North-South

January 2, 2022

How Uygur and North Korea human rights activists can join forces to keep slave-made goods out of your closet

How many things do you own that were made by slaves—specifically, enslaved North Koreans or Uygurs? The bad news is that no one knows, because most of the evidence is hidden deep within the supply chains. The good news is that this may be changing just enough to make the use of slave labor unprofitable for the retailers you buy from and the sweatshops in China that employ it. “Royal Blood-Fresh” Chinese manufacturers have a long history of sourcing their...

Activism/Human Trafficking/Kaesong/Sanctions

October 3, 2021

Selling Slavery: South Korean investors’ $900,000 Kaesong lobbying campaign

Documents filed with the Justice Department in July show that a group of South Korean investors hired a San Francisco law firm and a South Korean consulting firm to lobby the U.S. government to support reopening a shuttered, looted, and partially exploded manufacturing complex near Kaesong, North Korea. The documents were required to be filed with the Justice Department and made public under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), a law designed to expose foreign propaganda and influence...

Kaesong/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Law

March 13, 2019

UN Panel investigating South Korean sanctions violations

The U.N. Panel of Experts has released its latest report, and for the first time since it began publishing them in 2009, it is now investigating South Korea for violating the sanctions. One area the Panel is looking into is its imports of North Korean coal for ten months, in violation of UNSCR 2371, while its Coast Guard dragged out an “investigation” of those imports, allowed the smuggling ships to come and go freely without seizing them, and later charged...

An Alliance?/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions/Sunshine

January 11, 2019

How to make Kaesong a safety valve for sanctions and a(nother) test of engagement

Fifteen years after the opening of Kaesong and more than twelve years after the approval of UNSCR 1718, Seoul has finally gotten around to reading the resolution that Kaesong violated for a decade. As I’ve harped on during that entire period, paragraph 8(d) required Seoul to “ensure” that its bulk dollar transfers to Pyongyang, which it deceptively called “wages,” were not diverted for nukes, missiles, or luxury goods. No matter how obnoxiously I would present that question to the South...

Kaesong

December 3, 2018

Of course, Kim Jong-un’s tourist resorts will fail. Of course, we can help with that.

The following question is multiple choice. Please do not use a number two pencil to blacken the oval on your screen. In April, angry, hungry citizens in North Korea’s remote Ryanggang Province took the brave and desperate step of protesting to local authorities over forced “donations” of food, money, and supplies they were required to make to the construction of — (a) an orphanage (b) a grain elevator (c) a soy-based infant formula factory (d) a beach resort If you...

Human Trafficking/Sanctions/Sunshine/U.S. Law

November 19, 2018

How engaging the wrong North Koreans set back openness, reform & peace

South Korea’s social-nationalist government, joined by too many Western academics of the sort who bask in its generosity and fear the withdrawal of it, has re-embraced the “Sunshine” hypothesis. This hypothesis equates nearly all economic “engagement” with North Korea’s military-industrial complex — also known as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” — with economic openness, and economic openness with political openness, disarmament, prosperity, and peace. The Western exemplar of no-questions-asked engagement is the NGO and media darling known as Choson...

North-South/Sunshine

August 22, 2018

If the deal-maker didn’t make a deal & the peace-maker didn’t make peace, could Twitter be wrong?

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually believe that Agreed Framework III proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. It often seems that everyone on Twitter but me belongs to one of these tribes, which...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea

July 26, 2018

Kaesong is a buffalo jump for amoral politicians & unlawyered cretins

Mark Lambert, who is a “U.S. State Department official in charge of Korean affairs,” and who is also a mensch, is in South Korea this week, where he will meet with Korean officials, and also with “a group of South Korean businesspeople involved in inter-Korean economic projects.” Over the course of 15 years, this blog has followed the various get-broke-quick buffalo jumps that promoters, most of them amoral politicians who specialize in throwing away other people’s money, euphemistically call “inter-Korean...

Kaesong/Sunshine

May 9, 2018

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean Society/Korean War II/North-South/Sunshine

May 3, 2018

Guest Post: Irrational Exuberance Redux: North Korea and its nuclear weapons, goals, and intentions

[The following guest post is submitted by Dr. Tara O, the author of this book, and whose bio you can read here.] Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, called the overvaluation of the dot-com market “irrational exuberance” in 1996. The term was used again to describe the housing bubble of 2004 through 2007 by Yale Professor Robert Schiller. Now, here is another situation ripe for the term—the expectation that Kim Jong-un will give up his nuclear weapons. This irrational...

Korean War II/Sunshine

May 2, 2018

North Korean Freedom Week is the next test for free speech in “free” Korea

A FEW OF US WILL ALWAYS STUBBORNLY INSIST THAT WE DISREGARD THE LIVES AND DIGNITY of North Korea’s oppressed people at our own peril. We argue that there can be no verified disarmament of a North Korea that remains a closed society, no security in its promises as long as it mendaciously denies the existence of its prison camps, no lasting peace as long as it holds human life in contempt, no reunification between a liberal democracy and a tyranny...

An Alliance?/Censorship/Korean War II/Sunshine

April 30, 2018

Moon Jae-in just put Seoul on a collision course with U.S. & U.N. sanctions (updated)

THE ONE INVIOLABLE RULE OF INTER-KOREAN SUMMITS IS THAT THERE IS ALWAYS A SCANDAL sooner or later. Kim Dae-jung’s summit with Kim Jong-il in 2000 resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize, eight indictments, six convictions, and a bunch of suspended prison sentences for an illegal payment of $500 million to North Korea. Otherwise, it did not disarm North Korea and did not produce a lasting reduction of tensions.((Previously said $500,000. Since corrected.)) Roh Moo-hyun’s 2007 summit with Kim Jong-il also...

An Alliance?/Kaesong/North-South/Sanctions/Sunshine

November 7, 2017

The Moonshine Policy failed because Kim Jong-un demands surrender, not engagement

Just before Air Force One took off for Tokyo, the New York Times printed a story by Choe Sang-hun, mourning for Moon Jae-in’s failure to revive the Sunshine Policy, wallowing in self-pitying nationalism, and pinning most of the blame for this on Donald Trump – not Moon, for failing to read the U.N. Security Council resolutions before promising initiatives that would violate them, not Korean voters who don’t trust Pyongyang and don’t want a revival of the Sunshine Policy. Choe...

An Alliance?/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea

July 10, 2017

Why Moon Jae-In can’t make the sun shine again

Given the background of Moon Jae-In and some of his closest confidants, the question that has nagged at me is whether Moon is (1) a closet hard-left ideologue who has managed to let everyone around him say and do the extreme things he avoids saying and doing himself; (2) just another oleaginous opportunist who paddled his canoe to the swifter currents on the left side of the stream; or (3) a hopelessly naive squish who thinks he can simultaneously charm,...

An Alliance?/Korean Politics/North-South/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea

July 6, 2017

We can neither talk, bomb, nor wait our way out of the North Korea crisis

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” – Winston Churchill In one sense, North Korea’s first test of an ICBM should change little about our analysis of this crisis, other than to compress its timeline by two years. Two years ago, in fact, I predicted that we’d have reached this point by January. Most Korea-watchers have long assumed this...

North-South

May 12, 2017

North Korea policy in the South Korean election: what (little) the data tell us

What exit polling data I do have come to us from the Asan Institute. And while Asan’s analysis contains much interesting information that political types would call “internals,” it doesn’t tell us all that much about voters’ attitudes about North Korea policy. The first thing it tells us is that North Korea didn’t really weigh much on the minds of voters at all, compared to economic issues. I wonder whether you’d see more concern among Americans about the North Korean threat if...

Korean Politics/Korean Society/South Korea/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea

May 10, 2017

No, Moon Jae-In’s election probably doesn’t mean Sunshine 2.0

I’ll have to keep this post short because of time constraints, but my interest in South Korea’s election is mostly related to how Seoul’s policies toward North Korea will shift. I’ll refer you to this post and this one on why it’s likely to change less than John Delury might like, this piece in NK News where I offer some thoughts, and this excellent post by Marcus Noland and Kent Boydston. Much will depend on how hard President Trump pushes...

Kaesong/Korean Politics/Sunshine

May 9, 2017

Our grand plans to engage North Korea must learn from their failures and evolve with the evidence

One of my cruel habits lately has been to ask the holdouts who still advocate the economic, cultural, and scientific “engagement” of Pyongyang to name a single significant, positive outcome their policies have purchased at the cost of $8 billion or more, over 20-odd years, as thousands of North Koreans died beyond our view and our earshot. I’ve yet to receive a non-sarcastic answer to that question. Yesterday, I salted this wound by pointing out that the largest remaining engagement...

Appeasement/Propaganda/Sanctions/Subversion/Sunshine

Category: North-South