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Category: Diplomacy

July 20, 2007

A License to Stall

If you read those breathless reports that North Korea was really, really  ready to fully denuclearize,  you can  catch your breath now:  “We had a big discussion about putting an overall deadline in,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator, told reporters after talks concluded today. “We had a consensus. Since we were not very successful in meeting the date in the spring, we decided that we should have working groups before we come up with a...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
July 16, 2007

IAEA Confirms Yongbyon Shutdown

After much speculation, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that North Korea has shut down its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon.  I have always expected North Korea to go through this part of the deal (full text here), as I expected them to let IAEA inspectors back into Yongbyon and the other  facilities near it.  But to simplify arguments I’ve made here  before, those things cost North Korea almost  nothing: It’s easy to kick inspectors out.  They’ve done it before....

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
July 14, 2007

If Jack Pritchard Doesn’t Believe Jack Pritchard, Why Should We?

Jack Pritchard probably comes to his role as South Korea’s  main policy mouthpiece honestly,  through a shared  belief that the next ten years of unrequited aid really will change North Korea into a peaceful, bucolic, union-free garment  district.  Pritchard is President of the Korea Economic  Institute, which  works  Washington’s Korea-watching and policy-making crowds through its regular sponsorship of social and academic dinner  events.  I’ve been to a few myself, and though I seldom agree with  what I hear there,  the...

Categories Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics/Washington Views/WMD
July 13, 2007

Law Enforcement Will Be Compromised, Part 2

Law enforcement will not be compromised. ““ Chris Hill, Feb. 27, 2007 [Update: Welcome Wall Street Journal readers.] The latest refutation of this whopper of diplomatic mendacity is an extensive new investigative report on North Korea’s criminal enterprises from Time (thanks to a reader for forwarding). The report suggests that our State Department’s incomprehensible decision to return $25 million of Kim Jong Il’s criminally derived funds, now under GAO investigation as a possible violation of our own money laundering laws,...

Categories Appeasement/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks
July 9, 2007

All Quid, No Quo

If Andrei Lankov is right and most North  Koreans secretly  know that they don’t really live in an earthly  paradise, these must be confusing times.  Any of them who mull the oddities of the wider world in the privacy of  their own minds must be asking themselves:  “Why do they pay us?”  If North Korea has few natural resources and a  dwindling population of a few million, why does it seem that  everyone on earth lines up to pay tribute...

Categories "United" Nations
July 3, 2007

Anju Links for 7/3

Forgive the light blogging of late, the result of competing obligations, a bigger project I hope you’ll see here soon, and frankly, a lack of interesting fodder in the news recently. *   When I read that South Korea was already preparing to ship fuel oil to North Korea (see also), even before Yongbyong is shut down, I thought that seemed a bit overconfident.  AF 2.0, as explained by Chris Hill to the Congress, specified that the first 50,000-ton delivery...

Categories An Alliance?/Anju Links/Appeasement
June 25, 2007

House Moves to Cut Funds for UNDP, Human Rights Council

Each entity has recently brought particular discredit on itself, and in each case, there is a North Korea nexus. The UNDP recently failed a UN internal audit after U.S. diplomats outed the organization for allowing its Pyongyang operations to become, as a U.N. staffer put it, “an ATM machine” for the regime. It turns out that North Korea used some of the funds to buy overseas real estate and dual-use equipment, and that the U.N. even had a stock of...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Human Rights/Korean Education
June 24, 2007

Vanishing Goalposts and a Fool’s Errand

The minute we have bilateral talks, the six-party talks will unwind. That’s exactly what Kim Jong Il wants. — George W. Bush seemed to understand the stupidity of holding both multilateral and bilateral talks with North Korea when John Kerry was proposing them back in 2004. To truly discredit that idea, however, Bush had to flip-flop and try it on himself. Now we know what the worst of both worlds looks like. First, we got together with the representatives of...

Categories Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
June 16, 2007

Dude, Where’s My Spine? Agreed Framework 2.0 at Four Months

Yesterday, the press reported that after months of multilateral bungling, we had finally transferred either 20 or 25 million dollars of frozen assets to the disposal of Kim Jong Il for whatever purposes he chooses. Those assets had gathered in a shady Macau Bank known as Banco Delta Asia until September 2005, when the Treasury Department published an interim rule noting that they were, in large part, laundered proceeds of counterfeiting and drug dealing. Does anyone think Kim’s purposes will...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/WMD
June 1, 2007

‘[W]e believed the United Nations could save us.’

I wonder how many mass graves could be marked with those words.    That quote — it would be funny, though epitaphs  seldom are — comes from this testimonial of a Yodok survivor, via the International Herald Tribune.  In 1999, a group of seven North Koreans fleeing their country was intercepted in Russia. The Russian authorities, rejecting appeals from the United Nations and human rights groups, sent them to China. China returned them to North Korea. In the ensuing uproar...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/Refugees
May 29, 2007

Wachovia Backs Off of North Korea Funds Transfer

State must  really regret having let the Banco Delta issue  enter the mainstream of our nuclear diplomacy with the North Koreans.  What a terrifically mangled excuse it has become for North Korea’s nonperformance. The United States believes a banking dispute blocking a nuclear disarmament accord will drag on and has pressed North Korea to start shutting its reactor in return for a firm US promise of a solution, a report said Monday.  [AFP] This is just odd.  You’d think that...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Money Laundering
May 21, 2007

Frostbrain

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A snag in what is probably the easiest phase of the North Korea nuclear agreement has sparked new criticism of the Bush administration but U.S. officials appear committed to pursuing a solution, even if it reverses previous policy. More than a month after Pyongyang was due to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex under a Feb 13 deal, it has not done so, insisting it first receive $25 million in once-frozen accounts. “It’s tricky but I think...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
May 14, 2007

One Man’s Diplomacy Is Another Man’s Conspiracy (or Chris Hill, Call Your Lawyer)

Whoever [in the United States or in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States] knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). — So here’s something I though I’d never see: U.S. government officials more-or-less openly engaging in a conspiracy that would land anyone else in a federal prison for...

Categories Appeasement/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks
May 14, 2007

Surprisingly Strong Criticism of AF 2.0 on WaPo, NYT Editorial Pages

It’s a surprising reversal to see the Washington Post in particular speaking so critically of the results of something for which it spent so many years and so much ink advocating. North Korea first made clear that it would take no action until the banking issue was settled by the unfreezing of its accounts. The administration conceded that. Then Pyongyang demanded all of its money back, including that linked to criminal activity. Again, the administration gave in; on April 10,...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
May 7, 2007

So Much for ‘Hawk Engagement:’ Victor Cha Steps Down

The proponent of the “hawk-engagement” theory of North Korea policy looks to be the first casualty of the unraveling of Agreed Framework 2.0.  The AP  tries to shoehorn this into its standard anti-Iraq War meme, but it’s a strained fit for  on Cha,  an architect of  a soft-line diplomatic approach that is clearly failing:  Cha leaves amid concerns over  North Korea’s failure to comply with deadlines to eliminate its nuclear weapons programs.  [AP] Reporter  Matthew Lee’s story is  what you’d...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
May 6, 2007

North Korea Demands That U.S. Launder Its Counterfeiting Money

What do you get for making concessions to North Korea?  Demands for even more ridiculous concessions! North Korea has demanded the United States allow it to open an account at a bank in New York and its funds at a Macau bank be transferred there, a Japanese daily reported in Sunday. …. “The United States hurt the credibility of North Korea by imposing financial sanctions. The United States must correct this,” the source quoted an unnamed North Korean official as...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
May 5, 2007

A Denuclearization Agreement, But Without the ‘Denuclearization’ Part

It’s Day 21 since Peace in Our Time Day, and here’s the latest “peace in our time” update: Yonbyong is running; no IAEA inspectors have gone to North Korea and none have been invited; there have been no substantive six-party sessions since March; North Korea denies having the uranium program it previously admitted; North Korea may or may not be running away with the ransom in dirty money that held this deal up, even though it wasn’t part of the...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized