September 24, 2018

From Sunshine to solar eclipse: Can Moon Jae-in censor his way to reunification?

FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, THE STATED PREMISE OF THE SUNSHINE THEORY of “engagement” with the regime in Pyongyang has been that economic incentives and integration would gradually draw it into the community of civilized nations and spur political reform, disarmament, peace, and eventual reunification. The Sunshine Policy and its progeny promised that the gentle suasion of liberalization would win over even those responsible for “crimes against humanity, arising from ‘policies established at the highest level of State,’” including as...

Categories Censorship
August 29, 2018

The U.S.-Korea alliance is “in jeopardy” & it’s not even (mostly) Trump’s fault

MAKING THE ROUNDS IN WASHINGTON THIS WEEK IS THIS MUST-READ REPORT, in Tokyo Business Today, by Stanford Professor Daniel Sneider: “Behind The Chaos Of Washington’s Korea Policy.” The report is based on Sneider’s discussions with insiders familiar with the administration’s North Korea negotiations and policymaking, and yes, you should be worried: [T]he spoken, and unspoken, aim of most professionals implementing North Korea policy is to hold off President Trump from meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again. They worry...

Categories An Alliance?/Sanctions/Washington Views
August 27, 2018

New head of S. Korea’s ruling party once said North’s abuses were “not something other countries can intervene in”

ON SATURDAY, SOUTH KOREA’S RULING “DEMOCRATIC” PARTY PICKED LEE HAE-CHAN as its new Chairman. Lee, who previously served as Prime Minister under Roh Moo-hyun, promised “unwavering efforts toward … inter-Korean peace.” The Joongang Ilbo calls him “a staunch liberal.” Lee replaces Choo Mi-ae, another “liberal” who was fond of making public threats to sue opposition politicians for criminal libel. In South Korea, the term is also broad enough to include the President’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, who as far...

Categories Appeasement/Human Rights
August 24, 2018

Why the domestic troubles of Trump & Moon are grave news for Koreans

POLITICIANS DO THEIR WORST DIPLOMACY WHEN THEY’RE WEAK AT HOME. SCANDAL TEMPTS THEM TO SEEK GLORY ABROAD. The hyenas of the world’s ecosystem see them limp and decide to prey on them, or on the calves they can’t protect. Of Mr. Trump’s troubles, you already know plenty that I need not repeat here. Whatever your view of those troubles, they aren’t going away, and if you correctly acknowledge their political element, they’re apt to be more serious next January. The...

Categories America/An Alliance?/Korean War II/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
August 22, 2018

If the deal-maker didn’t make a deal & the peace-maker didn’t make peace, could Twitter be wrong?

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually believe that Agreed Framework III proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. It often seems that everyone on Twitter but me belongs to one of these tribes, which...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
August 21, 2018

A new report says South Korea spends more to influence Washington than Israel, China & Saudi Arabia combined

IN WASHINGTON, THERE IS GROWING UNEASE ABOUT how far and how fast South Korea’s anti-anti-North Korean President, Moon Jae-in, is moving to undermine the pressure of U.S. and U.N. sanctions before Pyongyang takes meaningful steps to disarm. The unease is greatest in Congress, where there is also unease that both Moon and Trump have done so much to legitimize a tyrant who would, in a more just world, be hauled before a tribunal and sentenced to spend the remainder of...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
August 18, 2018

On the contrary, it’s Washington that must take back our sovereignty from Moon Jae-in’s lobbyists

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually seem to believe that the Singapore summit proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually seem to believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. Most members of the latter group believe that the former group are...

Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
August 16, 2018

The Myth of Maximum Pressure: Why Trump’s North Korea sanctions strategy must change or fail

If you’re a journalist or scholar who writes about North Korea, you’re apt to think that the Trump administration really did impose more-or-less “maximum” pressure on Kim Jong-un, although this was never really true. If your understanding of sanctions is based on a 1980s concept of sanctions as trade blockades that require the cooperation of every customs inspector at the country’s border, you’re also apt to harbor several other misunderstandings about how sanctions work, and consequently, to add to the...

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

South Korea has been caught violating 3 UN resolutions this week (so far)

South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade now admits that it first suspected that subsidiaries of its national power company were importing North Korean coal as early as October 2017. For those of you who don’t do math, that was ten months ago. The result of that extensive ten-month investigation? Despite all the red flags that should have put everyone involved in this transaction on notice that they were buying North Korean coal right up until last week, the South...

Categories An Alliance?/Sanctions
August 7, 2018

South Korea implicated in large-scale violations of U.N. coal, shipping sanctions against North Korea

This week, a scandal is burgeoning in South Korea that a wholly owned subsidiary of the nation’s largest power company purchased large quantities of North Korean coal in violation of the coal export ban of UNSCR 2371. The other day, I tweeted about a Korean-language report in the right-leaning site Pennmike, indicating that a Belize-flagged ship carrying North Korean coal was spotted in the port of Pyeongtaek. We’ve since learned that this violation was part of a broader, long-standing, illicit...

Categories Shipping sanctions
July 26, 2018

Kaesong is a buffalo jump for amoral politicians & unlawyered cretins

Mark Lambert, who is a “U.S. State Department official in charge of Korean affairs,” and who is also a mensch, is in South Korea this week, where he will meet with Korean officials, and also with “a group of South Korean businesspeople involved in inter-Korean economic projects.” Over the course of 15 years, this blog has followed the various get-broke-quick buffalo jumps that promoters, most of them amoral politicians who specialize in throwing away other people’s money, euphemistically call “inter-Korean...

Categories Kaesong/Sunshine
July 5, 2018

The Trump-Kim Pact was a con by both men. We’re the marks.

WHEN I FIRST WROTE ABOUT THE TRUMP-KIM NON-AGGRESSION PACT, I expressed pessimism but reserved judgment until I knew more about its vague terms. I now wonder if history will record it as the most disastrous international agreement since Molotov-Ribbentrop, one that will put the U.S., South Korea, and Japan forever under the shadow of North Korean nuclear blackmail, forever break the global nonproliferation regime, mark the beginning of the end of South Korea’s experiment with liberal democracy, and put us...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
June 12, 2018

Agreed Framework III: A fisking

Yesterday, I said the best we could hope for from the Trump-Kim summit would be “a vague agreement that North Korea will denuclearize, without Trump making any concessions for such a nebulous promise.” We have that vague agreement (full text here). It is so vague, in fact, that it’s hard to even say what concessions were given, implied, or will be given in the coming months. Historically, vague agreements are the agreements Pyongyang loves. One the one hand, it will...

Categories Appeasement
June 11, 2018

Why Trump can’t lift North Korea sanctions unilaterally

THE HIGHEST EXPECTATIONS WE SHOULD HAVE FOR THE UPCOMING CIRCUS IN SINGAPORE are low expectations – that the summit breaks with, at most, a vague agreement that North Korea will denuclearize, without Trump making any concessions for such a nebulous promise. No one deserves a Nobel Prize for trading away our last chance to disarm Kim Jong-un peacefully for more lies, or for excusing Kim Jong-un from the few consequences he faces for proliferation, crimes against peace, organized crime, and...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
May 18, 2018

On Libya, as an ahistorical justification for North Korea’s nukes

JOHN BOLTON LIKES THE LIBYA MODEL OF NORTH KOREA’S DISARMAMENT, KIM JONG-UN HATES IT, and Donald Trump is backing away from it. Nonproliferation experts, who at times seem to have embraced the defense of Kim Jong-un’s inalienable right to nukes as their own cause, hate it just as much as Kim Jong-un does. Many of them are fond of citing the 2011 Libyan Civil War as a justification for North Korea retaining a nuclear arsenal. The argument goes like this:...

Categories Diplomacy/Proliferation/WMD
May 14, 2018

Then they came for the defectors, but I said nothing: Why the UNHCR must investigate the Ningpo 13 case

Here Squealer’s demeanour suddenly changed. He fell silent for a moment, and his little eyes darted suspicious glances from side to side before he proceeded. It had come to his knowledge, he said, that a foolish and wicked rumour had been circulated at the time of Boxer’s removal. Some of the animals had noticed that the van which took Boxer away was marked “Horse Slaughterer,” and had actually jumped to the conclusion that Boxer was being sent to the knacker’s....

Categories Defectors/Refugees
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