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Category: Diplomacy

December 12, 2008

On North Korea, Bush has one last chance not to go out with a whimper.

In several ways, it would be a mistake to make too much of the New York Times’s declaration of the “collapse” of Agreed Framework 2.0, a/k/a the Not Quite Agreed Framework. The Times’s coverage of this story has never been particularly good, and its editorials have been ridiculously inconsistent. Clearly, The Times’s loathing of Bush did not dwell easily with its approval of Bush’s new willingness to excuse North Korea from every standard of human civilization. The Times saying so...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks
December 11, 2008

No Deal on Verification

Chris Hill’s words to the press speak well enough for themselves, but the testiness of his tone tells us just as much. He has no one but himself to blame for his own humiliation, of course. It’s just unfortunate that his personal ambition created such risk and suffering for so many others. Christopher R. Hill ,Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs China World Hotel Beijing, China December 11, 2008 ASSISTANT SECRETARY HILL: Good morning. Obviously we would like...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
December 9, 2008

Agreed Framework 2.0 Death Watch

Whoop de doo. The six-party talks have started again. China has circulated a draft protocol that strives mightily to top Chris Hill’s gift for vagueness by omitting the word “sampling.” I don’t think the people who designed this six-party concept, in retrospect, realized what a perfect venue this was for Chinese, Russian, and (often) South Korean back-stabbing. The concept may be with us for a while, at least as a superficial demonstration of Obama’s commitment to “multilateralism.”* With the clock...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
December 8, 2008

The Unmourned Death of Agreed Framework 2.0

Just as Washington seems to have almost forgotten the name of the current president, hardly anyone still remembers Chris Hill, a media hero for one brief while after he conned George W. Bush out of one part of the “cowboy diplomacy” they loved to loathe. Also mostly forgotten: for the brief interlude when it was tried, the cowboy diplomacy worked. Less so: what replaced it did not. Hill is now about to round up the six various parties for one...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
December 1, 2008

N. Korea Expels Half of the South Koreans from Kaesong.

North Korea has allowed 880 South Korean people to stay in the inter-Korean industrial complex in the border city of Kaesong, far less than expected by the South, South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesman said Monday. North Korea verbally informed South Korea of its decision Sunday night, Kim Ho Nyoun told a press briefing. [Kyodo] You say that like it’s a bad thing. Updates: The better media reporting on this subject probes two questions: (a) how will this affect Kaesong and...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
December 1, 2008

Watch Your Back, Comrade

No, this is not a post about Hillary Clinton’s role in Barack Obama’s cabinet. I’ve read a lot of silly reporting about Kim Jong Il’s rumored stroke, but I’ve also seen and heard enough leaks from people who ought to be in the know that I’m actually starting to believe that he’s seriously debilitated. This latest one comes from former CIA officer Art Brown, and it makes it sound as though the power struggle to inherit all this is already...

Categories Diplomacy/Kremlinology/U.S. & Korea
November 29, 2008

The Wisdom of Kim Dae Jung: Slavery Is Prosperity, Censorship Is Freedom, Terror Is Peace

No matter what the North Koreans do with Kaesong next week or next year, their actions last week have already assured that it will fail to attract the international investment it needs to succeed. The North having demonstrated its willingness to hold potential investors’ capital hostage to their political whims, those investors will now stay away in droves. It’s worth reviewing just how grandiose the dream of Kaesong had become so recently. If you recognize the url stamped onto this...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
November 26, 2008

Activists to Resume Leaflet Balloon Campaign

A wave of free publicity, courtesy of the governments of North and South Korea, has made the leaflet balloon campaign has been a great success. Why quit now? Activists for human rights in North Korea on Tuesday vowed to keep sending propaganda leaflets to the North even though the government has asked them to desist. The announcement was made by Park Sang-hak, head of Fighters for Free North Korea and Choi Sung-yong, president of Family Assembly Abducted to North Korea....

Categories Activism/Appeasement/Deprogramming/NK Economics
November 26, 2008

Obama Cabinet Watch: Someone is going to be very disappointed

We still don’t have a very clear picture of what Obama’s North Korea policy is going to be, but the North Koreans apparently have high expectations, as does one of its most prominent U.S. sympathizers, Professor Han S. Park. Park, writing in the Korea Times, says Team Obama met with the North Koreans recently and promised a “dramatic stride toward diplomatic normalization.” Oh, and the Americans will also demand that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Some day. This...

Categories Appeasement
November 25, 2008

Because if it’s counterintuitive and groundless, it must be true!

I think the headline of this New York Times story by Choe Sang Hun ought to give you the idea: “Latest Threats May Mean North Korea Wants to Talk” Right. North Korea is serially flicking all of switches on the Sunshine machine to the “off” position, snipping the hotlines, storming out of talks, typing up eviction notices for the fools and scoundrels who inhabit Kaesong, and shooting the occasional housewife. Yet “experts” are found to conclude that this means that...

Categories Appeasement/Uncategorized
November 24, 2008

Calling Jay Lefkowitz

According to some fragmentary reports passed along by Human Rights Frontiers, Son Jung Nam — or rather, what’s left of Son Jung Nam after more than a year of torture in a dungeon in Pyongyang — is about to be stood up against a firing squad … if he still lives, that is. (No link on the latest report, which come to me via e-mail). I previously posted on Son’s case here. In China, a group of 11 refugees between...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees
November 21, 2008

Obama Cabinet Looking Surprisingly Centrist and Responsible

The L.A. Times reports that Obama is seriously considering either Hillary Clinton or Richard Holbrooke for State and retaining the effective Robert Gates at Defense.  We are already hearing the first sorrowful wailing from those for whom the highest form of patriotism is the emotional investment in America’s defeat and dimunition, in a way that is only coincidentally similar to the patriotism of its enemies.  At least one of them had the deficiency of judgment to actually believe that Dennis...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
November 16, 2008

Arbeit Macht Nichts: The End of Kaesong?

The second of the twin pillars of the Sunshine Experiment, the Kaesong Industrial Project, may have gone to join the Kumgang Tourist Project on the ash heap of history this week with North Korea’s closure of the border between North and South.  With that closure, South Koreans inside the North Korean enclave have been served with their eviction notices.  The North Korean directive may yet prove to be a bluff, but it will still mean the end of Kaesong as...

Categories Appeasement/NK Economics
November 2, 2008

Yet again, Kim Jong Il caught proliferating right under Chris Hill’s nose.

Sometimes, I wonder why I even bother. India blocked a North Korean plane from delivering cargo to Iran in August, responding to a U.S. request based on fears about the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This, nine weeks before President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, ostensibly to reward it for some sort of good behavior. According to the Western and Asian officials, the North Korean plane, an Ilyushin-62 long-range jet owned by...

Categories "United" Nations/Proliferation/WMD
October 28, 2008

While America Drifts, Japan and S. Korea Stand Firm

Does it ever seem that U.S. policy toward North Korea is intentionally designed to clash with those of Japan and South Korea?  No matter how necessary a coordinated approach may be to the success of any policy, and even when Japan and Korea are newly aligned toward the same strategy we’d been pursuing until February 2007, our State Department seems to delight in creating diplomatic chaos at the first sign that order might break out.  Ironically, it’s now America that...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 24, 2008

I’ll Give You a Topic: The Verification Protocol is Neither. Discuss.

It’s hardly worth discussing anyway; after all, with North Korea, there’s little point in expecting what’s agreed today to stay agreed tomorrow. We’ve already abandoned the goal of disarmament, there is always another demand, it is always followed by another concession, and someone always wants us to think that this time, it’s really the last one. Still, the State Department justifies its de-listing of North Korea as a terror sponsor by claiming that it has reached a verification protocol with...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 19, 2008

What Removing North Korea from the Terror List Means

If tomorrow’s Big Announcement from North Korea isn’t that the Great Leader has gone to the Great Meat Locker, it may well be that the North, having met with  such stunning  success at blackmailing the United States,  will throw some new tantrum at South Korea.  I would not credit the North with diplomatic genius for its success at isolating and blackmailing its enemies one at a time.  The trick isn’t new.  It seems more fair to credit us for the...

Categories Appeasement/Asia/Diplomacy/Geopolitics/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics