May 9, 2018

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” – Samuel Johnson Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Korean Society/Korean War II/North-South/Sunshine
May 8, 2018

Moon Chung-in throws U.S. Forces Korea out the Overton Window (Update: & so does Trump)

A PATTERN WE’VE SEEN REPEATED OVER THE LAST YEAR goes roughly as follows: First, Moon Chung-in, the left-wing South Korean President’s crazy old uncle1 shouts something wacky from his attic when the Americans are within earshot. The Americans wince and pretend they didn’t hear. President Moon Jae-in and his cabinet walk the wacky remark back and gently hush the crazy old uncle. But once Moon Chung-in has defenestrated the wacky idea out of his attic’s Overton Window, the hard-left base...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
May 2, 2018

North Korean Freedom Week is the next test for free speech in “free” Korea

A FEW OF US WILL ALWAYS STUBBORNLY INSIST THAT WE DISREGARD THE LIVES AND DIGNITY of North Korea’s oppressed people at our own peril. We argue that there can be no verified disarmament of a North Korea that remains a closed society, no security in its promises as long as it mendaciously denies the existence of its prison camps, no lasting peace as long as it holds human life in contempt, no reunification between a liberal democracy and a tyranny...

Categories An Alliance?/Censorship/Korean War II/Sunshine
April 30, 2018

Moon Jae-in just put Seoul on a collision course with U.S. & U.N. sanctions (updated)

THE ONE INVIOLABLE RULE OF INTER-KOREAN SUMMITS IS THAT THERE IS ALWAYS A SCANDAL sooner or later. Kim Dae-jung’s summit with Kim Jong-il in 2000 resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize, eight indictments, six convictions, and a bunch of suspended prison sentences for an illegal payment of $500 million to North Korea. Otherwise, it did not disarm North Korea and did not produce a lasting reduction of tensions.((Previously said $500,000. Since corrected.)) Roh Moo-hyun’s 2007 summit with Kim Jong-il also...

Categories An Alliance?/Kaesong/North-South/Sanctions/Sunshine
April 27, 2018

The Warmbiers sue North Korea

WHILE THE WORLD IS AGOG AT THE SIGHT OF KIM JONG-UN’S impersonation of a human being, Fred and Cindy Warmbier wish to remind you of his true character by sharing with you what their son—or what was left of him—was like when he came home from North Korea. Yesterday, they filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the North Korean government for the wrongful death of Otto Warmbier. I downloaded the complaint from PACER. Warmber...

Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
April 25, 2018

Steve Mnuchin is defying Congress & undermining the President’s North Korea policy

WHO, EXACTLY, DOES STEVE MNUCHIN THINK HE WORKS FOR—Donald Trump or Xi Jinping? We are just weeks away from a scheduled meeting between the President who appointed Mnuchin and the dictator of North Korea. That meeting may decide whether it’s still possible to disarm the North through diplomacy instead of a war that could easily go nuclear. Unlike every other U.S. president since there has been a North Korea, President Trump grasps that the prerequisite to a successful negotiation is...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
April 24, 2018

Will the real Im Jong-seok please speak up?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, AS IF TO ANSWER THE QUESTION I RAISED in the final paragraph of yesterday’s post, reports on the background of South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, or rather, some of it. It’s an unsatisfying report by first-rate reporters that reads as if it has been edited too heavily by lawyers. Its most glaring omissions are the word “Chondaehyop,” what it did, or when Im led it. Specifically, it fails to answer the...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
April 23, 2018

Moon Jae-in’s vision for reunification means One Slave Korea

LAST DECEMBER, I PUBLISHED A SURPRISINGLY CONTROVERSIAL HYPOTHESIS that Korean War II would not be a conventional war, but is a hybrid war to alternately cajole and coerce South Korea into gradual submission to the North’s hegemony, aggressive implementation of a series of joint statements, and eventual digestion into a one-country, two-systems confederation. I argued that this plan would only work if a sufficiently submissive government in Seoul yielded to Pyongyang while going only so far and so fast as...

Categories Appeasement/Korean War II
April 16, 2018

“Liberal” South Korean government blocks filming of Thae Yong-ho’s speech; article reporting it vanishes (Updated)

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices … in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for...

Categories Censorship/Defectors/Democracy/Korean War II
April 11, 2018

Using the law to break Africa’s addiction to North Korean weapons

When Africa binges on North Korean weapons, it doesn’t just deprive Africa of resources its people need for development; it fuels conflict and human rights abuses by some of the world’s most despotic governments. It also finances and encourages Pyongyang’s militarist reunification drive, and helps it buy more weapons for its generals to point at and terrorize South Korean cities. As with arms purchases by Syria, arms sales to Africa are a major hole in our sanctions that the Trump...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
April 6, 2018

South Korea’s “liberal” government is trying to censor the North Korea policy debate in America

IT’S WEIRD HOW A TL/DR POST I PUBLISHED IN 2014 ON THINK TANKS, PROPAGANDA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and Korea suddenly resurrected itself to relevance twice in two days, almost four years later. As you may recall from that post, in 2005, the Korea Foundation suddenly pulled its funding from the American Enterprise Institute after its in-house magazine, The American Enterprise, published a special edition about the current wave of sometimes-violent anti-Americanism in South Korea during and after the...

Categories Censorship/Korean War II
April 3, 2018

How to build a big, beautiful (financial) wall around North Korea & make Kim Jong-un pay for it.

HERE IN WASHINGTON, THE BLOB IS ALL ATWITTER over a possible summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Those who see no solution to this crisis but the next piece of paper took the news with the same mixture of euphoria and dread as a man who waits four hours in the emergency room in throbbing agony, only to hear, “Doctor Oz will see you now.” But in reality, a Trump-Kim summit is no more than 40 percent likely to...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 16, 2018

Why we must break the Syria-North Korea WMD trade, and how we can

Last night, the U.N. Panel of Experts published its latest report. There is sufficient material in it for several posts, but some of the most alarming facts in it have to do with North Korea’s assistance to Syria with its ballistic missiles and chemical weapons, so that’s where I’ll begin. That North Korea is helping Bashar Assad gas his own people isn’t news to readers of this blog. The Panel confirms that the trade includes not only conventional arms, but also...

Categories Proliferation/WMD
March 5, 2018

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s board, search & sink their smuggling ships & show it on TV.

LAST WEEK, REUTERS REPORTED THAT THE WHITE HOUSE is considering a proposal to board and search North Korean merchant ships for contraband on the high seas. This is one of the few forceful options against Pyongyang I could get behind. Unlike “bloody nose” proposals (which sound like they’re an urban myth anyway) and preemptive strike proposals (which exist, at least on the op-ed pages) the boarding of North Korean smuggling ships at sea is unlikely to trigger a sudden use-it-or-lose-it...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Shipping sanctions
February 28, 2018

You want maximum pressure? Oh, I’ll show you maximum pressure.

SINCE LAST WEEK, WHEN THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT announced 56 designations of ships, shipping companies, and trading companies, reporters have been emailing me to ask whether this is finally the “maximum pressure” the Trump administration has been talking about. The short answer is “no.” In terms of length alone, yes, this was the largest set of North Korea designations ever, although we should discount for the fact that most of the 28 ships were effectively designated twice (once per ship, and...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
February 15, 2018

Neither talks for talks’ sake, nor sanctions for sanctions’ sake.

AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, the U.S. Army assembled a team of experts, including the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, to assess the effects of our strategic bombing campaigns in Europe and Asia. For present purposes, let’s stick to what the Strategic Bombing Survey found about strategic bombing in the European theater: that it lacked focus, hit too wide a variety of targets, and had varying levels of impact on each category of target. Our terror bombing of German...

Categories History/Sanctions
February 14, 2018

The media fawning over North Korea’s Censor-in-Chief is indefensible, yet they still defend it.

A MEDIA CRITICISM OF DONALD TRUMP that weighs more heavily than their predictable policy and tribal differences with him is that his tepid repudiation of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer “normalized” some of America’s most deplorable people. It’s going to be much harder for the Washington Post to make that charge stick after its reporters fawned over one of Earth’s most deplorable people — the Censor-in-Chief of a racist, homophobic, misogynistic regime that stands credibly accused by the...

Categories Censorship/Human Rights/Sports
February 2, 2018

Dandong Delenda Est: A little-noticed law may soon raise the pressure on China over N. Korea’s smuggling

IF OUR CHOICES FOR ADDRESSING THE KOREAN MISSILE CRISIS come down to (a) a trade war with China, or (b) a nuclear war with North Korea, which option is worse? If you still believe that begging Kim Jong-un for another piece of paper he doesn’t want and wouldn’t keep is the answer, no amount of evidence will convince you. To accept Pyongyang’s nuclear status in the mistaken belief that conventional means can deter Kim Jong-un’s campaign to gradually blackmail, censor,...

Categories Sanctions/Shipping sanctions