Search Results for: Obama not ready

November 28, 2016

There’s no appeasing North Korea

North Korea has violated or summarily withdrawn from an armistice, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, two IAEA safeguards agreements, an inter-Korean denuclearization agreement, two agreed frameworks, a joint denuclearization statement, the Leap Day agreement, and six U.N. Security Council resolutions — and yet, the most stubborn “engagers” of Pyongyang look on this clear historical record and declare that it calls for yet another piece of paper. Now that calls to negotiate a peace treaty with Pyongyang are metastasizing from the pro-North...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
November 21, 2016

If China is gambling on Trump to blunt N. Korea sanctions, it could lose bigly*

By all outward appearances, President Obama never really had a coherent North Korea policy. While pursuing a deal that Pyongyang either didn’t want or wouldn’t keep, it reacted to each nuclear test by building on John Bolton’s work and nominally tightening the sanctions the U.N. initially imposed a decade ago, in Resolution 1718. The idea, apparently, was to deter Pyongyang by threatening its plans to develop Hamhung and Chongjin, something it no more intends to do than the Confederacy intended...

Categories "United" Nations/China/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
November 17, 2016

As Trump picks his cabinet, Congress flexes its foreign policy muscle

As we continue to watch Trump’s trial balloons float by on the selection of his national security cabinet, we still don’t know much about the foreign policy Donald Trump would have as President. On the other hand, most of Congress’s key players on foreign policy will still be around next year, and some of them have already begun to assert themselves. Committee chairs are (on one hand) pushing Trump to adopt more conventional foreign policy views, while (on the other) threatening...

Categories U.S. Law/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
November 11, 2016

It’s time to help Donald Trump be a good president

Stop laughing, already; it isn’t funny anymore. It’s no secret that I opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy from the beginning to the end. My misgivings about his character, temperament, and qualifications remain. My precocious son, reading this over my shoulder, just asked me how much fallout shelters cost. But the election is over now, and we need to make an important distinction: how a patriotic citizen responds to a candidate, and how he responds to a president-elect. If a citizen believes...

Categories U.S. Politics
November 7, 2016

Treasury finalizes cutoff of N. Korean banks from U.S. financial system

After a long delay, the Treasury Department has issued its final rule prohibiting financial institutions operating in U.S. jurisdiction from providing direct or indirect correspondent account services to North Korean financial institutions. In English, that means North Korean banks are now denied a critical link for accessing the global financial system. North Korea is now one of only three countries to be declared a Primary Money Laundering Concern by the Treasury Department, and is the only country subject to Special Measure...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 31, 2016

Why China and North Korea want Park Geun-hye gone

Nearly all of the news from Korea this week is about the scandal that has paralyzed President Park Geun-hye’s presidency, and may even end it. Going by Alastair Gale’s report in The Wall Street Journal, the scandal has three main elements, along with some other (mostly) unspoken elements. First, Park has said that her “friend, Choi Soon-sil, had helped her prepare speeches early in her presidential term.” She has since apologized for this, although I can’t see why. Most American...

Categories Korean Politics/Subversion
October 26, 2016

Only the end of Kim Jong-un will disarm North Korea

In Washington, one still sometimes hears from the diminishing ranks of North Korea “engagers” calls to give the noxious and incorrigible regime in Pyongyang “security guarantees” in exchange for whatever concession they want to buy from His Porcine Majesty this year – denuclearization in 1994, partial denuclearization in 2000, or a freeze today. The idea behind security guarantees, of course, is to incentivize Pyongyang to do what we want it to do, by offering it the stability we think it...

Categories Regime Change

North Korea Sanctions & Policy Enhancement Act FAQ

What does the NKSPEA do? The North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, or NKSPEA, was signed into law by President Obama in February 2016, after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test. The NKSPEA uses targeted financial and economic sanctions to isolate Kim Jong Un and his top officials from the assets they maintain in foreign banks, and from the hard currency that sustains their rule. These assets are derived in part from illicit activities and proliferation, and are used to...

Understanding North Korea sanctions: An explainer, links & authorities

Introduction: Why I created this page Background Until February of 2016, U.N. sanctions against North Korea were strong on paper but poorly enforced, and U.S. sanctions against North Korea were (contrary to the assumptions of many journalists and academics) comparatively weak — weaker than our sanctions against Belarus and Zimbabwe. Sanctions against North Korea strengthened considerably in 2016 with the passage in February of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and the U.N. Security Council’s approval of Resolution...

October 14, 2016

North Korea, secondary sanctions, tertiary impacts, and the coming death spiral

As I write today, rumors are swirling through the South Korean media of defections and purges involving so many North Korean diplomats, spies, minders, workers, and other officials that I haven’t had the time to either keep up with them or sort out the conflicts in those reports. I’ll try to do that by this time next week, and identify any patterns I see in them. In the meantime, an intriguing story by the Daily NK elucidates how well-targeted sanctions can drive disloyalties and fissures...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 12, 2016

How to close the livelihood loophole in N. Korea sanctions, even without China’s help

It has now been more than a month since North Korea carried out its fifth nuclear test, and the U.N. Security Council has yet to respond by approving a new resolution to strengthen its sanctions. After North Korea’s previous nuclear tests, it took between four and six weeks to overcome Chinese and Russian objections, and the world is growing impatient. As noted yesterday, the U.S. is correctly focused on cutting off North Korea’s sources of hard currency. Judging by the...

Categories China/Sanctions
October 11, 2016

FP: White House “heatedly debating” whether to enforce North Korea sanctions law

Last week, Samantha Power was in Seoul, reassuring our increasingly panicky South Korean allies that the U.S. will use “all the tools in our tool kit” to deny His Porcine Majesty hard currency and WMD materiel, and pressure him to disarm. Meanwhile, a must-read article in Foreign Policy reveals that late in the eleventh hour of his presidency, Barack Obama still hasn’t decided to use “all” the tools after all, particularly the one Congress wants him to use — secondary sanctions...

Categories Sanctions/Washington Views
October 3, 2016

“Negotiate with N. Korea,” they say, as if we haven’t tried that for decades.

In retrospect, it was probably unfortunate that James Person and Jane Harman began their Washington Post op-ed, “The U.S. needs to negotiate with North Korea, with Albert Einstein’s apocryphal definition of insanity. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. To anyone who knows anything about the long history of our negotiations with North Korea, that’s a poor argument, but a terrific punchline, because what Person and Harmon spend the rest of their op-ed...

Categories Fiskings
September 27, 2016

The Chinese banks in the N. Korea money laundering scandal skated. They shouldn’t have.

Yesterday’s indictments of the Dandong Hongxiang defendants, who are charged with willfully violating North Korea sanctions by laundering money for sanctioned Korea Kwangsong Banking Corporation, might have been good enough for 2009. They broke the illusion that China’s well-connected bag-men and bag-women were immune from sanctions. To borrow John Park and Jim Walsh’s expression, they meant that we’d finally begun to go after North Korea, Inc. Unfortunately, this isn’t 2009. We’re now in a desperate race to disarm Kim Jong-un, one...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
September 27, 2016

Treasury sanctions, DOJ indicts Chinese for violating N. Korea sanctions

As of yesterday, and for the first time ever, the U.S. Treasury Department has frozen the assets of Chinese entities for violating North Korea sanctions, and the Justice Department has indicted them for sanctions violations, conspiracy, and money laundering. The company in question is the Liaoning Hongxiang Group of companies, of which Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Company Limited, or DHID, is the largest component. The individuals are Hong Jinhua, Luo Chuanxu, Zhou Jianshu, and Ma Xiaohong, the CEO of the Liaoning...

Categories Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
September 12, 2016

Clinton’s North Korea epiphany: We have always been at (cold) war with China

So desperate are we to avoid a Cold War (or worse) in the Pacific that throughout the Obama years, we’ve pretended that China hasn’t been waging one unilaterally the whole time. Meanwhile, China has seized the South China Sea, bullied our allies with spurious territorial claims, whipped up anti-American rhetoric to persecute human rights activists, and effectively quit enforcing sanctions against North Korea despite signing on for a nominally tough new resolution in March. Evidence, you ask? Start with this...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
September 8, 2016

Dear AFP: May we see your agreements with the North Korean government?

This blog often criticizes the way the media cover North Korea; in fact, it sometimes even criticizes the way the media cover the media who cover North Korea. In the case of Agence France-Presse’s newly opened bureau in Pyongyang, most other media are treating AFP’s low-key opening ceremony as a non-event. It probably is a non-event — except for what it may mean for the decline in journalistic ethics, the corruption of our media, and their transformation into global propaganda...

Categories AFP Watch/AP Watch
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...

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