Search Results for “china buffer”

August 16, 2016

The Obama administration isn’t following Kim Jong-un’s money. Congress should ask why.

In February and March, respectively, the U.S. Congress and the U.N. Security Council responded to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test with sanctions that were, in theory, an order of magnitude stronger than any sanctions imposed on North Korea until then. Sanctions, of course, are only as good as their enforcement, and in enforcing sanctions against North Korea, the most important rule has always been “follow the money.” Money — along with the contradictions of its political system — has always...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

June 7, 2016

Barack Obama disappointed Kim Jong-il. Donald Trump will disappoint Kim Jong-un.

We will see a better relationship between the U.S. and the Korean Peninsula with Obama, who sternly criticizes Bush and who would meet the leader of Chosun without pre-conditions, than with the “Bush clone” and scarecrow of the neocons McCain. – from the pro-Pyongyang Chosun Sinbo, June 9, 2008 (original Korean here) Like most of you, I slept uneasily on the night after the New Hampshire primary results came in. When sleep finally did come, dreamed I was tending an...

Diplomacy/U.S. Politics

April 8, 2016

Why an unprecedented mass defection could be a sign of instability in North Korea

Yonhap is reporting this morning that 13 North Koreans —12 women and a male manager working at one of its overseas restaurants in an unidentified country — have defected and arrived safely in South Korea. The impetus for this unprecedented mass defection? Sanctions — which never work, so we’ve been told. “As the international community has slapped sanctions on the North, North Korean restaurants in foreign countries are known to be feeling the pinch,” Jeong Joon-hee, a ministry spokesman, told...

Sanctions

March 11, 2016

Park Geun-hye finds her inner Thatcher

This week, the South Korean government imposed bilateral sanctions on North Korea, banning from its harbors ships that have been to North Korea in the last 180 days, cancelling a joint logistics project with Russia to export coal through Rajin, and designating “30 companies with links to the North’s nuclear and missile programs …, 38 North Korean nationals and two foreigners.” The targets include “Leonard Lai, president of Singapore-based Senat Shipping” (see this post) and “the Taiwanese president of Royal Team...

Kaesong/Korean Politics/North-South/Sunshine

February 19, 2016

Aid agencies struggle to feed hungry kids as N. Korea cuts food imports to 10-year low

Wasn’t it only Groundhog Day when the U.N. released $8 million in emergency aid to “enable life-saving assistance for more than 2.2 million people” in North Korea who are the “most vulnerable and at risk of malnutrition?” Wasn’t it just last month when UNICEF warned that “25,000 children in North Korea require immediate treatment for malnutrition after a drought cut food production by a fifth and the government reduced rations?” North Korea’s overall food imports from neighboring China fell by a quarter...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid

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...

Reconstruction

August 25, 2015

Koreas agree to fight another day

They came, they talked, and they signed, but they solved nothing. Plus or minus one piece of paper, three severed legs, and an implicit promise of payment, we are where we were on the morning of August 4th, when Staff Sergeant Kim Jung-Won and Sergeant Ha Jae-Heon embarked on their fateful patrol. As I predicted hours before the deal was announced, Pyongyang didn’t apologize, and Seoul will continue to pay. The loudspeakers will be switched off. There will not be...

Korean War II

August 11, 2015

North Korean Men Cross DMZ (and plant land mines)

By now, you’ve read that South Korea’s government has accused the North Korean military of sending soldiers across the DMZ to plant mines near South Korean guard posts, an act that blew the legs off two South Korean soldiers last week. The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies. One lost both legs in the...

Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy

June 4, 2014

Coalition against N. Korea crumbles due to U.S. incompetence, betrayal, and weakness

Last week, Japan and North Korea announced an agreement under which Pyongyang would “conduct a comprehensive survey” of the whereabouts of “Japanese spouses, victims of abduction and mission persons,” both dead and alive, and return them to Japan. In exchange, “Japan has announced that it is lifting sanctions against North Korea on travel, reporting remittances and humanitarian shipping.” Japan also agreed “to examine humanitarian aid to Pyongyang at an â€˜appropriate time.’” Xinhua also reports that Japan may send monitors to...

Abductions/Diplomacy/Japan/Six-Party Talks

March 27, 2014

Open Sources, March 27, 2014

~ 1 ~ CONSEQUENCES: The State Department sends a strong hint that it’s mulling more sanctions on North Korea in response to the North’s recent missile tests, including two medium-range missiles fired toward Japan, but offered no details on the type of sanction or whether they would be unilateral or at the U.N. This separate report, however, says that our U.N. ambassador is talking with other members of the Security Council. If State does press for U.N. sanctions, that would...

Anju Links

December 19, 2013

Kim Kyong Hui leaves N. Korea for medical treatment, and the deeper meaning of Jang’s scapegoating

The Daily NK, citing “a high-level party cadre,” reports that Kim Kyong Hui (Kim Il Sung’s daughter, Kim Jong Il’s sister, Jang Song Thaek’s widow, and Kim Jong Un’s aunt) has left North Korea for medical treatment after having a seizure caused by the execution of her husband. Ms. Kim was noticeably absent from yesterday’s ceremony marking the second anniversary of her brother’s death, as Don Kirk’s report notes with almost uncanny prescience. Ri Sol Ju was there, however, looking...

Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology

September 27, 2013

RAND’s study of N. Korea collapse should be required reading at State, USFK

This week, the World Bank recently analyzed a series of governance indicators to conclude that the North Korean regime is stabilizing. Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees. Bruce Bennett of RAND has just published an indispensable, readable, and plausibly terrifying new study of the regime’s stability, and he reaches a very different conclusion. To Bennett, a violent and chaotic collapse looks increasingly likely as North Korea tries to consolidate succession to its third hereditary ruler. (Thanks to a reader for forwarding)....

Reconstruction/Regime Change

February 14, 2013

AP Exclusive! North Korea’s nuke test a cry for peace

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — AP Pyongyang has all the logic and perspective of KCNA Pyongyang and none of the guilty pleasures of KCNA’s prose. The way North Korea sees it, only bigger weapons and more threatening provocations will force Washington to come to the table to discuss what Pyongyang says it really wants: peace. [….] North Korea has long cited the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, and what it considers a...

AP Watch/WMD

November 17, 2009

NGO Claims North Korea Abducted 200 Chinese Who Aided Refugees

Pyongyang’s agents over the past decade abducted about 200 Chinese citizens as part of a campaign to stop people from fleeing North Korea, a news report said Tuesday. The Chinese of ethnic Korean descent had been helping refugees who had fled across the border, Chosun Ilbo newspaper said, adding they were abducted to North Korea and jailed there. [AFP] The English version of the Chosun Ilbo article isn’t out yet as I write this (but might be by the time...

Abductions/China & Korea

January 12, 2009

Defections from North Korea to South Rose in 2008

The Chosun Ilbo reports that defections from North Korea rose 10% in 2008 compared to 2007. This may or may not tell us anything about economic or political conditions in the North as opposed to last year. The number of new arrivals in South Korea is a small trickle from a vast reserve of North Koreans hiding in China — estimates vary from 50,000 to 300,000. Not all of the new arrivals in the South are necessarily recent escapees, given...

Defectors/NK Military/Refugees

March 16, 2008

Chinese Academic: Accept North Korea as a Nuclear Power

China has a habit of using academics and scholars to float foreign policy trial balloons. Dingli Shen, a Professor and Executive Dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, recently visited North Korea, something he would not have done unless he spoke for at least a part of the Chinese government. Shen, a physicist and a former Professor of “American Studies,” has also acted as a quasi-governmental mouthpiece on North Korea here and here. Here’s what now: The...

China/China & Korea/Six-Party Talks

October 11, 2006

Kim Jong Il Unplugged, Part 12

“If the U.S. keeps pestering us and increases pressure, we will regard it as a declaration of war and will take a series of physical corresponding measures,” the North’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. Well, what on earth did they expect? Applause? Mind you, they still have the chutzpah to say they want to disarm, but the last time they said that was just hours before their alleged nuke test. Meanwhile,...

China & Korea/Japan & Korea/NK Economics/WMD

September 7, 2006

Kaplan Identifies the Problem. So How Do We Solve It?

[Updated; Updated again 9/6 regarding South Korea’s withdrawal from OPLAN 5029 planning last year.] First, I want to thank “a fellow blogger” for forwarding me this article. The Marmot has posted the entire text. Richardson and GI Korea have already preempted many of my comments on this piece. As with everything Kaplan writes, the article shows the author’s research; it’s approached with both depth and perspective. Inevitably for a piece that printed out to 12 pages, there were parts with...