September 26, 2016

China just sent 30 N. Koreans back to a slow death in Kim Jong-un’s gulag

While the world is rightly focused on China’s (non-)compliance with a series of U.N. sanctions resolutions it voted for, the world must not forget that China is also in flagrant violation of the Refugee Convention when it sends people fleeing persecution back to North Korea, without affording them any opportunity to claim asylum or meet with representatives of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. And after all these years, China certainly knows damn well what happens to the men, women,...

Categories Refugees
September 23, 2016

Invest in North Korea? Don’t let Jim Rogers talk you into prison.

For a few years now, I’ve heard that hedge fund investor, TV provocateur, and crackpot Jim Rogers has been urging his audiences to invest in North Korea. A few years ago, that advice might not have done much worse than condemn your soul to eternal damnation and bankrupt you, the way it bankrupted (or nearly bankrupted) Orascom Telecom and any number of other investors who preceded it. Since at least March, however, Rogers’s advice has been malpractice on a whole new...

Categories Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
September 22, 2016

In North Korea, no disaster is ever entirely natural

With all the news out of North Korea recently, I’ve been saving up links to news reports about the floods in the northeastern provinces until I had a moment to put some thoughts together. According to a U.N. aid coordinator’s assessment, the floods killed 138 people, damaged 30,000 houses, and made 69,000 people homeless. [source] North Korea claims that these are the worst floods since World War II, and some news reports have obligingly reprinted that claim. But OFK has...

Categories Border Control/Famine & Food Aid
September 21, 2016

Please share: New State Dep’t grants for “access to information” in N. Korea

Sanctions legislation lends itself to lengthy legislative texts, but mandates to break the digital DMZ between the two Koreas don’t. So while most of the text of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act concerned itself with what North Korea-related conduct and entities should be sanctioned and what consequences they should face, that’s not an accurate reflection of Congress’s relative priorities. Those of us who wrote and negotiated the bill were equally concerned with direct engagement of the North Korean...

Categories Subversion
September 20, 2016

Pyongyang’s peace trap: What is N. Korea’s asking price, and who will pay it?

In 1994, one might have been forgiven for believing that for the right price, an isolated, famine-stricken, and potentially unstable regime in Pyongyang might have agreed to trade a nascent nuclear weapons program for the financial foundations of a new stability. Much harder to accept, given subsequent experience, is how the Bush administration could have reached the same conclusion in 2007, when North Korea’s nuclear program was no longer nascent, and when (thanks to the Sunshine Policy’s unconditional aid, and...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
September 19, 2016

Congress to Obama: Enforce N. Korea sanctions against Chinese banks

Three weeks before North Korea’s fifth nuclear test, I wrote, “The Obama administration isn’t following Kim Jong-un’s money. Congress should ask why.” Unfortunately, subsequent events soon affirmed that criticism; fortunately, Congress is asking, and it’s asking the right questions. The failure of the administration’s North Korea policy has even become an election-year liability for Hillary Clinton, forcing her to distance herself from the President and his policy (or more accurately, the lack of one). The Obama administration’s single greatest North...

Categories China/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
September 14, 2016

Sanctions talk with Steph Haggard; House hearings on N. Korea nukes & sanctions

In lieu of a full-length screed today, I’ll direct you to — a more refined list of my sanctions and policy recommendations in this post, by Stephan Haggard. for the sanctions geeks, the latest Treasury/FINCEN advisory, in which North Korea seizes the top spot from Iran as a money laundering risk. If nothing else, it’s a useful reminder that North Korean banks’ cutoff from the financial system — the single most important sanction yet imposed on North Korea — still hasn’t...

Categories Sanctions/Washington Views
September 13, 2016

How to make shipping sanctions against North Korea work

By now, diplomats at the U.N. have begun wrangling over the shape of the next North Korea sanctions resolution (let’s hope they at least vote before North Korea’s next nuclear test). Meanwhile, efforts to enforce the last resolution have lost momentum. With regard to both banking and shipping sanctions, the Obama administration doesn’t appear to have done much to encourage other U.N. member states to comply. I’ve said before that following the money matters most, but North Korea’s transportation sector...

Categories Shipping sanctions
September 12, 2016

Clinton’s North Korea epiphany: We have always been at (cold) war with China

So desperate are we to avoid a Cold War (or worse) in the Pacific that throughout the Obama years, we’ve pretended that China hasn’t been waging one unilaterally the whole time. Meanwhile, China has seized the South China Sea, bullied our allies with spurious territorial claims, whipped up anti-American rhetoric to persecute human rights activists, and effectively quit enforcing sanctions against North Korea despite signing on for a nominally tough new resolution in March. Evidence, you ask? Start with this...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
September 9, 2016

I don’t blame Obama for N. Korea’s nuke test. I blame him for not enforcing the law.

It’s grim vindication this morning to see my prediction from two months ago now validated. This bomb appears to have had a higher yield than those that preceded it, and may show progress toward miniaturization. I’d already posted my recommendations for how to respond to this test, back in July. For the U.N. Security Council, the response should include new rounds of designations and the closing of sanctions loopholes. I hope Samantha Power will also push for bans on North Korea’s...

Categories Sanctions/WMD
September 8, 2016

Dear AFP: May we see your agreements with the North Korean government?

This blog often criticizes the way the media cover North Korea; in fact, it sometimes even criticizes the way the media cover the media who cover North Korea. In the case of Agence France-Presse’s newly opened bureau in Pyongyang, most other media are treating AFP’s low-key opening ceremony as a non-event. It probably is a non-event — except for what it may mean for the decline in journalistic ethics, the corruption of our media, and their transformation into global propaganda...

Categories AFP Watch/AP Watch
September 7, 2016

Senate Foreign Relations Chair to President Obama: Enforce N. Korea sanctions law

Senator Bob Corker’s office issued this statement today: CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released the following statement today after reports that North Korea fired three medium-range missiles as the Group of 20 economic summit was underway in China. “It is highly discouraging that China does little as North Korea continues to test and develop its missile and nuclear programs,” said Corker. “China wants the international respect due a country of...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
September 7, 2016

U.N. & Obama vacillate as our last chance to stop Kim Jong-un runs out

Have you ever heard the late Christopher Hitchens speak about his visit to North Korea, and how he promised himself that he would not use the “1984” cliche? “Eventually,” Hitchens said, “They make you do it.” I believe it was sometime around 2007 that I made the same promise to myself about the Hans Blix scene in “Team America” when speaking of the U.N.’s response to North Korea’s increasingly brazen behavior. It has become another cliche, but they also make...

Categories "United" Nations/Missiles/Sanctions
September 6, 2016

N. Korea calls for murder of S. Korean President, State Dep’t still doesn’t think it sponsors terrorism

“When he eventually came to power, there was no book which deserved more careful study from the rulers, political and military, of the Allied powers. All was there….” – Winston Churchill, on Mein Kampf History, which is diplomacy in the past tense, is littered with examples of despots who made their intentions clear, but whom journalists and diplomats in free nations have blindly refused to take at their word. So it was that in the late 1930s, the journalist and...

Categories Terrorism (NK)
September 1, 2016

What victory looks like from Pyongyang (Parts 1 and 2)

Part 1 David Straub’s “Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea“ has resonated with me in several ways, but none of them more than Straub’s deep ambivalence about Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when I also served there as a young Army officer. Straub admits that in writing his book, he struggled to reconcile, and to show his readers, an honest-yet-fair portrayal of a society that earned his affection, and also caused him much exasperation, even as...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Diplomacy/Korean Society/Korean War II
August 31, 2016

N. Korea’s biggest a**hole shoots Vice-Premier, sends second-biggest a**hole to weed the fields

Here at OFK, stories about kremlinology are usually page two material. Too often, we’ll read reports that some official or minor celebrity has been executed, only to read a year later that the target has risen like Lazarus from the KCNA crypt. As a general rule, the closer a story about North Korea is to the center of the power structure, the less I tend to believe it. Which is why I didn’t even tweet the report yesterday that His...

Categories Cyberwar/Kremlinology/Terrorism (NK)
August 29, 2016

Defections may not foretell N. Korea’s collapse (but they could help induce it)

The defection of North Korean Deputy Ambassador Thae Yong-ho two weeks ago has tolled a ghoulish vigil in which bloggers, op-ed writers, and academics have speculated about the longevity of His Porcine Majesty. Some of them still read a long lifeline on his palm. South Korean President (and master troll) Park Geun-hye, on the other hand, sees “serious cracks” in the regime and says that the cohesion of the oligarchs is “collapsing.” “The North Korean regime is taking no account...

Categories Defectors/Money Laundering/Sanctions