Category: Miscellaneous

The folks at Slate (and one reader, thanks) e-mailed me this review of Nothing to Envy, which contemplates the problem of breaking down North Korea’s isolation: The answer is one that policy-makers from Washington to Seoul often overlook, fixated as they are on two stark options as they confront North Korea’s nuclear threat: either impose harsh sanctions or promise a “grand bargain” of complete normalization and massive financial assistance in return for denuclearization. Either put a stone slab on top...

Some perspective for those of you in Washington now: the weather right now in Verkhoyansk (55 below, as I write this). As a native of South Dakota, I never thought I’d see this place get a respectable blizzard._____________ An interview with Ha Tae Keung, a/k/a Young Howard, of Open News._____________ North Korea tries to keep the lid on dissent, which Alejandro Cao de Benos assures us does not exist._____________ The Korea Herald interviews Todd Zitin, the creator of Korean News...

State Department denies deal for Park’s release; also, Larry Craig still isn’t gay. If by some miracle the truth actually leaked out, State would probably say that President Obama’s announcement — the day before North Korea announced Park’s release — that he would not to re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism was a mere “goodwill gesture,” or an “understanding,” but not really a quid-pro-quo. When the transcript of the State Department news conference for February...

I’ve mostly ignored the speculation that the Koreas will hold a summit because I think the chances of it actually happening are still pretty vaporous. One thing I will observe is that South Korea is saying that it won’t reward North Korea just for showing up, but I don’t see any chance that Kim Jong Il would attend without a payoff. Really, I think Kim Jong Il’s dispositive motivation is that payoff, while Lee’s is to look like he’s open...

The Wall Street Journal has a feature about North Korea’s political monument export industry: This month, workers from Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies, a North Korean design firm, were putting the finishing touches on a giant copper sculpture of a family. Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade will inaugurate the African Renaissance Monument in April to mark the 50th anniversary of the country’s independence from France, a ceremony he expects the president of North Korea’s Parliament to attend. “Only the North...

A South Korean lawyer sits down to dinner with a group of North Korean defectors and has an epiphany: “Listening to such painful stories, I naively wondered why the rest of the world is not doing more to help these desperate people. They are not some criminals or fugitives. Their only crime was to be born into a nation which is ruled by a dictatorship that cares more about the survival of its regime than the wellbeing of its people.”...

Some people never learn: After everything that’s happened in the last 20 years, we’re still trying to get Agreed Framework III. _____________________ Which moment of truth is this? I lost count in 2007. _____________________ A Kaesong Travel Advisory: Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air. _____________________ Bangkok Update: Here’s the most detailed inventory I’ve yet seen of that North Korean weapons shipment intercepted last year: Thai police discovered 40 tons of North Korean arms including multiple rocket launchers,...

The arch-“realist” Richard Haass has concluded that talks are going nowhere, changed his mind, and called for regime change in Iran. I wonder if, had all other things been equal but the outcome of the 2008 election, Haass would have had the same epiphany. I’ve always found irony and amusement in the idea that it is “realistic” to believe that pathologically mendacious regimes, regimes founded on the idea that rules are for subjects and enemies, would freely negotiate away the...

THE JOONGANG ILBO JUDGES VITIT MUNTARBHORN’S LEGACY rather harshly in this article, I’d say. While I agree that the situation has gotten worse, I’ve always gotten the impression that Muntarbhorn did the best he could, given the limited backing he seems to have had from his boss, Ban Ki Moon, to confront the Chinese. But of course, it would be too much to ask of a South Korean newspaper to render an honest criticism of Ban’s repeated and woeful betrayal...

CHILLING WORDS FROM KCNA, as it calls for “struggle against anti-socialist moves:” It is also important to struggle against allies and stooges of the imperialists. A fierce struggle should be waged against the class enemies within the socialist society. All those who try to destabilize the socialist society are the enemies of socialism. They include remnants of the exploiting classes who harbor antipathy towards the socialist system, those who work hard overtly and covertly to bring down the socialist system...

JEFFREY GOLDBERG IS READING “NOTHING TO ENVY” and contrasting the plight of its subjects with Lorin Maazel’s moral equivalence between America in North Korea. Like Karajan and Bernstein before him — try that for equivalence! — Maazel’s political views add more value to our discourse for the criticism they evoke than for their own substantive merits. THE H1N1 OUTBREAK CONTINUES in North Korea, although it’s very difficult, for the most familiar of reasons, for anyone to know how serious it...

SHE COULD HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT NORTH KOREA: One of the hallmarks of a regime in financial trouble is a complicated regime of “special” exchange rates aimed at getting around the problems caused by financial mismanagement. The devaluation that Venezuela announced last week may have been a good idea, given the country’s recession, and the problems of declining oil revenues. But the way Chavez has gone about the thing is typically ham-fisted. By Sunday, he was threatening to deploy the...

What is the objective of negotiating with North Korea at all? How you answer that question may depend on whether you believe North Korea cheated on the first Agreed Framework with Bill Clinton. Even before Clinton left office, the evidence that North Korea cheated by trying to build a uranium bomb was too compelling for any responsible president to ignore, yet during the last decade, true believers in diplomacy with Kim Jong Il invested themselves in denying that evidence and...

OBAMA TO OPEN EMBASSIES TO N. KOREAN REFUGEES? That would be huge, and I’ll have much more to say about that later. Also, Robert King says human rights will be on the six-party agenda. NORTH KOREA’S H1NI OUTBREAK has reached Camp 16. Meanwhile, the South Korean government continues to provide aid to the North despite its doubts about the data the North is reporting. TODAY’S “WE ARE ONE” MOMENT is brought to you by the Joongang Ilbo, and features North...

MORE REPORTS OF DRASTIC FOOD PRICE INFLATION in the North: Prices probably also vary dramatically between regions. The series of diktats I’ve called The Great Confiscation has the potential to become the grimmest and most unnecessary humanitarian tragedy since the Arduous March, but unlike the 1990’s, North Koreans know more about life on Earth, and there are no more obedient subjects left outside Pyongyang who’d just die passively. The question isn’t whether North Koreans will resist; it’s is whether the...