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January 12, 2007

Fortunately, No Translators Were Present

Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, stated that the new South Korean president must be “sensitive to the needs of the (Asia-Pacific) region, in addition to thinking about North-South relations.” …. Washington expects the new Korean administration to think “about working closely with Tokyo and Washington in terms of joint approaches, in terms of what’s going on in North Korea,” he told Yonhap News Agency after meeting with Kim Geun-tae, chairman of the ruling Uri Party, at Kim’s parliament...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
January 8, 2007

Will John Negroponte Put Some Steel in Our Korea Policy?

If so, it would be good news. I’ve argued on this blog that the G.W. Bush policy isn’t really that different from the Bill Clinton policy on the fundamentals. Both shared the same set of  essential beliefs: that North Korea has a genuine interest in disarming, for the right price; that such a disarmament is achieveable, verifiable, and enforceable; implicitly, that North Korea’s nuclear proliferation can be contained; implicitly, that North Korea is more dangerous if its regime is destabilized...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
January 5, 2007

Whatever Happened to Jay Lefkowitz?

The Washington Post sets a new milestone by reading my mind when it asks the question. The position of Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea was created in the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004, which President Bush signed in November of that year. After a long delay in filling the post, President Bush finally nominated Lefkowitz. Despite a few promising words and some forthright challenges to South Korean appeasement and apathy, the White House has never...

Categories America/Human Rights/Washington Views
December 9, 2006

South Korea’s Influence Machine

The Donga Ilbo has an excellent piece on how South Korea lobbies Congress.  Well worth reading in its entirety. Related:  how it tries to influence the American  press. Also related:   Felony violations  of the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act  are now classified as Specified Unlawful Activity  under 18 U.S.C. sec. 1956, meaning the transactions of unregistered agents are considered money laundering.

Categories Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
December 6, 2006

A Billion for Tribute, But Not One More Cent for Defense!

Update:   Guess what?  GI Korea had it exactly right all along.    All hail GI Korea!   Wow.  Talk about nailing it. Let’s compare the $780 million dollar cost sharing agreement to the amount of money Seoul sends to North Korea.   While North Korea was busy creating international stability with their ballistic missile and nuclear bomb tests, the South Korean government was busy sending them a record amount of humanitarian aid.   The South Korean government sent $227...

Categories An Alliance?/NK Economics/U.S. Military/Washington Views
December 5, 2006

Robert Gates Gets It (Mostly) Right on Korea

Consider that: how often do bloggers, who live to bite ankles, find no fault with the pronouncements of those who make policy? I begin my observation of Gates as SecDef as a skeptic. And indeed, nothing that Gates could say about Korea could make me a fan if he prescribes Surrender Lite in Iraq or “learning to live with” an Iranian bomb. But listen carefully to his views on the Koreas, from his confirmation hearings. Begin in 1994, back when...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Washington Views
December 2, 2006

What Can We Expect from Silvestre Reyes?

Reyes, a Democrat from Texas (he’s the one on the left, next to Curt Weldon), has been picked to lead the House Intelligence Committee. First, let’s heave a sigh that Nancy Pelosi’s first choice, Alcee Hastings, hit the “WTF!?” wall hard. The choice of Hastings was Pelosi’s second major personnel stumble since her selection as majority leader, before even taking up the post. Before he was elected to Congress, Hastings had been a federal judge. In 1988, he was overwhelmingly...

Categories Diplomacy/Washington Views
November 29, 2006

Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 15

The United States has leaked a new set of sanctions on “luxury items” that can no longer be exported to North Korea, in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718: [T]he list of proposed luxury sanctions, obtained by The Associated Press, aims to make Kim’s swanky life harder: No more cognac, Rolex watches, cigarettes, artwork, expensive cars, Harley Davidson motorcycles or even personal watercraft, such as Jet Skis. Electronic goods like I-pods and plasma TV’s are also banned.  Defectors helped...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology/Washington Views
November 28, 2006

We Support Our Dupes

John Kerry tried to deny it until his own Web site tried to defend it.  Now, Charlie Rangel, even confronted with statistical evidence to the contrary, comes right out and states one of the minor premises  of the “back door draft” argument:  only an idiot with nowhere else to go would join the United States military.  It’s all right here, on video.  We all remember the dishonest suggestion, mostly just before the  2004 election,  that a Bush reelection would mean...

Categories America/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Military/Washington Views
November 28, 2006

More G-2 on Robert Gates

If you’re looking for reasons not to be glum about Robert Gates, Michael Barone offers a few.  Barone pictures Gates as someone with a great deal of sensitivity, and perhaps hostility, toward congressional meddling in foreign policy since its failure to confirm him as CIA Director years ago.  I was especially interested in this take on Nicaragua: “By the end of 1984, I concluded that we were kidding ourselves if we thought the contras might win. I wrote [CIA Director...

Categories U.S. Military/Washington Views
November 21, 2006

The Case for Starving the People

I noticed this interesting graf in a story about the effect of the luxury  items sanctions in UNSCR 1718.  For reasons that escape me entirely, some people believe that it’s counterproductive to bar Kim Jong Il from buying sashimi, S-Class sedans, and Omega watches while his people are starving – to – death,  some seem so quick to forget. Over past years, U.S. leaders have described the North Korean regime as an axis of evil, an outpost of tyranny, an...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/Korean Education/Washington Views
November 19, 2006

‘The North Korea Refugee Relief and Reconstruction Act’

Several weeks ago, K-blogs were all aflutter with Robert Kaplan’s article on the prospects for destabilizing chaos when the North Korean regime collapses.  I argued in response that the United States should begin planning to fund reconstruction and organize an emergency humanitarian response, and that this ought to be one of the main contingencies  around which a U.S.-Korea alliance should be designed.  Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has now introduced a bill to address those issues.  Here’s the summary;...

Categories An Alliance?/Reconstruction/Refugees/Washington Views
November 15, 2006

Two Cheers for Tom Lantos

He’d get three if he’d said  it three years ago, and four if he offered a few more specifics, but Tom Lantos (D, Cal.) sounds at least as  tough here  as Jim Leach (R, Ia.) might have: The Bush administration’s policy toward North Korea has failed and a new approach must be tried, including punishing the North’s leaders and sending a U.S. envoy to Pyongyang for talks, a key Democrat said on Wednesday. Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who is...

Categories America/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
November 9, 2006

Chosun Ilbo’s Take on Dem Takeover Sketches Shape of New Realignment

Today is November 9th, which means that the official sulking period has ended, and it’s time to start picking your way though the banquet of bloggable delicacies of our new moveable feast.  America has moved to the left, but it’s uncertain just how far.  At the same time, Korea seems poised to move  right just, and it’s not at all clear that either side will stop to shake hands if, and when, they cross paths.  A more elemental question is...

Categories America/An Alliance?/Human Rights/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Washington Views
November 8, 2006

The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard

“Our interest is a stable North Korea.” — Bill Richardson They sell uranium to Libya, sell  missiles to Iran and Syria, renounce or violate every agreement they make, kill “impure” babies, gas kids, put the handicapped in concentration camps, and intentionally starve millions of their people.  And we want  them to be able  to go on doing that?  My idea of our interests obviously differs from Bill Richardson’s.  The North Koreans have fooled him so many times, he’s obviously beyond...

Categories Diplomacy/Washington Views/WTF?
November 8, 2006

Wobble Watch: Robert Gates on North Korea

A few links that may interest (or depress) you.  In 2004, Gates teamed up with Zbigniew Brzezinski to call for direct bilateral talks with Iran.  Procedurally, you can’t say that we gain much by letting the Europeans do it for us, since we certainly don’t share a common set of interests or base beliefs with Europe.  Substantively, I don’t see what you can gain by talking to a man as hell-bent as Ahmedinejad.  Especially if we show weakness in Iraq,...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Military/Washington Views
November 8, 2006

Rumsfeld Resigns

[Update: More on Robert Gates here, and some clues to how he thinks here and .] It was probably inevitable, and if it might have been the only way to preserve any kind of bipartisan consensus on Iraq. I agree with Robert’s analysis, as it concerns Korea policy. Rumsfeld has managed the downsizing of the alliance creditably, confronting, rather than denying, the effect of the political trends there. Much of what Rumsfeld did right in Korea is owed to the...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Washington Views
November 6, 2006

What’s Joe Di Trani doing these days?

You may recall that  before he resigned from the six-party  negotiations  team,  Di Trani was one half of the New York Channel, along with Han Song Ryol (Han, who is a real bastard, has also moved  on).  Those were the bilateral talks that the State Department was pretending not to have while the Democrats and some Republicans were demanding we have them.  Di Trani, who was at the CIA previously, went to the Directorate of National Intelligence.  Now (via Richardson)...

Categories Diplomacy/North Korea/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD