Home  >  South Korea

Category: South Korea

August 20, 2014

South Korea’s missile problem, and ours

For the last year, the South Korean government has been saying that it considers a North Korean attack a very real risk, and it has also said that if attacked, its retaliation will be swift and severe. Its President, Park Geun-Hye, recently expressed concern about a North Korean “misjudgment,” and touted the U.S.-ROK military alliance as the best deterrent against that. As recently as this week, she has been warning her army of the dangers of “complacency.” I don’t have...

Categories Missiles/NK Military/ROK Military
August 6, 2014

Insiders debate North Korea’s EMP capability

The simplest electro-magnetic pulse or EMP weapons are, put simply, nuclear weapons detonated at high altitude. A high-altitude nuclear blast would overload and destroy electrical circuits and infrastructure, and create blackouts over wide areas for extended periods of time. Imagine your life without the internet, telephone, electricity, or cars — in short, being part of a 21st Century population trying to sustain itself with Colonial Williamsburg technology — and you get the idea. Without the means to recover from that sort of attack...

Categories NK Military/ROK Military/WMD
August 1, 2014

Election result throws Korean left into chaos, me happy

Wow. This has to be really painful: In Wednesday’s parliamentary by-elections, the ruling conservative Saenuri Party scored an thumping victory, winning 11 out of 15 seats and increasing its majority to 158 of 300 National Assembly seats. The major opposition party, New Politics Alliance for Democracy, won in only 4 districts and now has 130 seats in parliament. The most surprising result was a conservative win in the Jeolla region in the southwest of the country, a traditional staunch stronghold...

Categories Korean Politics
June 5, 2014

Park Geun Hye didn’t lose. That means she won. (updated)

Ruling parties are supposed to lose mid-term elections, especially when they look incompetent, uninspiring, visionless, and scandalous. I expected Park Geun Hye’s Saenuri Party to lose, and frankly, it deserved to. Despite all of this, it didn’t lose, which means it won. Saenuri’s opposition was the New Politics Alliance for Democracy, formerly known as the Democratic Party, the Uri Party, the Millennium Democratic Party, and before that, Prince. It has not weathered Korea’s modest political realignment well. At the moment, it...

Categories Korean Politics
April 29, 2014

Just test the damn thing already.

So the news this week is that the Obama Administration, which for the last five years has stayed its hand from sanctioning North Korea because of Chinese sensitivities, has just blocked the assets of top members of Vladimir Putin’s government over their seizure of the Crimea. That sounds like an effective way to piss them off, but I can’t see how it poses a serious threat to Russia’s economy or Putin’s domestic support, or how it will deter his next...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. & Korea/WMD
February 25, 2014

Royce goes to Seoul, calls for cutting off Kim Jong Un’s cash

So Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was in Seoul last week, and sat down for an interview with Yonhap to talk North Korea: “It seems that the strategy that slows down North Korea the most is not allowing them access to the hard currency which they use in order to create their offensive nuclear weapons capabilities,” said Royce in an interview with Yonhap News Agency in Seoul.  Royce is now in Seoul along with a delegation...

Categories Sanctions/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
February 17, 2014

Breaking: Leftist S. Korean lawmaker gets 12-year sentence for pro-N. Korean sabotage plot

Yonhap is just reporting that a court in Suwon has handed down a 12-year sentence against leftist fringe lawmaker Lee Seok-Ki. Ouch. That’s a very tough sentence for South Korea, whose judicial system compensates for its loose rules of evidence (and the error rate that implies) with light and fluffy sentencing. When I was an Army Judge Advocate serving in Korea, I saw people get less than that for murder. On the other hand, prison conditions in South Korea are, shall...

Categories The Fifth Column
February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...

Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
February 5, 2014

Can Park Geun-Hye prepare Korea, and the world, for reunification?

Yesterday, Yonhap reported that an unusual billboard had appeared in Times Square in New York: “Korean Unification would be an immeasurable BONANZA for any nations with interests in the Korean Peninsula.” To most of the Americans who read it, the billboard will seem odd, but Korea-watchers will recall when Korean-Americans took out similar ads in the United States, about things that matter much less. Beneath the paywall, we learn that “[t]he ad was set up by Han Tae-gyuk, a 66-year-old Korean-American man, at his own expense,”...

Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Reconstruction/Regime Change/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
February 4, 2014

Post-Sunshine South Korea is sober, pragmatic, and grouchy.

In this post last week, I cited polling data showing how South Koreans’ views of North Korea have hardened in recent years, representing a dramatic swing since the fervent anti-Americanism and pro-appeasement sentiment of the Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun years. I reckoned that the 2010 Cheonan and Yeonpyeong attacks were the tipping point in this shift, but a wealth of polling data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project changes my mind about this. I wish the data...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
January 28, 2014

Please buy Don Kirk’s new book on Okinawa and Jeju

A few weeks ago, it was my pleasure to meet up with Don Kirk for beers at the Press Club. Don was kind enough to give me a copy of his new book. I’ve only had time to poke through it so far, but it does (as you would expect) a comprehensive job of discussing the politics of military basing on both islands, each with its own history of conflict and controversy. Don asked me to give it a plug,...

Categories Books & Films/Korean History/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 14, 2014

Gates: Roh Moo Hyun was “anti-American” and “a little crazy,” and Lee Myung Bak wanted to bomb the crap out of Kim Jong Il.

This must be the most controversial understatement of the year, so far: Reading a new memoir by former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, South Koreans may be quite surprised by his characterization of the country’s late President Roh Moo-hyun as “a little crazy.” I estimate that approximately 63.8% of them won’t be in complete shock about that. Gates recalls a November 2007 meeting in Seoul with the liberal-minded president, whose diplomatic and security policy is still being debated. He calls...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/U.S. & Korea/Yeonpyeong Attack
October 11, 2013

N. Korea says Park GH’s father “smelled of elderberries,” S. Korea responds with “large wooden badger” plan

I don’t know about you, but I sure got tired of Park Geun Hye’s hippie Earth mother act last summer, after North Korea started making nice, right after banks all over China and Europe started blocking North Korean accounts. Thank God that’s over with. We’re back to steaming reactors, spinning centrifuges, war drums, nasty taunts, and all the things we’ve grown to love and miss about North Korea. The North was uncharacteristically quietly during August’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises, but for reasons known only...

Categories North-South/ROK Military/Sunshine/U.S. Military
September 21, 2013

Democracies don’t shoot their own people for trying to leave

The ROK Army has given its explanation for why its soldiers shot a would-be South-to-North defector, and that explanation is completely unsatisfactory: Asked if the soldiers’ response was excessive, Brigadier General Cho Jong-sul at the briefing said: “It was legitimate. In a combat area like this, anyone who ignores our soldiers’ repeated warnings and tries to run away to North Korea will get shot.” The ministry said Mr. Nam was carrying a South Korean passport, which showed that he had...

Categories Democracy/ROK Military
September 16, 2013

ROK Army shoots, kills man attempting to swim to N. Korea

I’ll withhold my criticism until I know a few more facts, but I can’t immediately understand why South Korean troops had to shoot and kill a South Korean man who was swimming the Imjin toward North Korea. This would not be the first South-to-North defection, but I don’t know why one the loss of one more nut or fugitive would be a great loss to the South. If the South doesn’t address the appropriateness of the use of force, it will weaken calls...

Categories Defectors/North-South/ROK Military
September 13, 2013

Fifth Column Watch

The arrest of Lee Seok-Ki and his merry band of fifth column plotters is also uncovering a lot of the United Progressive Party’s publicly funded rackets: The ministry cited the Suwon Self-Support Community Center as an example. The center’s job is to support people receiving government welfare; it received 1.7 billion won ($1.6 million) from the city government this year. But this center also urged its clients to join the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) and demanded that workers at the center...

Categories The Fifth Column
September 4, 2013

National Assembly approves arrest of Lee Seok-Gi

South Korea’s National Assembly has voted to revoke leftist fringe party lawmaker Lee Seok-Gi’s parliamentary immunity and allow his arrest for sedition and “praising North Korea.” This makes it all sound like something a banana republic would charge an opponent with, but in fact, Lee really stands accused of leading something called the Revolutionary Organization and “conspir[ing] to storm firearms depots to secure weapons, destroy oil-storage and communication facilities and assassinate unspecified figures.” The leadership of the main left-opposition Democratic...

Categories The Fifth Column