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Category: Diplomacy

January 9, 2008

Honor, Delayed

President-Elect Lee Myung Bak will finally  honor six South Korean sailors killed in a North Korean attack on their patrol boat on  June 29, 2002.  The sailors’ surviving family members were embittered, believing that their government and outgoing  President Roh Moo Hyun had  snubbed  them to appease Kim Jong Il.  One young widow  even left South Korea for good: Kim Jong-seon, the widow of Petty Officer Han Sang-guk […]  turned her back on her homeland Sunday and boarded a flight...

Categories Appeasement/ROK Military
January 8, 2008

The Restoration

No one should take pleasure in seeing another person worry about  losing his job, but there  is much to celebrate about how Lee Myung-Bak’s new administration is shaping up.  Some doubt is now cast on earlier reports that  the UniFiction Ministry would be abolished, although it’s clear that  its size and influence will be reduced  dramatically.  Its days as a foreign policy player are over,  and the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) will regain its foreign policy...

Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/U.S. & Korea
January 7, 2008

North Korea’s Moment of Untruth, and Chris Hill’s

Secretary Rice, embrace your legacy. Agreed Framework 2.0 has stalled, and probably for good. Last month, we thought we were approaching North Korea’s moment of truth. Last week, with the matter of that overdue declaration, it was still possible (though gullible) to believe they’d still offer it in due course. Certainly that was the impression the White House was feeding us when it said on January 3rd that it was “going to keep hammering away” at getting the declaration and...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 3, 2008

UniFiction Ministry to be abolished?

[Update:   The Marmot  is giddy about this.]   Had George Orwell lived in modern-day Korea, reality would have  mooted his most sardonic fiction.  After all, a  lying Ministry of Truth  is only marginally sillier than  a Ministry of Unification whose primary function is  keeping the slaves on the other side of the mine fields through the lavish financing of their overseers.  Today comes word that president-elect Lee Myung-Bak may put an end to this cruel joke by abolishing the...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
January 2, 2008

Condi Going to Pyongyang?

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, citing a report from NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, reports that Secretary Rice intends to accompany the New York Philharmonic to Pyongyang this February.  I’m agnostic on the visit of the orchestra, but  a visit  from America’s senior diplomat will rightly be interpreted as an expression of American approval. This begs a question:  approval of what, exactly?  North Korea is ignoring its obligations under Agreed Framework 2.0, is still  lying about the full extent of its...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
January 2, 2008

U-Tubed! (Part. 3)

Washington has long suspected North Korea of having a program to make highly enriched uranium (HEU) since shortly after it agreed to denuclearize in the first Agreed Framework.  North Korea  denied this at first, admitted it to two U.S. diplomats and three translators in 2002, and  then went  back to denying it.    Those denials  just got even less likely. As I previously noted here,  the U.S. asked for, and North Korea recently provided, samples of aluminum tubes we know it...

Categories Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 1, 2008

2007: A Lost Year

[Update 2 Jan 08: “North Korea failed to fulfill its October promise to declare all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 — and the United States did not make a big deal out of it.” — WaPo, Blaine Harden] SO ENDS THE YEAR 2007, with this terse statement from the State Department spokesman: In September 2005, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea agreed on a Joint Statement with North Korea that charted the way forward...

Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 30, 2007

Ralph Cossa is wrong; Pressure on North Korea worked, when applied

Generally, I agree with  Robert Koehler  that Lee Myung Bak’s landslide victory was anything but a mandate for a better, more moral North Korea policy.  It will put  less irrational people in charge, but the policy will not be the improvement that Nicholas Eberstadt hopes for unless Kim Jong Il gets seriously on the wrong side of  Lee Myung-Bak’s temper. Why?   First, the election was all about money.  Second, Lee Myung Bak is all about money.  Third, South Korean voters  …...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics/Money Laundering
December 30, 2007

Jay who? Christopher Hitchens, President Bush, and the betrayal of the North Korean people

Christopher Hitchens is certainly one of our age’s most compelling thinkers and one of the English language’s best writers. I disagree with him about plenty of things; who could say otherwise? Hitchens’s greatest logical strength is his consistent argument for the moral superiority of freedom — for all of its flaws of application — over slavery. That is a woefully unfashionable idea among popinjays in Europe and America who are too sodden with the smug confidence of liberties taken for...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/U.S. Politics
December 26, 2007

Two more North Korean refugees coming to U.S.

Two North Korean defectors are in the U.S. with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.The UNHCR’s Beijing office says a man in his 20s and a woman in her 30s have been under UN protection since July last year and were granted approval for asylum in the U.S. by Beijing and Washington. [Chosun Ilbo] The report marks only the second known occasion of the UNHCR performing its assigned mission on behalf of North Korean refugees, and...

Categories "United" Nations/Refugees
December 26, 2007

N. Korea will miss year-end deadline to declare nukes

No surprise there.  At this point, it would really only be news if North Korea actually met the deadline, or made a full disclosure at all during Kim Jong Il’s life span. A South Korean government official on Tuesday said, “There is no sign yet that North Korea has decided to make an accurate declaration. It’s improbable that the North will declare its nuclear programs by the end of the year, with only a week remaining before the New Year.”...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
December 21, 2007

U-Tubed! Enriched uranium found on N. Korean sample

Say it aint so. U.S. scientists have discovered traces of enriched uranium on smelted aluminum tubing provided by North Korea, apparently contradicting Pyongyang’s denial that it had a clandestine nuclear program, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources. [Washington Post, Glenn Kessler] But where and when did we find this incriminating sample? The United States has long pointed to North Korea’s acquisition of thousands of aluminum tubes as evidence of such a program, saying the tubes could be used as the...

Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 21, 2007

U-Tubed, Part 2

[Part 1] An honest appraisal of this new discovery means that those of us who are skeptical of AF 2.0 should grudgingly admit that it has produced at least one significant intelligence windfall, even if it was due to a North Korean oversight. Since that oversight will probably land a few people in front of firing squads, AF 2.0 proponents should at least draw the obvious conclusions to which this new intelligence leads. It seems difficult to deny that AF...

Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 20, 2007

Behind the scenes, a deepening crisis for Agreed Framework 2.0

Maybe the Dear Leader will save us all yet. From ourselves, that is. If he does, it will be because he’s overplayed his hand again. A reader forwards a scan of a letter sent by three Republican U.S. Senators — Brownback, Grassley, and Kyl, the new minority whip, to Chris Hill, the architect of Agreed Framework 2.0. The letter requests that State specifically respond to this Congressional Research Service report’s allegations that North Korea continued to materially support Hezbollah and...

Categories Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
December 13, 2007

Great moments in diplomacy

As the two sides started the second-day meeting, a North Korean navy official tried to show a slide displaying the North’s proposal on the fishing zone in front of pool reporters.  A South Korean naval officer rushed over and stopped the move, triggering a minor scuffle.  [Yonhap] This, kids, is why you don’t bring makkoli along to a negotiation.  By the way, this is what I consider a successful end to any inter-Korean negotiation involving the Roh Administration.

Categories Diplomacy
December 13, 2007

Condi: U.S. not ready to engage N. Korea broadly

A day after the New York Philharmonic announced it would play a concert in the North Korean capital and a week after word of a personal letter from Bush to leader of the communist nation, Kim Jong Il, Rice downplayed the significance of both. “This is not a regime that the United States is prepared to engage broadly,” she said. “If we are going to engage it broadly, it’s clear in the program that we have laid out how that...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Politics
December 13, 2007

North Korea still refusing to admit HEU program

The chief nuclear negotiators of South Korea and China Thursday met in Beijing to hammer out a joint message to North Korea, urging Pyongyang to come clean on all its nuclear programs and activities. North Korea is reportedly refusing to acknowledge its long-suspected uranium enrichment program, creating what Foreign Minister Song Min-soon has called a new “bump” in six-way nuclear disarmament talks that involve the two Koreas, the U.S., Japan, China and Russia.  [Yonhap] Just watch us fold like lawn...

Categories Six-Party Talks