January 29, 2016

Rev. Tim Peters is feeding N. Korea’s hungry, and showing us how to re-think food aid

The Rev. Tim Peters, a man who embodies everything I admire about the word “Christian,” leads the group Helping Hands Korea, which has been helping North Koreans escape for more than a decade. Now, he’s putting into action what I call “guerrilla engagement,” reaching inside North Korea covertly and helping its oppressed and starved classes achieve material independence. He’s doing it by harnessing the private sotoji farms that operate on the edge of legality, and which may have saved North Korea...

Categories Activism/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid
January 27, 2016

Meet the assassin/killer/hacker/terrorist Kim Jong-un just put in charge of relations with S. Korea

With all recent movement on sanctions legislation in the House and Senate, I’ve skimmed over the developments in North Korean Kremlinology, reports about which often read like the dossiers in a lost, bad-acid fueled manuscript for a “High Castle” sequel. If you believe that personnel is policy, however, Kim Jong-un’s choice of a replacement for Kim Yang-gon, who ran Pyongyang’s so-called United Front Department until he died in a car-maybe-not-accident recently, is a dark omen about Kim Jong-un’s policy instincts....

Categories Cyberwar/North-South/Terrorism (NK)
January 26, 2016

Senate sanctions bills pick up new co-sponsors

It may be of no more than symbolic value at this point, with intense behind-the-scenes discussions ongoing over a bipartisan compromise bill, but symbols do matter, and a few more senators have lined up behind different versions of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act in the Senate. One of the Senate bills, S. 2144, has picked up Republicans David Perdue and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Steve Daines of Montana, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Kelly Ayotte of New...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
January 24, 2016

Did a U.S. university teach North Korea to track down dissidents?

Just after Christmas, Reuters reported on the analysis of two German IT experts who downloaded a copy of North Korea’s Linux-based Red Star operating system and analyzed its code. Inside, they found something both horrifying and completely predictable. Red Star contains code for “tagging, or watermarking, every document or media file on a computer or on any USB stick connected to it.” Meaning? That means that all files can be traced. “It’s definitely privacy invading. It’s not transparent to the user,”...

Categories Censorship/Engagement
January 23, 2016

How Congress can ban tourist travel to North Korea, and why it should

[Update: If I had known when I wrote this that the North Koreans would torture and, for all practical purposes, kill Otto Warmbier in custody, I’d have written this post very differently. Frankly, I’m ashamed to reread it today, and can only ask you to understand that at the time, I had every reason to expect that this young man’s misadventure would end as anti-climatically as other arrests of foreigners in North Korea had ended until that time, and as...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
January 23, 2016

Arguments to Impotence, Part 2: A response to Joseph DeThomas

As Professor Lee and I have flogged, and flogged, and flogged, and flogged this horse that our sanctions against North Korea were far weaker than was widely assumed, we knew a few of you were rolling your eyes and wondering how long we would go on flogging it. The answer, of course, is, “As long as it takes.”  If the published opinions of Michael Green, Victor Cha, Bruce Klingner, Scott Snyder, the editors of The Washington Post, Evans Revere, Robert Gallucci, and...

Categories Anju Links
January 21, 2016

In The Weekly Standard: Ed Royce’s Bipartisan Coup Against a Bipartisan Failure

If President Obama ends up signing a North Korea sanctions bill in the next 30 days — and at this point, I don’t know what interest he has in vetoing one — it will effect the biggest change in our North Korea policy since the 1994 Agreed Framework. That, in turn, will have been due to years of principled dissent and patient, bi-partisan coalition building by Ed Royce, the California Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. A certain,...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
January 21, 2016

WaPo: Senate Foreign Relations hopes to mark up N. Korea sanctions bill next Thursday.

Via the Washington Post this morning, we’re still pretty much where I said we were last week, but at least we have an expected date for a committee markup. The Senate is still trying to work out a bipartisan compromise between Senator Bob Menendez’s (D, NJ) weaker S. 1747 and Cory Gardner’s (R, CO) tougher S. 2144, rather than voting on the House bill that passed last week “with huge bipartisan support.” While the House and Senate bills contain generally the same...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
January 20, 2016

Two (Kinda) Free Koreas?

My friend, Adrian Hong, argues in an op-ed for The San Diego Union-Tribune that we should sacrifice one free Korea for specific, pragmatic goals — disarmament, the cessation of Pyongyang’s proliferation and “export of terror,” the closure of the prison camps and other human rights abuses, and ending the North Koreans’ perpetual hunger: Regional stakeholders regularly reaffirm their desire to see a unified Korea. They do not mean it. They do not desire the status quo — only Pyongyang’s rulers...

Categories Reconstruction
January 19, 2016

In The Weekly Standard: N. Korea sanctions worked before, and they can work again.

In lieu of an OFK post today, I’ll direct your attention to this legal analysis, in The Weekly Standard, of the wide range of sanctions President Obama has not imposed on North Korea, and why history tells us that financial sanctions can be an effective tool for modifying North Korea’s behavior, with or without the cooperation of the Chinese government. Also, in case you missed it, here’s the latest op-ed by Professor Lee and me, at CNN.com.

Categories Sanctions
January 18, 2016

On MLK Day, remember North Korea’s state-sanctioned racism

Today, my multiracial family and I reflected on the debt we owe to the movement that Martin Luther King, Jr. symbolized and, for a too-brief period in our history, led. My children and I reflected on this day by talking about the fact that in the state where we live, within my lifetime, the marriage of their parents would have been unlawful under local anti-miscegenation laws. These, thankfully, were struck down as unconstitutional under the wonderfully named case of Loving...

Categories Racism
January 17, 2016

If S. Korea won’t close Kaesong, let it pay N. Korea in food.

The bad news from North Korea’s nuclear test is that its yield exceeded those of its 2006, 2009, and 2013 tests. The good news is that while the blast wasn’t thermonuclear, it was still hot enough to burn away plenty of policy fog. In Congress, sanctions legislation has sailed through the House, and seems to have good prospects in the Senate. Opinions are shifting among Korea scholars here, too. This morning, I had a chance to finish reading last week’s testimony before the...

Categories Kaesong/Sunshine
January 14, 2016

North Korea, sanctions, and the argument to impotence

With support for the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy collapsing in Washington, the White House desperately needs a win at the U.N., by showing that it can get the Security Council to pass tougher sanctions and make sanctions work. Let’s review what we know about the substance of a potential resolution: Two administration officials said the United States was now drafting a proposed resolution for United Nations Security Council approval that would impose sanctions on North Korean trade and finance,...

Categories Sanctions
January 13, 2016

N. Korea sanctions bill passes the House 418-2, Senate seeks compromise bill

By now, you’ve probably read the news about last night’s lopsided vote. Interestingly, it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who were unanimous in their support. The two dissenting votes were Justin Amash and Thomas Massie, both isolationist Republicans from the Ron Paul mold.  Dissent may be patriotic, but it’s never beyond some well-deserved ridicule. [Reminder: The views expressed on OFK are the author’s alone.] You have to hand it to Nancy Pelosi for running a tight ship. In the end,...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
January 11, 2016

The biggest loser from North Korea’s nuke test? China. (updated)

When I was in high school, my favorite TV show was “Miami Vice.” Until it jumped the shark in Season Three, I’d count the minutes until each episode began. One of its best episodes was called “Golden Triangle,” in which the show developed the main characters’ boss, Lieutenant Castillo, played by Edward James Olmos in his breakout role. Olmos played Castillo deep and dark. To me, at that age, Castillo personified cool. In this episode, Castillo revealed his past as...

Categories China & Korea
January 10, 2016

South Korea’s loudspeaking needs a strategic objective

Barely four months ago, Park Geun-hye’s negotiating team exchanged high-fives and backslaps with its North Korean counterparts, and came home having secured either peace in our time, or (as I called it) an agreement to fight another day. Today, South Korea says the North’s nuke test was “a grave violation” of the August agreement, the loudspeakers are blaring on both sides of the DMZ, and North Korea says the noise is pushing the two Koreas to “the brink of war.”...

Categories Anju Links
January 8, 2016

Dems & Republicans join forces to support North Korea sanctions legislation

When it comes to North Korea policy, Washington’s most influential lobbyist has never been to Washington. He’s in his early 30s, never finished high school, chain smokes, likes to ski, loves the NBA and , favors dark suits and mushroom haircuts, has an explosive temper and a small nuclear arsenal, and weighs as much as a village full of his malnourished subjects. Tuesday’s nuke test may have come just in time for Congress to act before dispersing for a long...

Categories Sanctions/Washington Views