Home  >  Diplomacy  >  Appeasement

Category: Appeasement

November 7, 2006

S. Korean Defense of Kaesong Raises More Questions Than Answers

Last spring, the U.S. Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea and some  NGO’s first raised concerns about the rights of workers at North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Park, which  hosts just  over a dozen South  Korean factories.   The  Unification Ministry initially tried to allay those concerns by bringing journalists and some foreign dignitaries up to Kaesong for guided tours.  This did not work  as planned.  The U.S. Ambassador wandered around and snapped pictures of all the U.S.-made machine tools that...

Categories Appeasement/Money Laundering/WMD
November 6, 2006

Got Meth?

Recently,  Robert Koehler  blogged about the North Korean drug ship that was repeatedly caught in Busan, only to be left to go and make the same haul again.  It’s only the latest example of the South Korean government putting the interests of Bureau 39 ahead of the interests of ordinary Korean citizens in either the North or the South.  Now, however, media exposure has embarrassed Roh’s government into the most limp-wristed  action  they could get away with — actually inspecting...

Categories Appeasement/Drugs & N Korea
November 2, 2006

The Song Min-Soon Dossier (The Death of an Alliance, Part 59)

We all know that Song Min-Soon is going to be South Korea’s next Minister of Foreign Affairs and trade, but if you think that a man who talks this kind of trash  about his friends couldn’t possibly be a career diplomat, think again. [ ]Mr Song, 58, is a 30-year career diplomat who served as ambassador to Poland while Christopher Hill was US ambassador there. The two then became their respective countries’ chief negotiators in the six-party talks on North...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Korean Politics
November 2, 2006

Next UniFiction Minister Was Convicted in 2002 Bribery Scheme; Still Under Suspended Prison Sentence Later Pardoned by Roh

Update:   According to this, Roh pardoned  Lee last year —  which, of course, changes everything except the appeanance of cronyism, whitewashing, back-scratching, and corruption. Funny, I don’t recall anyone mentioning that Lee Jae-Joung is a con. Lee taught at the Sung Kong Hoe University in Seoul and served as the university president from 1994 to 2000 when he joined the then-ruling Millennium Democratic Party to become a member of the 16th National Assembly. He helped found the governing Uri...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Law/Korean Politics
October 30, 2006

‘Contain and Transcend’

Eric Sayers of the Center for Security Policy has produced a very interesting paper called “Contain and Transcend:  A Strategy for Regime Change in North Korea.”  Eric doesn’t think we can or should  actually promote democracy or encourage dissent inside North Korea — I  think we can and should  — but he  gets the  essential formula right:  starve the regime, reach out to the people.  This one is a must-read think piece.  Eric also keeps a fine blog, The Neo-Reaganite.

Categories Appeasement/Geopolitics/Washington Views
October 29, 2006

DLP Leaders to N. Korea: ‘Say It Aint So!’

[Previous posts on the Il Shim Hue Fifth Column scandal here.  So far, the NIS has accused the ring of controlling violent anti-American protests, trying to infiltrate civic groups, controlling  senior officials of the Democratic Labor Party, and trying to manipulate the Seoul mayoral election.] As bad timing goes, it’s one for the books.  The far-left minor opposition Democratic Labor Party’s leaders  had planned their visit to Pyongyang  some time  ago, before they realized that their party would be at...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
October 25, 2006

S. Korean Cabinet Shakeup: Unifiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok Will Resign; Defense, Foreign Ministers Will Also Step Down

Reuters Photo:   UniFiction Minister Lee Jong-Seok and Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon at the National Assembly, Oct. 6, 2006. [Scroll down for updates]   Roh has not confirmed that he will accept the resignation of the UniFiction Minister who replaced Comrade Chung Dong-Young.  Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok was soon expected to confirm his intention to step down during a meeting with reporters, according to the officials. With Lee’s resignation, if accepted, the president is expected to reshuffle all of his...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean Politics
October 25, 2006

Nuclear Blackmail

Update:   A couple  of delightfully  subtle KCNA  quotes: “If South Korea joins  the PSI,  it will pay.” “South Korea, if you want to have security, trust in those who share your blood.” And spill it. “If the South Korean authorities end up joining U.S.-led moves to sanction and stifle (the North) we will regard it as a declaration of confrontation against its own people … and take corresponding measures,” the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/WMD/WTF?
October 25, 2006

Marcus Noland on Sanctions and Engagement

He makes several good points, but this is probably my favorite: If I lived in Korea, I myself would also support the engagement policy. Engagement is very important as a tool to induce the fundamental changes of the North Korean regime. But from some time back, the South Korean government seems to have lost its perspective. Engagement is just a tool to achieving the goal of making changes in North Korea, but now it seems engagement itself has become the...

Categories Appeasement/WMD
October 25, 2006

North Korea Sold Ryongchon Relief Donations

The first clue should have been why they said they needed 50 televisions (background  and photos  of the still-not-quite-unexplained disaster; click the first link and scroll down for a before-and-after gif animation using satellite images).  A North Korean government-sponsored company has reportedly been selling products to North Korean citizens using the nonprofit aid products received from the international community, including South Korea during the Yongchon disaster of April 2004. Members of a North Korean aid organization located in Dandong City,...

Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid
October 24, 2006

Proliferation Security Watch

*   Hong Kong authorities have detained a North Korean ship “Kang Nam I, a 2,035-ton general cargo ship,” which had arrived from Shanghai.  North Korean crew members and Hong Kong customs officials suggest that the inspection is related to a couple dozen safety violations, that the ship is empty, and that the inspections are not related to U.N.S.C.R. 1718.  Crew members claim that the ship will sail again in two days.  The Chosun Ilbo reports that the search didn’t...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Geopolitics/Money Laundering/Technology/Uncategorized/WMD
October 21, 2006

Dance, Little Piggy! (Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 14)

Most observers had speculated, since at least 1994 or so, that North Korea has the capacity to create a crude nuclear weapon. That appears to be exactly what they demonstrated recently, meaning that the only real news was our need to recalibrate Kim Jong Il’s brass-to-brains ratio. I didn’t guess whether he’d actually go through with it, but I did believe that he’d try to time it just before the U.S. election if he did. I also guessed that if...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/China & Korea/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea
October 21, 2006

MUST READ: NYT on Korean Nationalism, North and South

Today, even though it has a highly advanced economy — more than 80 percent of South Koreans have broadband Internet access at home, the highest rate in the world — the country has a nearly provincial relationship to its local heroes, like Ban Ki-moon, the foreign minister who will be the next U.N. secretary general. The most famous South Korean of recent times was Hwang Woo Suk, a scientist who in 2004 and 2005 announced breakthroughs in cloning. At home,...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean History/Korean Society/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 19, 2006

The Death of an Alliance, Part 56

At the end of this post, there is big news, but  if I told you now, I couldn’t wring the last full measure of absurdity out of  it.  So please stick with me here.  I have  accused the South Korean government of promoting anti-Americanism.  When I do, I speak of things like  this: The chief presidential secretary for security Song Min-soon on Wednesday said South Korea would be the greatest victim in a war on the peninsula due to the...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD/WTF?
October 19, 2006

Interview: L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director, Mansfield Foundation

Gordon Flake (bio)  is two things that make his opinions interesting and valuable to me.  First, he’s a fluent Korean speaker, and those of us who aren’t are always at some disadvantage to those who do when we are gathering the facts we process into our views.  Second — and Gordon may not agree with this characterization — his views  strike me as classically  liberal. His views are probably more independent and less jaundiced by partisan bias or  ambitions  than...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Blogs & Blogging/Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Media Criticism/NK Economics/Proliferation/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
October 17, 2006

Of Tin-Pot Crises, and Real Ones

U.N. Resolution 1695, passed after North Korea’s missile tests, demanded that countries exercise “vigilance” to be certain that their money wasn’t paying for more missiles.  South Korea adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach and continued as if nothing had changed.  It even had another illegal payments-to-North Korea  kerfuffle (“I apologize for the illegal remittance issue, which was caused by mismatch between law and reality” — a real classic).  The focii of all these legal and ethical evasions are Kumgang...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 16, 2006

Grand Nationals Call for Reexamining Aid to North Korea

The GNP had been modestly supportive of “engagement” theories during the high times of the unifiction, but in South Korea, the high has worn off. Park Geun-Hye, an exceedingly cunning sensor of the shifting political winds, is staking out “Sunshine Lite” as something more reciprocal than her previous statements had suggested. Here’s a rough translation of her most recent statement: The Sunshine Policy is necessary for leading North Korea toward change and for releasing tensions between North and South. But...

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 15, 2006

U.N.S.C.R. 1718: Who Won, Who Lost (Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 13)

John Bolton: Winner. I’d like to hear John Bolton’s critics deny that, as with Resolution 1695, he has wrung far more effectiveness from the U.N. than we had come to expect. Not only should we confirm this man, pronto, we should clone him. Madeleine Albright never got results like these. The United States: Winner. We got everything we really wanted here: help constricting Kim Jong Il’s financial arteries the right to search his ships and planes. an embargo on the...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Geopolitics/Japan/Japan & Korea/Money Laundering/U.S. & Korea/WMD