Search Results for: Obama not ready

October 12, 2015

The Myth of North Korean Socialism: How Pyongyang’s Profiteers Fooled the World

Over this long weekend, I’ve been reading Brian R. Myers’s new book, “North Korea’s Juche Myth,” a copy of which Prof. Myers was kind enough to send. Myers argues that juche, that cryptic ideology reporters often mention but never explain, is a sham ideology that is both overblown and seldom understood, by foreigners as well as North Koreans. Very roughly translated, juche means that man must be the master of his own destiny (in contrast to North Korea’s reality, in...

Categories Class Warfare/Engagement/Propaganda/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
October 7, 2015

Sens. Gardner, Rubio & Risch to introduce new North Korea sanctions bill (updated)

The new bill was revealed in this column by Josh Rogin, and includes a link to the full text. The bill, which still has no number, will be the Senate’s second version of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, following the introduction by Senators Menendez and Graham of S. 1747 in July. Both bills follow the lead of Ed Royce and Elliot Engel, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who introduced H.R. 757 in January. H.R. 757,...

Categories Anju Links/Sanctions
September 17, 2015

Shoot it down.

As some of you may be aware, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Legally and factually, this has long been a difficult view to defend. Although this week’s threat from Pyongyang to nuke the United States (see coverage in The Washington...

Categories Missiles
September 11, 2015

60 Minutes on the Sony Cyberattack: There is no defense, only deterrence

CBS has published video of a Sixty Minutes segment on North Korea’s 2014 cyberattack on Sony, hosted by correspondent Steve Kroft. View More: Newsmakers News|60 Minutes News|Live News|More News Videos The conspiracy theories of a few pro-Pyongyang gasbags and assorted cranks notwithstanding, the President, the Directors of the FBI and the NSA, and our country’s best technical experts agree that Pyongyang did it. I’m certainly no technical expert myself, but I don’t have to look back from the moon to...

Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
August 31, 2015

Agreed Framework III Watch: Syd Seiler steps down

Yonhap is reporting that Syd Seiler, the State Department’s Special Envoy to the long-defunct six-party denuclearization talks, has stepped down and returned to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The move was unexpected enough that an e-mail from a Yonhap reporter to Seiler bounced back, with an out-of-office message saying that Seiler was “moving on to [his] next assignment.” A diplomatic insider in Washington said, “The departure of one of the most trustworthy experts on North Korea...

Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
August 12, 2015

Mr. President, You’re no Jack Kennedy: The Coming Korean Missile Crisis

In October 1962, the United States almost went to war with the Soviet Union over Khrushchev’s deployment of nuclear capable missiles to Cuba. The Cuban crisis has been in my thoughts recently because of how it compares to the Korean nuclear crisis as it is today, and how it will be in January 2017. While most attention is on Iran, the consensus is quietly shifting to the view that North Korea is at the verge of nuclear breakout. Furthermore, President Obama...

Categories Kim Jong Un/WMD
August 11, 2015

North Korean Men Cross DMZ (and plant land mines)

By now, you’ve read that South Korea’s government has accused the North Korean military of sending soldiers across the DMZ to plant mines near South Korean guard posts, an act that blew the legs off two South Korean soldiers last week. The two South Koreans, both staff sergeants, triggered the mines last Tuesday just outside their post, within the South Korean half of the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer separating the two Korean armies. One lost both legs in the...

Categories Appeasement/Kaesong/Korean War II/North-South/Propaganda/ROK Military/Sunshine/Useful Idiocy
July 24, 2015

Treasury designates Singaporean shipping company for N. Korea weapons trade, but what about the Bank of China?

More than two years after the North Korean merchant vessel Chong Chon Gang was caught trying to sneak a shipment of Cuban MiGs and missiles through the Panama canal hidden under 200,000 sacks of sugar, the Treasury Department has, slowly and slightly, expanded its sanctions against the shipping companies involved in the incident. Yesterday afternoon, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Singapore-based Senat Shipping and its Director, Leonard Lai a/k/a Yong Chian Lai, a Singaporean national. It also blocked...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 20, 2015

The courage of Hyeonseo Lee: “I am human also. I am scared.”

Last Wednesday, Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation hosted and moderated an event called “Confronting the Human Rights Challenge in North Korea.” Hyeonseo Lee, author of “The Girl With Seven Names,” was the keynote speaker. Lee spoke in accented, but clear English of the indoctrination she received as a child, of the revelations that broke the hold of the state’s propaganda over her, of her flight from North Korea, and of her resettlement in South Korea. (Later, we learn that Lee also speaks fluent Chinese;...

Categories Deprogramming/Refugees/Terrorism (NK)
July 16, 2015

Does the Iran deal make a North Korea deal more likely? Here are six reasons why it doesn’t.

The Korean press today is filled with analysis of how the Iran deal could affect North Korea policy. China, which has long sought what would amount to de facto recognition of North Korea as a nuclear state, thinks the Iran deal is a swell model for a deal with North Korea, which almost certainly means that China sees the Iran deal as a capitulation. State itself is saying it’s ready for “authentic, credible” negotiations with Pyongyang, although State’s operational definitions...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
July 9, 2015

The summer of their discontent: Is Kim Jong Un losing the elite classes?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a spate of reports about defections from North Korea. Broadly, this is nothing new. The defection, for example, of three crew members of a fishing vessel is life-changing for three men, but is no more likely to rend the fabric of Kim Jong-Un’s regime than 27,000 other defections, almost all of them of people the regime had written off as expendable.  Recently, however, we’ve seen multiple reports suggesting something very different, and vastly more consequential...

Categories Defectors/Kim Jong Il/Kremlinology
July 6, 2015

EU blocking of Korea National Insurance Corp. hints at key shift in N. Korea sanctions enforcement

The European Union’s administrative body, the European Commission or EC, has added seven additional designations to its regulation on “restrictive measures” against North Korea. The new designees include the Korea National Insurance Corporation, or KNIC, and six of its officials. There are several good reasons why the EC could have designated KNIC, but didn’t (the reason it did use is more interesting, but we’ll get to that later). First, KNIC has been linked to Pyongyang’s luxury goods imports, which have been banned since...

Categories Europe/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
June 8, 2015

Guerrilla Engagement: A strategy for regime replacement and reconstruction in North Korea

~ 1 ~ One day, either this President or the next one will awaken to the realization that the regime in Pyongyang is collapsing, and that he has just inherited the costliest, messiest, and riskiest nation-building project since the Marshall Plan. The collapse of North Korea will present South Korea – and by extension, its principal treaty ally, the United States – with a nation-building challenge unlike any in recent history. After all, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria all had some...

Categories Capitalism/Reconstruction/Regime Change/Resistance/Subversion
May 28, 2015

U.S., allies talk sanctions and human rights (emphasis on talk)

We’d hardly had time to digest all those rumors of “exploratory talks” with North Korea just two weeks ago, before John Kerry was in Seoul, sounding like his speechwriters had slipped him some cut-and-pasted OFK text. There, Kerry denounced Pyongyang’s “recent provocations,” said it wasn’t “even close to” ready for serious about talks, and accused it of “flagrant disregard for international law while denying its people fundamental freedom and rights.” “The world is hearing increasingly more and more stories of grotesque, grisly,...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks
May 22, 2015

“Arsenal of Terror,” 2d ed.: N. Korea paid dope dealers $40K to kill Hwang Jang Yop

South Korean prosecutors have indicted three South Korean nationals, identified only by the surnames “Bang,” “Kim,” and “Hwang,” for “bringing in methamphetamine from North Korea and attempting to assassinate” Hwang Jang-Yop, North Korea’s highest-ranking defector until his death in 2010. Let’s unpack these two criminal conspiracies one at a time, starting with the meth: The 69-year-old, identified only by his family name Bang, and two others have been detained for producing 70 kilograms of methamphetamine at a North Korean factory...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Terrorism (NK)
May 18, 2015

GAO: State Dep’t must step up diplomacy to enforce N. Korea sanctions

The General Accountability Office has released a new report on the enforcement of sanctions against North Korea. The report, requested by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, will probably influence the contours of the Senate’s version of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act. You can read the full report here and a summary here, and listen to a podcast here. The report correctly points to a key flaw in the enforcement of the sanctions that exist now — a lack of financial intelligence....

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions/U.S. Law
May 11, 2015

Why a freeze deal with North Korea is a lose-lose proposition

Two weeks ago, almost no one thought we’d see Agreed Framework 3.0 before January 2017. The Obama Administration is politically weakened and out of time, its foreign policy is even less popular than its domestic policy, and it will need all of its energy to finalize an Iran deal acceptable to this Congress. Top administration officials were publicly skeptical about comparisons between North Korea and Iran, and saying that North Korea wasn’t serious about denuclearization. Last week, however, clear signs emerged that the administration is grasping...

Categories Anju Links
May 11, 2015

On progressive diplomacy: Friends first, frenemies second, enemies last

Aside from the vanishingly small chance of Agreed Framework III, the foundation of our North Korea policy, as set forth in a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions, is multilateral economic pressure. That means that all hope of success rests on building multilateral unity before we negotiate with Pyongyang. Every time Seoul, Tokyo, or Washington is taken in by Pyongyang’s divide-and-rule tactics, there is a piecemeal relaxation of pressure by one or two of them, at the expense of one or two others....

Categories "United" Nations/Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks