Search Results for “The Death of an Alliance”

January 1, 2008

2007: A Lost Year

[Update 2 Jan 08: “North Korea failed to fulfill its October promise to declare all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 — and the United States did not make a big deal out of it.” — WaPo, Blaine Harden] SO ENDS THE YEAR 2007, with this terse statement from the State Department spokesman: In September 2005, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea agreed on a Joint Statement with North Korea that charted the way forward...

Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks

November 30, 2007

Henry Hyde, R.I.P.

I last saw Henry Hyde at the final hearing at which he presided as Chairman of the International Relations Committee. Months later, despite the passage of control to another party, a larger-than-life portrait of Hyde still hangs in hearing room of the re-named Foreign Affairs Committee. Nearly all that has been written about Henry Hyde after his passage yesterday has focused on his role in Whitewater or his steadfast opposition to abortion — in other words, things about which the...

U.S. Politics/Washington Views

November 28, 2007

How Times Have Changed!

I’ve very much enjoyed the first installment of reviews of World War Two-era Korean films at Gusts of Popular Feeling, and look forward to the next ones. The first film reviewed was made in 1941, a pro-Japanese propaganda film called “The Volunteer,” surprising not only for its cinematic technique and moments of artistry, but also for its mention of discriminatory treatment of Koreans by the Japanese. The Japanese character (the one who told Choon-ho about the opening of the military...

History/Korean Society

November 26, 2007

Impervious to Evidence: State’s Appeasement Express Arrives at the Koryo Hotel

[Update: Richardson links to State’s quasi-denial: why, yes, we have stationed a State Department employee in Pyongyang, but he’s strictly there to supervise the equipment for the technical process of disabling North Korea’s nuclear programs. That’s peculiar. If this employee’s job is strictly scientific or technical, why not avoid giving people the wrong idea and send someone from the Department of Energy or Defense instead? At best, this is a trial balloon. More likely, we’ve just seen the camel’s...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation

November 19, 2007

Beyond the U.N. Experiment

What serious thinker still believes the United Nations still reflects the values of its own charter, much less contributes to seeing them realized? Much has been said about what was unexpectedly not found in Iraq, much less so about what was unexpectedly found: proof of just how completely the U.N. had been corrupted by arguably the second-worst dictator on earth. Not that all of the U.N.’s corruption is monetary: Recall what Churchill told the audience at Fulton about the United...

"United" Nations

November 13, 2007

Korean Election Update: Lessers Versus Evils

Just over a month before South Korean presidential election, Lee Hoi Chang has announced that he’s running as an independent candidate. I have now seen it all. So can he win? Hell if I know. To an observer of long American political campaigns, it’s hard to see how anyone could enter a race so late and have a chance of winning it, but this most definitely is not American politics. Korean politics is famously mercurial; it’s about as exact, empirical,...

Korean Politics

October 12, 2007

Links for 12 Oct 07

* Irrational Exhuberance, via the AFP’s P. Parameswaran: “A team of US experts left Tuesday for North Korea to disable the hardline communist state’s nuclear weapons arsenal in a crucial phase of a six-nation disarmament pact.” Mr. Parameswaran is a good enough fellow, but the first sentence of his report is absolutely false. Not only are U.S. experts not on their way to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, North Korea has yet to declare what, specifically, that arsenal consists...

Anju Links

September 24, 2007

The Rangoon Autumn

Updates below: 9/21: Original post, background of the protests. 9/22: Monks march to Aung San Suu Syi’s home in record downpour; 10,000 protest in Mandalay. 9/23: Protests hit 8 cities; Rangoon turnout at 20,000; World leaders speak out against use of force to quell protests, but the U.N. is silent. 9/24: Rangoon protests draw 100,000; Their hold on power seriously threatened, junta generals threaten to use force; Bush to announce new sanctions before U.N. General Assembly; Burmese entertainers join the opposition....

Democracy/Southeast Asia

September 19, 2007

Have Fun Spending That $20 Million in Hell

Mullah Abdullah Jan, the Taliban commander who led the kidnappings of 23 Korean hostages in Afghanistan, was killed in an air strike by U.S. forces. U.S. forces launched an airstrike on a house in Ghazni province where a council of Taliban commanders was meeting on Monday night, the Associated Press reported. Twelve Taliban leaders were killed including Abdullah, the commander of Qarabagh district in Ghazni, AP said on Tuesday, citing Ghazni provincial police chief Ali Shah Ahmadzai. Abdullah was believed...

Islam/Terrorism/Iraq

September 13, 2007

Is North Korea Selling Nukes to Syria?

Update: North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons. The new information, particularly images received in the past 30 days, has been restricted to a...

Proliferation/Six-Party Talks

North Korea F.A.Q.

Why blog about North Korea? North Korea’s nuclear program and the diplomacy that has attempted to end it for decades are widely covered in the media, but the media has done a poor job reporting the wider North Korea story: its people and their suffering, the society in which they live, and what these things say about the failure of the international community to respond to a grave humanitarian crisis. Those missing pieces of the story are the pieces that...

Comments: 73

September 5, 2007

The Shooting Starts Before the Whimpering Ends

I hope this will be the last post I do on the Korean-Afghan hostage story, at least until we start to see the proceeds of its resolution in bombs, mangled bodies, and the next round of kidnappings it will inspire. Koreans are still furious, but mostly at the victims rather than the terrorists. I admit to having thought, “better them than us.” The Korean street is a capricious thing. Consider all that the South Korean government was willing to do...

Appeasement/Terrorism/Iraq

September 1, 2007

Ransom Is Material Support for Terror

[Updated, edited, and bumped, 9/1] With friends like these …. Thanks to the weakness of the South Korean government, it’s a great day to be a terrorist. I second what other Korea bloggers are saying about the Taliban’s victory over South Korea. The Nomad: “[W]hen Canada criticises you for being soft on terrorism, you’re in big trouble.” Andy Jackson quotes the Taliban thusly: “We will do the same thing with the other allies in Afghanistan, because we found this...

An Alliance?/Terrorism/Iraq

August 6, 2007

Pew: Anti-Americanism Declined in South Korea (But Read the Fine Print)

According to this year’s Pew Global attitudes report, anti-Americanism has declined significantly in South Korea, from 46% favorable in 2003 to 58% favorable last year. Pew says that the “U.S. image has improved dramatically” there, and while this result suggests a significant and positive change, Pew’s enthusiasm is overstated, because Pew is comparing two extremes that may overstate the actual situation. Pew’s first point of comparison is 2003, when anti-Americanism was at its fevered peak, when no South Korean politician...

Anti-Americanism

July 26, 2007

South Korea: No Worse Friend, No Better Enemy

By now you’ve heard that the Taliban have murdered their first Korean hostage, and so Korea has now wheeled as one in spontaneous rage at the Taliban, as though they’d issued postage stamps with images of Tokdo, right? Well, not exactly. There are many things I could say about the reactions of Roh Moo Hyun, his government, and his country’s media, but Robert Kohler has pretty much already said those things, and a few others. Two lessons bears repeating: first,...

Anti-Americanism/Korean Society/Religion/Terrorism/Iraq

July 5, 2007

The FTA and ‘Fortress Korea’

It can be disturbing to find so much to agree with in the writings of someone who doesn’t share your outlook on the bigger picture. I generally favor the lowering of trade barriers and oppose the protection of domestic industries from the competition of a fair and open market. Note the key caveat in that last sentence, for defining “fair and open” is where the devil is. I suspect Alan Tomlinson defines it more narrowly than I do, and that...

NK Economics/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics

June 12, 2007

Win the Battle, Lose the War: How South Korea’s Brilliant Negotiation Skills May Have Killed the FTA

[Update: The USTR will reportedly call for renegotiation of the entire deal, in part to make the draft FTA compliant with U.S. labor standards. More at the bottom of this post.] Absolutely stomach-turning. After all of the Bush Administration’s brave rhetoric about “forced labor” and “material support” for “atrocities,” it ended up signing a free-trade agreement that could very well have allowed slave-made, axis-of-evil Kaesong imports into the United States. Then, because there was no denying the staggering hypocrisy...

Anju Links/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. Politics