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March 8, 2007

The Death of An(other) Alliance?

Thank you, Vice Foreign Minister Obvious! North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan reportedly told North Korea specialists in the United States that China is “only trying to use” North Korea. Kim was in the U.S. for talks on normalizing bilateral ties.  [Chosun Ilbo] I take it His Porcine Majesty did not enjoy the buffet at the Chinese Embassy.  Or, more likely, this is just disinformation: China has no great influence on North Korea, he was quoted as saying, adding...

Categories China & Korea/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
March 8, 2007

Peace in Our Time! Abductions Edition

I forecast severe tire damage along the road to removing North Korea from the terrorism-sponsor list:  HANOI–Japan and North Korea opened talks here Wednesday morning on normalizing bilateral relations, but the North Korean side canceled the afternoon session apparently as a way of refusing the Japanese request to discuss the abduction issue further, the chief Japanese delegate said. However, the meeting is scheduled to resume Thursday morning at the North Korean Embassy to discuss the abduction and normalization issues, Koichi...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan & Korea/Six-Party Talks/WMD
March 7, 2007

Hill: N. Korea Must Give Up Uranium Program

[Update:   This doesn’t  sound very “newly murky:”  “I have no doubt that North Korea has had a highly enriched uranium program,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said during a visit to Seoul. …. “We would expect that when North Korea makes its declaration of nuclear facilities that that would be one of the issues addressed in North Korea’s declaration,” he told a news conference.  Good, if we really have no doubts.  Straightforward interpretation is all that can...

Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Japan/Japan & Korea/WMD
March 6, 2007

Peace Is at Hand!

*    Accountability Is So Last Month:    For those who are thirsty for some rare news of someone holding Kim Jong Il accountable for anything lately, Opinion Journal has more on the end of the U.N. Development Program’s highly questionable North Korea operations, and some unsolicited advice for Chris Hill. *   ‘There’s Nothing to Wait for Here:’   Those words, from the North Korean delegate who passed reporters on his way into “normalization” talks, could be the truest...

Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK
March 4, 2007

How a U.S. Consul Helped Send Six North Korean Refugees to Kim Jong Il’s Gulag

[Update: The Shenyang Six were freed from a Chinese jail in August 2007.] The Secretary of State shall undertake to facilitate the submission of applications [] by citizens of North Korea seeking protection as refugees …. (Title 22, United States Code, Section 7843) Back in January, I told you the story of the Shenyang Six, a group of six North Korean refugees who sought refuge from persecution and starvation in their homeland, and how the Chinese authorities, following their long-standing...

Categories China/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Washington Views
February 28, 2007

Chris Hill Testifies at the International Relations Foreign Affairs Committee

Headlines now, details later: Hill was firm that North Korea had purchased items that had no other use but highly enriched uranium. He said that a failure to resolve the HEU issue would be a deal-breaker. Committee members of both parties also seemed to believe that North Korea must come clean on HEU. Hill left open the possibility that North Korea will still be denying the existence of its HEU program 60 days from now without breaking the deal. He...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
February 28, 2007

Welcome to the Hen House

[Update:   The  Daily NK has more on the working groups.] Those “working groups,” to which most of the  difficult unresolved issues with North Korea have been delegated, are scheduled to meet next month, and get a load of who is chairing them: South Korea will chair a working group on providing economic and energy incentives for North Korea, while China will be responsible for a group on the North’s denuclearization. Russia will head a group concerned with peace and...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 27, 2007

Joe DiTrani on the Not-Quite-Agreed Framework and N. Korea’s Uranium Program

[Update: Welcome Think Progress readers.  If you believe that our suspicions about highly-enriched uranium all  rest on slender  aluminum tubes, see also, and see also also.] Ambassador Joseph DiTrani, formerly a member of Chris Hill’s negotiating team and now the North Korea Mission Manager at the Directorate of National Intelligence, piped up in the Senate today when Sen. Jack Reed asked a fairly obvious question — what has changed since HEU was a deal-breaker in 2002?   His answer, though not earth-shaking,...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
February 26, 2007

Chronology of a Capitulation: Why Nothing Will Be Solved in 60 Days

Kyodo News has a very distressing report about just what the United States came to Beijing prepared to give up, and give up almost immediately: North Korea’s abandonment of nuclear weapons was stated in a first draft of an agreement document for the six-party talks held earlier this month, but was dropped in a second draft drawn up by the United States after the North Korean side rejected it, negotiation sources said Sunday. Given that North Korea giving up nuclear...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 23, 2007

The Administration’s North Korea Strategy: Pop Smoke

[Update: A friend just sent me John O’Sullivan’s must-read criticism of the deal on National Review Online (thanks!), and it’s an absolute direct hit. O’Sullivan actually attributed Bush’s new policy to Jimmy Carter (ouch!). Safe to say, conservatives pretty much all want this deal euthanized. I could swear I’d seen the Kipling reference before somewhere.] [Update 2: More “Barrel of a Gun” spin from Pyongyang: In another sense, North Korean authorities seem to be trying to re-integrate the disparity of...

Categories "United" Nations/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 22, 2007

Richardson on David Albright: Put Me Down for “C”

Update: Albright has published his views here in slightly more detail, and I’m even less persuaded than I was before. Albright completely mischaracterizes the HEU evidence by ingoring evidence he can’t refute (North Korea’s admissions, Musharraf’s admissions, Libya) and arguing as if all of our evidence consisted of a receipt for aluminum tubes we’d found in A.Q. Khan’s lint filter. The key point about aluminum tubes is that they’re used to make gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. I’ve never seen...

Categories Appeasement/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 21, 2007

‘Paying the Clown’

[Corrected, Updated]   Harvard Professor Sung Yoon Lee  dissects the North Korea sellout  in the Daily NK and manages to say in one paragraph, with crisp eloquence, what it’s taken me about four posts to say less clearly. Energy, food, economic aid, and legitimacy are a necessary condition to the North Korean regime’s long-term survival, for the quintessential criminal regime of Kim Jong Il–despite its claims of juche (self-sufficiency)–is unable to function over the long-term without aid from abroad. At...

Categories Appeasement/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 21, 2007

The Two (South) Koreas

I have concluded that there must be some South Korean law against holding cabinet meetings. South Korea’s point man on North Korea said Wednesday that there is no evidence to support reports that North Korea may have a uranium-enrichment program. “We do not have any information on whether North Korea is carrying out a concrete plan to run a uranium-enrichment program,” Unification Minister Lee Jae-joung said at a meeting of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and trade.  [Yonhap] National...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 20, 2007

A Rumble at Kouvola

Fred Frey International brings us the story from this  remote Finnish border post, which  was recently the scene of two North Koreans going a bit overboard in protecting the diplomatic pouch they were carrying.  They weren’t carrying diplomatic passports, but the Finns were ultimately willing to overlook that.  None of this would have happened if the North Koreans had just shown their tickets. I wonder what was in the pouch…. Update:   See also Antti’s great blog with the unpronounceable...

Categories Diplomacy/Europe/WTF?
February 19, 2007

It’s Time for Jay Lefkowitz to Resign

I recently wrote a piece for publication on North Korea’s finances, the rumors of the then-prospective deal with North Korea,  and how to increase the pressure so that we could get a truly verifiable dismantlement of their nuclear program and a real and fundamental movement toward transparency.   If no favorable agreement could be achieved,  our financial strategy  showed real promise in  collapsing  the regime’s palace economy, and maybe even the regime  itself, something for which my aspiration is no secret. ...

Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
February 17, 2007

Except for the Checks Being Written Out to ‘Herr A. Hitler,’ and The Dachau Industrial Park, Yes

Paying off Kim Jong Il is just like the Marshall Plan, says Roh. “There is frequent criticism that we are pouring out aid to the North,” Mr. Roh told South Korean residents in Italy. “After the war, the United States had several plans and investments, and among those the most efficient was the Marshall Plan. He noted the great benefits Washington had reaped from its investments: “Inter-Korean relations are being worked out, and we have the Kaesong Industrial Complex, but...

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement
February 15, 2007

Escape from Munich

[Update:    The Washington Post declares a  conservative revolt against the Not-Quite-Agreed Framework.  E-mailing another activist today, I noted the irony that after years of being on President Bush’s side and getting no media traction, we’re far more likely to attract media attention now that we oppose his new policy.  Just watch.  This will be  a fascinating experiment in media behavior.] [Update 2:   More at MSNBC.  The Administration is now  furiously “clarifying” that it will  interpret the terms strictly, which...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized