Search Results for “sunshine lite”

December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Fiskings/Korean War II

December 6, 2017

A soldier’s defection and survival inspire two peoples … and perhaps, a third

New reports on that North Korean soldier’s defection at the Joint Security Area last month have added even more dramatic detail to his story. First, we learned of the heroism of the ROK soldiers who crawled out to drag him to safety. Then, we saw the video of his escape, with his comrades just a few feet behind him, shooting at him (and thankfully, missing in most cases). Now we know his name: Oh Chong-song. We know his aspiration: to...

Defectors/NK Military/Propaganda/Subversion

September 11, 2017

Moon Jae-in, Putin & Kaesong 2.0: Why the state of the U.S.-Korea alliance is not strong

Of the many reasons why the U.S. and South Korea failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, one of the most important is that, despite their nominal alliance, Washington and Seoul have been fundamentally misaligned on North Korea policy since Bill Clinton and Kim Young-Sam led their respective nations. The most important of these differences was their mutually canceling economic policies toward Pyongyang. As the U.S. moved (however slowly and haltingly) toward isolating Pyongyang economically to slow and...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/U.S. & Korea

July 27, 2017

Pompeo, Malinowski, and The Change That Dare Not Speak Its Name

The failure of “engaging” North Korea into reform and peace, the madness of war, and the impossibility of coexisting with a nuclear North Korea are, however belatedly, causing more Americans to do some hard thinking about hastening our progression toward the post-Kim Jong-Un era. Last week, CIA Director Mike Pompeo (who speaks to the President about North Korea frequently) caused a stir in Washington and apoplexy in Pyongyang when he made comments at the Aspen Security Forum that hinted at...

Regime Change

July 7, 2017

Stop talking about bombing North Korea. Talk about the revolution it desperately needs.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. – Sun Tzu On the Fourth of July, I had a long talk with a Famous Person who would probably prefer that I not mention his name here. He’s famous (or infamous — your mileage may vary) for his association with a foreign policy philosophy described as “neoconservative,” whatever that means. Like many Famous Persons, this person’s public image is an injustice to his actual views, which sounded...

Resistance

May 9, 2017

Our grand plans to engage North Korea must learn from their failures and evolve with the evidence

One of my cruel habits lately has been to ask the holdouts who still advocate the economic, cultural, and scientific “engagement” of Pyongyang to name a single significant, positive outcome their policies have purchased at the cost of $8 billion or more, over 20-odd years, as thousands of North Koreans died beyond our view and our earshot. I’ve yet to receive a non-sarcastic answer to that question. Yesterday, I salted this wound by pointing out that the largest remaining engagement...

Appeasement/Propaganda/Sanctions/Subversion/Sunshine

March 28, 2017

Why human rights must be a part of the Trump administration’s North Korea policy

Yesterday, the State Department hailed the U.N. Human Rights Council’s adoption of a resolution condemning North Korea’s human rights abuses and recommending that member states help identify perpetrators for possible prosecution. The U.N.’s progress has been agonizingly slow, and I won’t argue against those who say that the HRC’s membership standards are Exhibit A in the case for reforming it. Still, for an administration that has not emphasized human rights, that’s an encouraging sign. By now, it’s fairly clear that...

Human Rights

February 10, 2017

Eight reasons why reopening Kaesong could be a deal-breaker for the U.S.-Korea alliance

More and more, I am hearing that Moon Jae-in, the left-wing front-runner in the South Korean presidential election, is talking about reopening and expanding the Kaesong Industrial Complex. It’s apparent that Mr. Moon and his supporters haven’t thought through the potential legal and diplomatic consequences of that. Perhaps this post will help concentrate some minds by telling Koreans, in frank terms, what most people in Washington really think about that idea. 1. Kaesong violates U.N. sanctions. I heard somewhere that...

An Alliance?/Kaesong/Sunshine

January 3, 2017

Trump’s tweets show the right instincts on North Korea.

Kim Jong-un’s New Year speech turned out to more interesting than I’d predicted. No, he isn’t going on Atkins; he’s threatening to fire an ICBM that can hit the United States with a nuke. One wonders how the usual suspects at 38 North will spin this speech into predictions of glasnost and perestroika, but for now, consistent with another prediction I made, Kim Jong-un’s transition-year provocations are molding the President-Elect’s policy at a critical moment, and not to Kim Jong-un’s...

China & Korea/U.S. Politics

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...

Border Control/Famine & Food Aid

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...

Appeasement/Diplomacy

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...

An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Censorship/Democracy/Diplomacy/Korean Society/Korean War II

March 16, 2016

President Park demands end to North Korea’s “tyranny”

Park Geun-hye has a long and distinguished history of saying next to nothing about human rights in North Korea, so these remarks are another welcome step in the right direction: “I will sternly and strongly deal with North Korea … until North Korea embarks on the path toward denuclearization and ends the tyranny of oppressing the human rights of North Korean people and pushing them to starvation,” Park said in an annual meeting with South Korea’s top envoys around. A...

Human Rights/North-South

March 14, 2016

Namibia’s prohibited arms deal with N. Korea triggers mandatory sanctions under U.S. law.

Namibia is a beautiful desert country with a turbulent history. Some years ago, when I worked in South Africa, I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town, took a bus across the border to Keetnamshoop, and hitch-hiked to the isolated town of Lüderitz, which sits where the barren dunes of the Namib Desert spill into the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Lüderitz was established by German colonists in the 19th Century; today, many of their descendants still live in the...

"United" Nations/Africa/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

March 4, 2016

Europe can play an important role in enforcing U.N. sanctions against N. Korea

With the enactment of UNSCR 2270, the EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini says the EU will soon move forward with what EU regulators refer to as “restrictive measures” against North Korea. “There is scope for the European Union to adopt additional autonomous restrictive measures to complement and reinforce the new U.N. measures,” said a diplomatic note seen by Reuters on the latest discussions. Germany, France, Spain and Poland want to see what more the bloc can do in areas...

Europe/Sanctions

March 3, 2016

South Korean National Assembly passes human rights bill. Finally.

Last month, I leveled some bitter criticism at South Korea’s opposition Minju Party for blocking North Korean human rights legislation (ironically enough, “Minju” means “democracy”). This week, after an eleven-year battle, the opposition finally gave up its obstructionism, yielded to the tides of morality and history, and allowed the bill to pass the National Assembly. The final vote for 212 for and 24 abstentions (and none against?). Belated as it was, this victory gives us some reasons to rejoice. First, it’s a...

Activism/Human Rights/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society

March 2, 2016

The U.N.’s new N. Korea sanctions will change the game … if they’re enforced.

The U.N. Security Council has just approved a new resolution, UNSCR 2270, sanctioning North Korea under Chapter VII and Article 41 of the U.N. Charter. Now that the Security Council has approved the resolution, I’m publishing this post, which I’ve been holding. It’s a strong text — very strong. In reviewing it, it’s useful to begin with my own wish list: Requiring member states to report North Korean property, accounts, and transactions to the U.N. Panel of Experts; Shipping sanctions...

"United" Nations/Sanctions

Search Results for: sunshine lite