Search Results for: The Death of an Alliance, Part

The Death of an Alliance, Part V

An advisor to the U.S. Congress said Friday a resolution drafted in 2003 to commemorate 50 years of the Korea-U.S. alliance died a quiet death in the House over anger in Congress at anti-American demonstrations in Korea. Rest the rest here. The advisor, Dennis Halpin, works for Henry Hyde. His wife is Korean, and he met her as a young Peace Corps volunteer. He’s considered one of the House’s go-to men on Korea policy. It’s friends like these that Korea...

The Death of an Alliance, Part III

Today, it’s the Brookings Institution . . . in the Washington Times, meaning that we’re not merely facing the death of the alliance, but the Apocalypse. For those of you from outside the Beltway, Brookings is a left-of-center foreign policy think tank that’s been supportive of negotiations with North Korea, often in the face of evidence that those negotiations have bought us little. Jack Pritchard has a job there, which might normally settle the matter. Author Richard Halloran, however, has...

The Death of an Alliance, Part III

Today, it’s the Brookings Institution . . . in the Washington Times, meaning that we’re not merely facing the death of the alliance, but the Apocalypse. For those of you from outside the Beltway, Brookings is a left-of-center foreign policy think tank that’s been supportive of negotiations with North Korea, often in the face of evidence that those negotiations have bought us little. Jack Pritchard has a job there, which might normally settle the matter. Author Richard Halloran, however, has...

The Death of an Alliance, Part II

Add the Asian Wall Street Journal and Thomas Barnett (The Pentagon’s New Map) to the list of those who’ve noticed that the United States and South Korea suffer from a visible lack of common interests and policies these days. The ASWJ said friction between Seoul and Washington was particularly intense over the joint North-South Kaesong Industrial Project. In the first stage of the project alone, 300 Korean companies were scheduled to employ 75,000 North Korean laborers and invest US$9.6 billion...

The Death of an Alliance, Part II

Add the Asian Wall Street Journal and Thomas Barnett (The Pentagon’s New Map) to the list of those who’ve noticed that the United States and South Korea suffer from a visible lack of common interests and policies these days. The ASWJ said friction between Seoul and Washington was particularly intense over the joint North-South Kaesong Industrial Project. In the first stage of the project alone, 300 Korean companies were scheduled to employ 75,000 North Korean laborers and invest US$9.6 billion...

The Death of Alliance, Part VI

South Korea is making it official: A high official from the National Security Council, speaking on condition of anonymity, said during a discussion with reporters that, “Korea will break away from its Cold War-era ‘camp’ diplomacy.” By “camp diplomacy,” it appears he was referring to the structure of conflict between the South Korean, U.S. and Japanese “camp” and the North Korean, Chinese and Russian “camp.” . . . . Receiving a report from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday,...

The Death of Alliance, Part VI

South Korea is making it official: A high official from the National Security Council, speaking on condition of anonymity, said during a discussion with reporters that, “Korea will break away from its Cold War-era ‘camp’ diplomacy.” By “camp diplomacy,” it appears he was referring to the structure of conflict between the South Korean, U.S. and Japanese “camp” and the North Korean, Chinese and Russian “camp.” . . . . Receiving a report from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday,...

The Death of Alliance, Part IV

On her return from an eight-day trip to the United States, Park Geun-hye, chairwoman of Grand National Party, told reporters yesterday that relations between South Korea and the United States are far worse than Koreans imagine they are. “I met various politicians,” said Ms. Park. “If the mistrust that prevails among the politicians spreads to the general public of the United States, bilateral ties between the two countries will face greater problems.”Ms. Park had a meeting with U.S. Secretary of...

The Death of Alliance, Part IV

On her return from an eight-day trip to the United States, Park Geun-hye, chairwoman of Grand National Party, told reporters yesterday that relations between South Korea and the United States are far worse than Koreans imagine they are. “I met various politicians,” said Ms. Park. “If the mistrust that prevails among the politicians spreads to the general public of the United States, bilateral ties between the two countries will face greater problems.”Ms. Park had a meeting with U.S. Secretary of...

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...

A Redefined Alliance With South Korea as Necessary as Ever

I can’t resist returning to the Weekly Standard piece I linked here to quote one very interesting passage for special mention.  After calling for a strengthening of our military alliance with Japan, it says: Second, we should redefine our alliance with South Korea. The North’s primary threat to the South is its arsenal of hundreds of artillery systems that could devastate Seoul. Rather than a U.S. presence that still includes ground forces, the primary focus of our military cooperation with...

WSJ: ROK-U.S. FTA to Die a Quiet Death

If the Wall Street Journal says the FTA is now dead, it must be so: Only two months after pressuring Seoul to insert labor and environmental concessions, House Democrats now say they won’t approve the FTA in any case. [WSJ] But if the WSJ says “House Democrats” say it, is it necessarily so? This news reaches us via Brendan Carr, whose post on the subject will do just as well if you’re not a WSJ subscriber. His blog is a...

The Death of An(other) Alliance?

Thank you, Vice Foreign Minister Obvious! North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan reportedly told North Korea specialists in the United States that China is “only trying to use” North Korea. Kim was in the U.S. for talks on normalizing bilateral ties.  [Chosun Ilbo] I take it His Porcine Majesty did not enjoy the buffet at the Chinese Embassy.  Or, more likely, this is just disinformation: China has no great influence on North Korea, he was quoted as saying, adding...

The Death of an Aliance, Part 43: Kim Won-Ung, Nutcase

The problem with identifying the most unhinged politician in South Korea’s ruling Uri party is a lot like trying to identify France’s most offensive armpit: at a certain point, extremity renders empirical comparison pointless. Still, I’m not sure anyone in the Uri party has built a more solid record than ex-GNP’er Kim Won-Ung, the only South Korean parliamentarian to have earned two of his very own “DOA” posts. His latest oral discharge is a ferocious denial that North Korea’s short-range...

The Battle of the Hump, Part 4: The Fiaola Ricefield War

The lastest example of the Washington Post’s awful Korea coverage is certain to leave you less informed than before you read it. Anthony Faiola manages to distort the Battle of Camp Humphreys into a conflict between peaceful, bucolic peasants and Uncle Sam’s evil puppet. Faiola apparently found one of the few local residents in attendance — there are just 70 of them among thousands — a sympathetic-sounding 90 year-old woman. It makes a better story to tell it this way...

The Battle of the Hump, Part 2

They’re ba …. ack! A day after the Defense Ministry forcefully evacuated protesters from an area in Pyeongtaek slated for the relocation of U.S. military installations, about 2,500 activists staged abrupt demonstrations by cutting through the fences built around the site of the future base. About 2,000 protesters from around the nation broke through the police line to seal off the area from outsiders. They marched three hours to join about 500 other protesters who had been scouting in Daechu...

Sick Day Post: Refugee Update; More Bad News for the Alliance; Politics; Are Independent Businessmen Running North Korea’s Counterfeiting Racket?

My advice to everyone who values his health: do not have children. I think I’ve been sick now for a whole month, courtesy of the adorable little biohazards at my son’s preschool. To save time, I put everything into one post (HT to LiNK for most of these). _________________ . We Are (Not) One! Via MSNBC, we have more evidence, if any were needed, that South Korea’s popular enthusiasm for unification doesn’t necessarily extend to the people of North Korea....

Eberstadt: Six-Party Talks “A Charade Masquerading as Diplomacy”

The American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Eberstadt is unimpressed with the latest round of six-party talks with North Korea. After thirteen months of pining for this dead parrot, we returned to the talks to hear an intentionally obtuse new set of North Korean demands–including demands to abrogate our alliance with South Korea (something that we’d more likely do without North Korea getting mixed up in the matter), and to let North Korea keep its reactors for “peaceful” uses. In fact, Eberstadt...