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November 3, 2006

Wobble Watch: Condi Rice Talks Tough, the Pentagon Talks Scary Tough

The Administration is trying to sound tough with the North Koreans, but I’m inherently distrustful of tough talk that comes the week before an election: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday the United States wanted “concrete action” when six-party talks resume on North Korea’s nuclear program. Rice said the starting point for the talks, which North Korea has boycotted since last November in protest at U.S. financial restrictions, would be to seek implementation of an agreement signed with...

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military/Washington Views/WMD
November 2, 2006

North Korea Wants Its Drug Money Back

[Update:  A senior Korean official suggests that the U.S. will do just that right after the talks resume.  Scroll down.] [Update 2:  The Washington Post post also suspects that North Korea’s announcement is merely an effort to foil the American economic pressure: We hope Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, who conducted lengthy talks with his North Korean counterpart in recent days, is justified in expecting “substantial progress” from the new round. But history suggests that both North Korea...

Categories "United" Nations/Counterfeiting/Drugs & N Korea/Famine & Food Aid/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks
October 31, 2006

N. Korea Agrees to Return to Six-Party Talks

[Update:   According to this Korean language link, the South Koreans were the last of the six parties to know that the talks would begin again.  You’d think that after getting seven billion dollars from South Korean taxpayers, they’d have enough left over to afford a phone call.  I guess they spent it somewhere else.] News coming off the wires claims that the North Koreans have agreed to return to six-party talks. Chinese, U.S. and North Korean envoys to the...

Categories China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Money Laundering/Six-Party Talks
October 26, 2006

Where Is That Other Shoe?

[Update:   A State Department official who asked not to be identified said the sanctions authority, bearing the name of Senator John Glenn, who sponsored it in the Congress, is open-ended in the range of sanctions available. That official predicted that all financial and economic transactions with North Korea would be ended, except for humanitarian aid. ] We’ve all been waiting for othe other shoe to drop — for the U.S. to announce what sanctions it will impose — since North...

Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views/WMD
August 31, 2006

TKL Interview with Chuck Downs on the Alliance, Diplomacy, Nukes, and Why Kim Jong Il Tested Those Missiles

[Update 2: Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I had accidentally disabled the comments! That’s fixed now; please submit any questions or comments you have.] [Update: This post will “stick” at the top of the page for a couple of days; scroll down for new entries.] Chuck Downs is an author, independent consultant, and former Pentagon official who frequently appears on television news programs to discuss North Korea policy. He has held a number of important positions in...

Categories An Alliance?/China & Korea/Geopolitics/Japan & Korea/Kim Jong Il/Korean Politics/Kremlinology/NK Military/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views/WMD
July 28, 2006

Kim Jong Il, Unplugged

“You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone.” — Al Capone In an interview with Radio Free Asia (Korean only), Raphael Perl of the Congressional Research Service suggests exactly what I suspected about polite requests from U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey to crack down on North Korean money laundering — the polite requests are backed by some powerful veiled threats: One option available to the US government, although this is...

Categories Counterfeiting/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
July 24, 2006

Now What? Part 3: Dave, What Are You Doing?

Update: The BOC account played a role in the 2000 summit scandal, according to the Chosun Ilbo. What skill it must take to step in it this hard: SEOUL, July 24 (Yonhap) — North Korea is suspected of having printed fake Chinese currency, which prompted the Bank of China (BOC) to freeze all of its North Korean accounts in an apparent retaliation, a South Korean legislator asserted on Monday. Quoting a number of unidentified U.S. officials, Rep. Park Jin of...

Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks
July 24, 2006

On Again

Update 7/25: Off again. How do you say “stall” in Korean? The North Koreans now say they’re returning to the six-party talks. Let’s hope the Bush Administration doesn’t call off Stuart Levy. I suspect his variety of communication has been much more effective than Nicholas Burns’s. Odd, isn’t it, that all of that alleged Chinese pressure and dearly purchased South Korean influence couldn’t bring them back to the table for so many months? Yet when a U.S. Treasury official flies...

Categories Diplomacy/Drugs & N Korea/Six-Party Talks
June 1, 2006

Korea Diary, 1 June 06

The latest word on the first six North Korean refugees to come to the United States is inspiring: During the dinner, the six were tearful. “I never thought time was so precious,” said a 32-year-old former North Korean soldier, who is now calling himself Sin Joseph. “But, now, I don’t want to waste any second, any minute.” He said he has two goals “• to learn English and to earn a license as an auto mechanic. Sin Joseph escaped to...

Categories Appeasement/Defectors/Diplomacy/Human Rights/Humor/Satire/NK Economics/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized
May 19, 2006

Daily NK President Talks to TKL about the New Right and North Korea

Recently, Newsweek’s BJ Lee reported on the emergence of South Korea’s New Right. One of the persons prominently featured in the article was Han Ki-Hong, President of the Daily NK, an online newspaper focusing on conditions in North Korea (DO NOT MISS their latest report on North Korea’s growing border control problems). The Daily NK differs from the South Korean papers in that it primarily focuses on events in the North. More remarkably, its reporters are often North Koreans reporting...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Geopolitics/Human Rights/Korean Politics/North Korea/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
May 19, 2006

Bush’s Old “New” Approach

[Update 2, 5/18: On the other hand, the “Kim Jong Hill” plan looks great next to the Richard Lugar plan, which is nothing more than a shiny new formula for buying lies with bribes. Lugar is a very nice person to meet and has his heart in the right place, but diplomatically, this is not the thing to be proposing when our financial crackdown and our political offensive are both showing some promising signs of success. When dealing with gangsters,...

Categories Appeasement/Counterfeiting/Diplomacy/Human Rights/NK Economics/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views/WMD
May 18, 2006

Is North Korea About to Test a Missile?

It could be nothing, then again …. TOKYO (Reuters) – North Korea may be preparing to launch a long-range Taepodong ballistic missile that could have the capacity to reach all of the United States, Japanese national broadcaster NHK reported on Friday. Quoting unidentified South Korean government officials, NHK said satellite pictures showed there have been signs since early this month around a launch site in northeastern North Korea that pointed to a possible firing in the near future. South Korea’s...

Categories Diplomacy/NK Military/Six-Party Talks/WMD
May 15, 2006

Kofi Annan Calls on N. Korea to Account for Abductees

Well, it’s a start. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday said North Korea must be held to account for the suffering and rage of people it kidnapped and the anxiety of families who never discovered what happened to their loved ones. He called on the North to return every one of those it abducted in its bizarre campaign in the 1970s and 80s. He also called on human rights and counterfeiting to be dealt with separately from, and (impliedly) after...

Categories "United" Nations/Abductions/Counterfeiting/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks
May 12, 2006

Ooh! Over Here!

“The regime change crew is in charge now and they are looking for any new ideas that can affect regime change.” — John Wolfstahl, CSIS The tone of regime change opponents and Bush foes is also interesting to observe these day. Two of them have published pieces nearly simultaneously, concluding that Bush has made the decision to get rid of Kim Jong Il. I agree. They they wonder if he’ll have time to do it. I agree with that, too....

Categories An Alliance?/Diplomacy/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
May 7, 2006

Reaction to the Arrival of North Korean Refugees

The arrival of the first six North Korean refugees — including survivors of concentration camps and sexual slavery — could mark a tipping point in the politics of North Korean human rights. The timing of the arrival is either a fortunate coincidence or the height of shrewdness. Local elections are coming up in South Korea on May 31st, and with the human rights issue having created a clear schism (see here, here, and here) between the United States and South...

Categories An Alliance?/Defectors/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Refugees/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views
May 6, 2006

Why We Signed

I grow weary of sounding the death knell of the U.S.-Korea alliance now that it’s just a question of being how fast and how ugly. If anyone is smart and honest enough to offer a cogent defense of it, it’s U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow, who has made plenty of enemies in Korea by speaking his country’s views plainly. Now we know that the best justification he can offer is as light, flavorless, and indigestable as styrofoam, and just as easily...

Categories An Alliance?/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Geopolitics/North Korea/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/Uncategorized/Washington Views/WMD
April 30, 2006

‘Barrel of a Gun’

During my recent trip to Korea, I was fortunate to have dinner and moderate quantities of alcohol with several other K-bloggers, including The Marmot, The Flying Yangban, Oranckay, The Drambuie Man (also a S. Dakota native), and Professor Andrei Lankov, who is working on a book on the Korean War, based on material from old Soviet archives. Oranckay picked a restaurant where I had some of the best kalbi I’ve ever eaten, and Robert knew of a beautifully restored old...

Categories Diplomacy/Inside NK/Korean Society/North Korea/Six-Party Talks/WMD