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May 7, 2015

Lesson One: Pyongyang always reneges. Lesson Two: Repeat Lesson One.

If it’s now cliché to write that North Korea might have modeled its domestic policies on Orwell’s 1984, I would like to be the first to coin the cliché that it might have modeled its foreign policy on P.T. Barnum.* North Korea has an acute sense of its interlocutors’ weakness and desperation, and an extraordinary talent for exploiting these moments of desperation to break coalitions, weaken sanctions, and bring in aid by offering its opponents “openings,” concessions, and disarmament deals. None...

Abductions/Japan/Six-Party Talks

May 5, 2015

Contradiction isn’t argument: A response to Doug Bandow on N. Korea and terrorism

In the years after my return from four years with the Army in Korea, I found much to agree with in Doug Bandow’s writing — up to a point. Bandow is best known — at least in the context of Korea — for arguing that South Korea can and should pay for its own defense, and that U.S. Forces Korea should withdraw. A supporter of the isolationist and semi-retired cult figure, Ron Paul, Bandow favors the withdrawal of all 28,500 U.S. military personnel from South Korea. But...

Terrorism (NK)

May 4, 2015

New blog template

Thanks for your patience for the flurry of design experiments and changes to this site over the weekend. No, it’s not because the North Koreans hacked the site again. The culprit is actually Google, which just announced a policy that sites that aren’t mobile-friendly will be buried in SEO rankings. For the last four or five years, this site had been using an extensively hacked version of this template, which I liked very much, but which was also the reason...

Blogs & Blogging

May 2, 2015

N. Korea denounces my report on its sponsorship of terrorism: a “sinister,” “plot-breeding,” “unpardonable … provocation.”

For days, since the launch of the report I wrote for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, laying out the case for re-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, I’d been watching KCNA, hoping I wouldn’t be snubbed. That’s why this 884-word May Day denunciation is a very special, emotional moment for me — the pinnacle of years of sinister plot-breeding, of careful research and delicately crafted Madonna analogies. I will go so far as to say that the...

Terrorism (NK)

May 1, 2015

The North Korean army’s rape problem, “Kangan” Province, and Gloria Steinem

It has been four whole days since I said I was done talking about Women Cross DMZ for a year. How foolish it was of me to write that. For one thing, I did not anticipate having this detailed history of Christine Ahn’s pro-North Korean views, which outdoes my own, to graf for you: In late April, WomenCrossDMZ held a press conference in New York City. Ahn was not in attendance to respond to our question of why the group omits...

Human Rights/NK Military/Useful Idiocy

April 30, 2015

Why is North Korea still in the U.N.?

Oh, those wacky North Korean diplomats. If they aren’t shouting death threats in a U.S. congressional office building or making racial slurs against African diplomats, they’re smuggling dope, counterfeit money, or gold, or generally behaving like complete tools at U.N. hearings. You can accuse them of many things, but you can’t deny that they represent their government perfectly. Here is how they represented their government today: A U.S.-organized event on North Korea’s human rights briefly turned into chaos at the...

"United" Nations/Human Rights

April 29, 2015

On Iran & N Korea: A good deal can’t overcome bad judgment

As the Obama Administration works toward an agreed framework with Iran, a curious division is emerging among its defenders. On one hand, the administration and its supporters are understandably rejecting comparisons to the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. The State Department insists that “[t]he comprehensive deal we are seeking to negotiate with Iran is fundamentally different than what we did in terms of our approach to North Korea,” and will require more intrusive inspections “because of the lessons we learned from the North...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Iran/Six-Party Talks

April 27, 2015

In The Weekly Standard: North Korea’s war on women

I believe, having written this, that I’ve gotten out of my system everything I’ve ever wanted to write about Christine Ahn and Women Cross DMZ. For this year. I just hope Gloria Steinem doesn’t leave her feminism at home when she goes to Pyongyang. Millions of North Korean women need her support, more desperately than she’s willing to see. On the same topic, see also this op-ed, in The Washington Post, by Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Greg Scarlatoiu.

Human Rights/Useful Idiocy

April 27, 2015

Why North Korea should be re-listed as a state sponsor of terrorism

Read the full report, here. ~ ~ ~ Many, many thanks to Greg Scarlatoiu, Suzanne Scholte, Nick Eberstadt, and Marcus Noland for their kind comments at yesterday’s launch event, and to everyone who showed up at 6:00 on a Monday night. Special thanks to the HRNK interns who made it all possible — especially to Rosa and to Raymond, who meticulously checked every last cite and footnote. ~ ~ ~ Update, 1 May 2015: Here’s video of...

Terrorism (NK)

April 23, 2015

Seiler: N. Korea isn’t serious about denuclearization

Sydney Seiler, the special envoy for the six-party talks, spoke this week at CSIS, where he affirmed what Ambassador Mark Lippert said last week — that North Korea isn’t ready for serious talks. “They (the North Koreans) may not have learned any lesson (from the Iran nuclear deal). If they had learned any lesson, then we would have perhaps seen it earlier,” he said during the seminar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Iranian deal “clearly demonstrates...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks

April 22, 2015

Craig Urquhart: Withdraw U.S. soldiers from Korea

Writing at NK News, Craig Urquhart makes a punchy but powerful case for withdrawing U.S. soldiers from South Korea: South Korea has been allowed to act like an overgrown child for decades. The U.S. exercised exclusive military command because South Korea could not be trusted not to start a world war, and now resists the American push to transfer operational command. It relies on U.S. protection when it flubs its own diplomatic efforts. It carved out a state-sponsored industrial policy...

An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea

April 21, 2015

Obama Administration hints at sanctioning N. Korean human rights violators

A year after a U.N. Commission of Inquiry found the North Korean government responsible for crimes against humanity whose “gravity, scale and nature … reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” action at the U.N. has effectively stalled in the face of Chinese and Russian veto threats. As I have written before, Congress can impose effective sanctions on those responsible in ways that the U.N. can’t and the Obama Administration won’t. But now, the...

Human Rights/Sanctions

April 20, 2015

RFA: North Korea tells overseas workers to attack journalists

Ever since the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued its report last year, North Korea has been particularly sensitive to accusations of human rights violations. It shouldn’t surprise us that this sensitivity is especially keen when the scrutiny threatens to cut off a growing source of hard currency — its export of what amounts to slave labor to places like Russia, Malaysia, and Qatar. Press reports on the working conditions of these workers, and the regime’s spotty history of paying their (paltry) wages, have embarrassed the regime, embarrassed companies...

Human Trafficking/Terrorism (NK)

April 18, 2015

On Chris Hill in Iraq: “It was frightening how a person could so poison a place.”

I had long wondered why, after a difficult confirmation battle for the post, Chris Hill’s tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq was so brief. A friend (thank you) points me to this lengthy article in Politico, adapted from The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, by Emma Sky, that does much to explain the brevity of Hill’s tenure, and much more. In it, Hill comes across like one of the caricatured out-of-touch diplomats from The Ugly American. For...

Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Terrorism/Iraq

April 17, 2015

Expert: cash shortage could undermine Kim Jong Un’s succession

You won’t find a more authoritative open-source study of North Korea’s police state than the one Ken Gause did for the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. When it comes to North Korea’s internal security, kremlinology, and command systems, Gause earns a great deal of respect among North Korea watchers. So when Ken Gause tells Yonhap that Kim Jong Un “has not fully consolidated his power,” and is at risk of failing to do so “in a couple of...

Kremlinology/Sanctions

April 16, 2015

N. Korea perestroika watch: “Gunfire must be made to resound”

New Focus International has published an “exclusive” report that “North Korea’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and Ministry of People’s Security (MPS)” have begun what amounts to an internal terror campaign against the people, personally ratified by Kim Jong Un in September 2013, and aimed at “the sweeping out of impure and hostile elements.” The campaign consists of a series of crackdowns, collectively known as the “9.8 measures.” According to the report, Kim Jong Un has taken personal oversight* (read: personal responsibility...

Border Control

April 15, 2015

Why does North Korea still need food aid? (Updated)

The UN aid agencies working in North Korea — the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Population Fund, UNICEF, the World Food Program, and WHO (writing collectively as Relief Web) — have published a new report. I draw three main conclusions from it. First, despite some reports of improved food production, the humanitarian situation is still bad. Second, aid agencies still aren’t being forthcoming about the most important reasons for that. Third, various UN entities are working at cross purposes, and don’t...

"United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions

April 14, 2015

60 Minutes on the Sony attacks

Gone were the inside-job theories, except that one expert, when asked, allows the bare possibility that an insider might have made the North Koreans’ work easier. Like the heads of the FBI and the NSA, all the experts 60 Minutes interviewed are convinced that North Korea was behind the attack. Worse, the attack itself was not all that sophisticated, when compared to what the U.S. and other governments are capable of today. An equally unsophisticated attack would have taken out...

Cyberwar