perhaps it’s time to extend Godwin’s Law to North Korea.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I had to be careful of my thoughts because I believed Kim Jong-il could read my mind. Every couple of days someone would disappear. A classmate’s mother was punished in a public execution that I was made to attend. I had no choice — there were spies in the neighbourhood.” See also.

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THE DAILY NK REPORTS THAT North Korea has dispatched more teams of security agents to China, to arrest North Koreans who’ve overstayed their visas. My immediate suspicion inclined toward Jang Song Thaek cronies who didn’t return when called, but the Daily NK speculates that this may be related to North Korea’s crackdown on religion.

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THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE UPDATES its survey of U.S. assistance to North Korea, in light of increasing restrictions imposed by the Congress in its annual appropriations.

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DENNIS HALPIN, WRITING IN The Weekly Standard, offers a skeptical view of the U.S. pivot to Asia, and at USKI, looks behind Japan’s not-so-secret talks with North Korea.

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HUCKABEE NOTWITHSTANDING, CONSERVATIVES ARE BEGINNING TO FIND their lost voice on foreign policy. Some of the better criticisms I’ve read come from John McCain, Michael Chertoff, Ian Bremmer and (just about daily) Walter Russell Mead.

If conservatives learn at least one lesson from Iraq, I hope that lesson is that wars of liberation are best fought by the liberated. That means that rather than incur the human and financial cost of fighting wars ourselves, when it is our interests to fight, our principal means of doing so should be through material assistance to those who share our interests and our values.

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GORDON CHANG REVIEWS the signs of a Chinese economic apocalypse. I met Gordon in Washington a couple of weeks ago and was able to hear him expand on the reasons for his beliefs. On the one hand, it’s hard to see how anyone — including bankers and investors in China — can predict anything about China, given the unreliability of its economic statistics and the prevalence of fraud. On the other hand, trends that can’t be sustained won’t be, and government intervention to arrest structural changes in an economy usually just transforms today’s recession into tomorrow’s crash. I think that goes far to explain what happened here in 2008.