This summation from the Chosun Ilbo sounds about right to me: The U.S. is the only counterpart the North’s foreign policy recognizes. Seoul, for Pyongyang, is just a pawn to help it maneuver into a better position vis-à-vis the U.S. The result is that the U.S. no longer listens to Seoul and the North regards it as a mere foil in its dealings with Washington. The moment when the U.S. takes unilateral action to deal with all the problems it...

We have a test case for North Korea’s bellicosity about counterfeiting sanctions. KCNA has confirmed a meeting with Japan in Beijing on Saturday, reference normalization of relations. Presumably, abductions will be an issue, as they have always been. Meanwhile, Japan has just announced its own sanctions against banks that launder Kim Jong Il’s money, starting with Banco Delta Asia, but not stopping there, either . . . . The majority Liberal Democratic Party on Wednesday set up a working group...

The Chosun Ilbo is expressing relief. So, presumably, is Roh. Hopefully, this won’t deny us the pleasure of a good KCNA rant.

Seoul Mayor and current presidential front-runner Lee Myung-Bak is dipping his toe into new waters–the hitherto unpopular issue of human rights in North Korea . . . . “We can talk about the importance of human rights as much as we like and it does not mean that we deal with the issue as if we were fighting a battle,” Lee, 65, said. “It is not a matter of whether or not to do it, but a matter of how...

The Flying Yangban is still not finished documenting Freedom House’s Seoul conference on human rights in North Korea (you can read his excellent OFK posts on the subject here, right below my own posts on the FH Washington conference). Andy’s latest is the text of a speech by the Korean politician I most admire, and one of a very few I admire at all: Kim Moon Soo. New readers with a deep interest in Korean politics may want to read...

Nothing in the story connects it to North Korea, although the Bank of China has been the subject of published reports in connection with the “supernote” money-laundering investigation. From the Justice Department . . . . WASHINGTON, D.C. ““ A federal grand jury in Las Vegas has indicted two former managers of the Bank of China, their wives, and a relative of one of the couples on charges of racketeering, money laundering and fraud, Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher...

A prediction: this traffic accident will not be viewed as an insult to national pride, and there will be no politically motivated demands to extradite the driver. Having taken my life into my hands on innumerable occasions to cross that very same street, I think it’s safe to say 40 mph was excessive. Fortunately, it sounds like the pedestrian will be OK.

I honestly don’t know how Rescue the North Korean People (RENK) would be able to receive reliable information that a North Korean is infected, but it’s interesting that the North Korean regime is now forced to respond to RENK’s reports. As usual, the UN is reduced to echoing the statements of the North Korean government without so much as telling us what access they were granted or denied to the allegedly infected area. The Food and Agriculture Office head who...

On North Korea, President Bush said very little: “The demands of justice require their freedom as well [specifically naming the people of North Korea, Syria, Burma, and Zimbabwe, among others].” The rhetoric was no more soaring, and certainly no more specific, than anything I’ve heard him say before. I can live without soaring rhetoric for public diplomacy’s sake, but what I can’t forgive is that this president has frittered away six years without forming a forceful or even a particularly...

If you can’t actually defend Kim Jong Il’s counterfeiting of the dollar, and you can’t deny that the evidence is strong enough to convince even the Chinese, what’s a dedicated appeaser to say? The talking point appears to be “Why now?” Meaning, why did the United States cruelly dash our high hopes of progress in the nuclear talks with North Korea now, as opposed to cruelly dashing similar hopes at any other time during the last decade or so of...

Kim Jong Il’s son-in-law has been rehabilitated. I don’t even have enough reliable facts to speculate about what this means.

Here.

Not a very ambassadorial thing to say, perhaps, but there are plenty of reasons to justify Washington’s harder new line toward North Korea of late. Leave aside the decade-plus of North Korean cheating and defiance of any standards followed by the rest of humanity. Although evidence of a policy shift is still inconclusive, it’s arguable that several developments last fall strengthened the hand of hard-liners (me, for one) seeking the abandonment of negotiation from weakness in favor of the economic...