Home  >  Diplomacy

Category: Diplomacy

December 13, 2007

Congressional Research Service issues report on the implications of removing North Korea from the terror sponsor list

Yesterday, a reader and friend was kind enough to forward the entire report to me (thanks!), which I’ve uploaded onto this blog, and which you can access here: crs-north-korea-terrorism-list-removal.pdf   Since then,  this has  generated some press attention in South Korea.  The report’s authors are the highly regarded Larry  Niksch and Raphael Perl.  There’s too much valuable information in there for me to graf and do it justice; this one is a must-read.  I’ll limit my comments to a few...

Categories Six-Party Talks/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
December 12, 2007

Senate resolution would set conditions for de-listing North Korea as a terror sponsor

I knew this was coming but was asked not to write about it. But now, I see that Richardson has a link to a Yonhap story about it. Now that it’s out, I’ll speak out of school for a moment and say that I suggested a couple of the provisions that made it into the resolution, although I’d rather not say which ones. The sponsor is Sam Brownback, who having dropped his presidential bid, is back to doing what earned...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. Politics
December 11, 2007

Desperately in need of a stranger’s hand

At the end of last month, I linked to a post at Powerline, quoting Noah Pollak on the subject of Annapolis, which I said then could just as well apply to Condi Rice’s eleventh-hour test of Kim Jong Il’s character. Pollak said, If Condi’s pursuit of the peace process is due to a belief that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible and will unlock the forces of moderation and conviviality in the Middle East, then, well, she is simply a...

Categories Diplomacy/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
December 8, 2007

North Korea hasn’t lost its talent for making enemies

[Update: This seems as good a place as any to tack on two more sets of comments from Chris Hill; plus, the Administration’s loyal soldier Victor Cha weighs in at the Chosun Ilbo. Scroll down.] Let’s face it: American conservatives are more interested in and concerned by events in the Middle East than they are in North Korea, and a bad deal with North Korea might not have been enough to mobilize their opposition if it only affected Korea. There...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation
December 8, 2007

Time to Shake Some Money-Makers

Recently, I articulated my suspicion that the Eugene Bell Foundation’s plan for family reunions between elderly Korean-Americans and their North Korean relatives would turn out to be just what Kaesong, Kumgang, and just about every other “grand opening” scheme also was: a cash pipeline to the North delivering dubious benefits and incalculable costs — incalculable because we have little or no idea of how Kim Jong Il spends the large sums he extracts from the South. In the case of...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
December 7, 2007

How Far to the Right has South Korea Moved?

Although the polls suggest that South Koreans have made a modest shift to the right on how to deal with North Korea, issue polls don’t measure the intensity of opinion or how candidates’ North Korea policies affect their appeal to voters. Those matters are key, however, when you try to whom the voters will choose to set national policy. It was this article, which I’ll quote extensively below, that brought me to the realization that I may have underestimated just...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
December 6, 2007

Chris Hill Returns from Pyongyang; Bush Writes to Kim Jong Il

After returning from a weekend in bucolic North Korea, Chris Hill stopped to talk to reporters in the lobby of his hotel in Beijing. As before, I’ll post the full State Department transcript of the Q&A, but here are some highlights: Hill visited Yongbyon and pronounced himself satisfied with the progress of “disablement” activities there. Although Yongbyon was already at the end of its useful life, the work there now involves removing the fuel, cutting valves, and using heavy equipment...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
December 4, 2007

KCNA Announces Hill’s Arrival

Pyongyang, December 3 (KCNA) — Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of State, and his party arrived here today.  [link] That’s the entire story, not an excerpt.  Why so terse?  Maybe their friends in Seoul sent them this (ht: GI Korea): The U.S. government decided to impose three new conditions for removing North Korea from Washington`s list of state sponsors of terrorism, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Saturday. The new conditions are in addition to the current U.S...

Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/U.S. Politics
December 3, 2007

North Korea Faces the End of the South Korean Gravy Train

[Update:   The field narrows further, but could Lee Hoi Chang be thinking of sticking it out through the election to lead an opposition group from the right?  It’s starting to look that way.  If Comrade Chung continues to remain way back in third place, that would allow Lee H.C. to continue to have a (from my perspective) positive influence on Lee Myung-Bak’s governance.  On the other hand,  by drawing conservatives out of the GNP, it could  solidify the GNP’s...

Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
December 1, 2007

Hill the Hawk? Not This Year.

A friend was kind enough to pass along five transcripts of Christopher Hill’s remarks to the press during his current trip to Japan and the Koreas. There’s too much interesting information in there to graf and the remarks aren’t long, so I’m just going to upload them in full and let you read for yourself. These are State’s own transcripts; I’ve appended the text to the bottom of this post. The key point is that North Korea is going to...

Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
November 29, 2007

Inter-Korean NLL Talks Deadlocked

The Northern Limit Line (NLL) is  the disputed martime boundary between the Koreas, the western extension of the Korean DMZ (map here).  The sea border was one of the issues that the 1953 Armistice talks never resolved, so the South Koreans drew a line.  Since then, the North Koreans have realized that the waters near the NLL are rich crab fishing grounds, and that crab bring in badly needed foreign exchange.  Thus, the North Koreans have developed a habit of...

Categories Appeasement
November 29, 2007

What is Condi Thinking?

It took the Annapolis Summit — not North Korea — to galavanize conservative suspicions about Secretary Rice and our State Department.  That part of the world doesn’t interest me much because I wrote it off as hopeless after visiting it in 1990 (I mean the Middle East, not  Annapolis).  My few days in Israel and a  Hamas-controlled village in  East Jerusalem have persuaded me that there isn’t going to be peace there until the Palestinians make the fundamental decision that...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
November 28, 2007

Chris Hill (Possibly) Heading for P’yang

Hill has already left for Tokyo and Beijing; the stopover in Pyongyang is still unconfirmed.  In Japan, I suppose we can expect Hill to tell his hosts to forget about ever seeing their abducted citizens again, to hurry up and pay ransom, or perhaps both.  In China, after performing a full kowtow before  Jiang  Zemin, Hill will  not mention the impending repatriation, torture, and execution of the dissident  Yoo Sang Joon or any other North Korean refugee.  Ever so stealthily,...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
November 27, 2007

The Pressure Is Off on Human Rights in North Korea

North Korea no longer feels the constraint of international pressure — particularly American pressure —  so it  believes that  it has a free hand to try to increase its  internal control by any means necessary.  Witness last week’s decision  by South Korea to abstain again from a U.N. resolution condemning the North, a reversal of a hard-won gain.   Two of the ways the regime is trying to reassert itself:  tightening its border controls and carrying out more public executions. It’s...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights
November 27, 2007

Terrorism, Plain and Simple

If you stick with me for a modest amount of law, I promise you that this post will end with a nice little adventure in participatory democracy.  But to get there, we must begin with how the United States Code defines “international terrorism,” at section 2331 of Title 18: As used in this chapter –       (1) the term “international terrorism” means activities that –                 (A) involve violent acts or...

Categories Appeasement/Terrorism (NK)
November 26, 2007

Impervious to Evidence: State’s Appeasement Express Arrives at the Koryo Hotel

[Update:   Richardson links to State’s quasi-denial:  why, yes, we have stationed a State Department  employee in Pyongyang, but he’s strictly there to supervise the equipment for the technical process of disabling North Korea’s nuclear programs.  That’s peculiar.  If this employee’s job is strictly scientific or technical, why not avoid giving people the wrong idea and  send someone from the Department of Energy or Defense  instead?  At best, this is a trial balloon.   More likely, we’ve just seen  the camel’s...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation