July 18, 2017

McCarthyism! Moon Jae-In’s government declares Christine Ahn persona non grata

Is it possible to be too far-left for Moon Jae-In? In the end, I suspect not, but still: An American who helped arrange for 30 female peace activists to cross the heavily armed border between North and South Korea in 2015 has been denied entry to South Korea, officials confirmed on Monday. Christine Ahn, a South Korean-born American citizen, said she did not know she was persona non grata in the country until Asiana Airlines stopped her from boarding a...

Categories Useful Idiocy
July 14, 2017

For Beijing, a sharper choice on N. Korea: accord and prosperity, or discord and chaos

Writing in Foreign Affairs this week, Zhu Feng sketched out a vision of the thinking in Beijing from the perspective of a person more reasonable than Xi Jinping has been, so far. Zhu’s piece suggests the outlines of an agreement with Beijing to defang Kim Jong-Un and manage North Korea’s transition to peace. Alas, Zhu Feng is not in charge in Beijing, and Xi Jinping is. Suspend your paranoia that this essay is only an artifice to persuade us that...

Categories China & Korea/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance
July 12, 2017

Maximum pressure watch: The Dandong Zhicheng warrants foreshadow N. Korea-related indictments

Last fall, as America was consumed by (depending on your state of residence) post-election trauma or celebratory gunplay, China blew past the North Korean coal import caps it had just agreed to at the U.N., and the Obama administration issued what would be some of its final North Korea sanctions designations — of Daewon Industries (a coal exporter subordinate to the North Korean military) and Kangbong Trading Corporation (a coal exporter subordinate to the Munitions Industry Department and involved in the development of...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
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,...

Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/North-South/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
July 7, 2017

Stop talking about bombing North Korea. Talk about the revolution it desperately needs.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.  – Sun Tzu On the Fourth of July, I had a long talk with a Famous Person who would probably prefer that I not mention his name here. He’s famous (or infamous — your mileage may vary) for his association with a foreign policy philosophy described as “neoconservative,” whatever that means. Like many Famous Persons, this person’s public image is an injustice to his actual views, which sounded...

Categories Resistance
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...

Categories North-South
July 5, 2017

We cannot live with a nuclear North Korea (or rather, it will not live with us)

Yesterday, the North Korean threat finally crossed the ocean to our shores. As it is after every fresh outrage from Pyongyang, the question many will ask is, “Now what?” Certainly, there are plenty of legal, financial, and diplomatic options on this list that President Trump’s cabinet can exercise. Congress is also ready to act, or nearly so. You should expect to see the Senate move legislation you’ve seen (or something similar to it) and legislation you have not yet seen....

Categories "United" Nations/Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD
July 3, 2017

The Moon-Trump Summit: Catastrophe averted, for now

Korea-watchers are relieved that the uniquely volatile combination of Moon Jae-In and Donald Trump did not cause a catastrophe at last week’s summit. If avoiding catastrophe was the objective, then mission accomplished, for now. But if the objective was to build trust between the two governments or resolve the thorniest issues between them, the two governments achieved little. They tabled the issue of THAAD and already have an emerging split on free-trade renegotiations. Difficult USFK cost-sharing talks lie ahead. On...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
June 30, 2017

Commence Primary Ignition: Treasury zaps the Bank of Dandong for laundering Kim Jong-Un’s money

And so, the “maximum pressure” we’ve been waiting for begins in earnest. Yesterday afternoon, the Treasury Department announced a series of legal actions against Chinese enablers of North Korea’s proliferation, smuggling, and money laundering. First, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control froze the assets of two businessmen and a shipping company. One of those businessmen, Sun Wei, was the sole shareholder of Mingzheng International Trading, the Chinese company targeted in this recent civil forfeiture action. The shipping company was sanctioned for...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 29, 2017

N. Korea just threatened to kill S. Korea’s ex-president & any of its critics anywhere

Here at OFK, we collect small bits of North Korea trivia, such as the fact that President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and the related fact that the State Department’s official position is that North Korea has not sponsored acts of terrorism since 1987. Discuss among yourselves. In other news, the official North Korean “news ” agency, KCNA, has just published a call by the North Korean government for the...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
June 28, 2017

China finally pays a (symbolic) price for its North Korean slave trade

This blog has long posited that a nuclear North Korea will not coexist with us and that war with it would be inevitable; that preventing another Korean War will require a focusing an assortment of financial, diplomatic, and political pressures on Pyongyang; and that to deter China’s government and industry from undermining that pressure will require us to pressure China itself. This will carry costs for both economies, and to the relationship between the two governments. Relations with China will...

Categories China & Korea/Human Trafficking/U.S. Law
June 26, 2017

Five North Koreans, including two soldiers, have defected in June 2017 (so far)

Nat Kretchun’s latest report on Pyongyang’s efforts to control the spread of outside and subversive information suggests that the state has mostly written off its thirty- and forty-somethings as a lost generation, irrecoverably disillusioned by the collapse of the state’s rationing system, corruption, and the influx of South Korean DVDs. Instead, Kim Jong-Un is focusing his War on Glasnost on the detection of cellular signals and the watermarking of digital files to control the spread of dissent. Demographically, he is...

Categories Defectors/NK Military/Refugees
June 23, 2017

Pyongyang’s freeze gambit is a transparent pre-summit ploy.

I’m going to give the reports that North Korea’s Ambassador to India floated the idea of negotiations for a freeze deal all they attention they deserve. The proposal, such as it is, came during an English-language interview with a local journalist. First, the proposal is an obvious ploy to divide the U.S. and South Korean governments just before Moon Jae-In’s visit to Washington. (As I noted yesterday, that visit already looks to be a difficult one.) Even Moon Jae-In appears...

Categories Diplomacy
June 22, 2017

Moon Chung-In’s visit was a fiasco. Moon Jae-In’s summit with Trump might be the next one.

Next week, South Korean President Moon Jae-In will arrive in Washington for his first meeting with President Trump. North Korea policy is certain to be at the top of their agenda. Months ago, I predicted that the combination of Moon Jae-In and Donald Trump would be a uniquely volatile one, and all the indications so far are bearing this prediction out. Volumes of august and cerebral analysis may soon be nullified by 140 characters. This is partially (but only partially)...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
June 20, 2017

How to hold North Korea accountable for Otto Warmbier’s death

In North Korean prisons (at least, in those from which release is possible at all) when the guards conclude that a prisoner is about to die, they release her and send her away to die at home, so that disposing of her body will be someone else’s problem, and so that the warden can manipulate the camp’s rate of in-custody deaths downward. (Perhaps in some small way, even the wardens of North Korean prisons fear being held accountable, one day,...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions/U.S. Law
June 15, 2017

Breaking: DOJ files $1.9M forfeiture complaint against North Korean front company in China

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia issued a press release this afternoon announcing that it has filed a complaint under the civil forfeiture statute at 18 USC 981, to forfeit $1,902,976 from Mingzheng International Trading Limited of Shenyang, China. According to the complaint, Mingzheng conspired to evade sanctions and launder money through the United States on behalf of the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea (FTB). Treasury designated the FTB under Executive Order 13382 in March 2013, for proliferation financing. Under the...

Categories Money Laundering/Proliferation/U.S. Law
June 15, 2017

Meet the fresh-faced kids who want you to commit a felony for Kim Jong-un

I confess that I’ve always hated Facebook, but every now and then, I see something there that interests me. One such example is the Facebook page of a group called Delegations for Dialogue, which led me to this slickly produced website. As it turns out, Delegations is run by a cast of improbably young characters promoting investment in North Korea through a “fact-finding†trip to Rason this August. Now, I suppose there are two kinds of people in this world...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 14, 2017

One American tragedy, millions of North Korean statistics

The idea that foreign tourists in North Korea could escape the evil they help, however minimally, to propagate, was never sustainable. Tourism in North Korea reduces the physical and mental slavery of totalitarianism to a circus performance and its subjects to zoo animals. It doesn’t only endanger the tourist, it plays some unquantifiable role in sustaining that horrid system, and in endangering the lives of people from Seoul to Seattle to Aleppo by giving cash to a regime obsessed with the...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea