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Category: Diplomacy

October 28, 2008

While America Drifts, Japan and S. Korea Stand Firm

Does it ever seem that U.S. policy toward North Korea is intentionally designed to clash with those of Japan and South Korea?  No matter how necessary a coordinated approach may be to the success of any policy, and even when Japan and Korea are newly aligned toward the same strategy we’d been pursuing until February 2007, our State Department seems to delight in creating diplomatic chaos at the first sign that order might break out.  Ironically, it’s now America that...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 24, 2008

I’ll Give You a Topic: The Verification Protocol is Neither. Discuss.

It’s hardly worth discussing anyway; after all, with North Korea, there’s little point in expecting what’s agreed today to stay agreed tomorrow. We’ve already abandoned the goal of disarmament, there is always another demand, it is always followed by another concession, and someone always wants us to think that this time, it’s really the last one. Still, the State Department justifies its de-listing of North Korea as a terror sponsor by claiming that it has reached a verification protocol with...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 19, 2008

What Removing North Korea from the Terror List Means

If tomorrow’s Big Announcement from North Korea isn’t that the Great Leader has gone to the Great Meat Locker, it may well be that the North, having met with  such stunning  success at blackmailing the United States,  will throw some new tantrum at South Korea.  I would not credit the North with diplomatic genius for its success at isolating and blackmailing its enemies one at a time.  The trick isn’t new.  It seems more fair to credit us for the...
Categories Appeasement/Asia/Diplomacy/Geopolitics/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Politics
October 10, 2008

Rumor: Bush will de-list N. Korea as a terror sponsor today.

I heard the rumor yesterday afternoon, but now I see the AP is reporting it.  According to the Financial Times, the only thing holding up the announcement is notifying / strong-arming the Japanese, and perhaps the South Koreans.  You can see Condi and her mouthpiece not answer questions about this below the fold, if you’re interested. There’s nothing quite like giving right in to extortion.  Somewhere on the troposphere of Kim Jong Il’s clot-riddled, misshapen, hideously coiffed cranium, a drooly...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 9, 2008

S. Korean JCS Chair: N. Korea Building Lighter Nuclear Warheads for Missiles

You  might have thought  that an agreement whose nominal objective is nuclear disarmament ought to be reasonably clear about dismantling, disabling, or dissing those arms in some specific way.  If so, you thought wrong, and here are the consequences of that.  In fact, Chris Hill’s February 2007  disarmament deal was intentionally vague about North Korea’s existing nuclear arsenal.  Until this summer, State had insisted that the North’s nuclear weapons  were covered by the phrase “all nuclear programs,” although North Korea’s...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/NK Military/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks/U.S. & Korea/WMD
October 8, 2008

Did They or Didn’t They? (Pt. 2)

You’d think that if Chris Hill and the North Koreans had made up, the North Koreans wouldn’t be launching missiles again.  The new launches appear to have been short-range missiles launched from the island naval base at Cho-Do, which you can see in full Google Earth color here.  One thing this illustrates is why North Korea always seeks to narrow the focus of talks:  while they sell temporary concessions on plutonium, they pursue a uranium program at full speed; then,...
Categories Anju Links/Appeasement/Diplomacy/NK Military/Six-Party Talks
October 7, 2008

How Many Divisions Does Ban Ki Moon Have?

Since October 2006, U.N. Security Council resolution 1718 has prohibited North Korea from trafficking in  major weapons systems or WMD techonology.  So sit down for this one: “The Middle East remans on the receiving end of the DPRK’s reckless activities,” Israeli delegate David Danieli told the meeting, referring to North Korea by its acronym. “At least half a dozen countries in the region … have become eager recipients” of the North’s black market supplies of conventional arms or nuclear technology,...
Categories "United" Nations/NK Military/Proliferation
October 7, 2008

Did They or Didn’t They?

I took a few days off from blogging and figured by today I’d know if Chris Hill had succeeded in giving away the store to the North Koreans, but the reporting today is ambiguous.    The New York Times says that Hill left Pyongyang with the main “issues unresolved” but quotes or cites no  hard authority  to substantiate this.   The Chosun Ilbo quotes “observers” who  see “signs” that Hill’s visit  “produced some results,” and also quotes or cites no hard authority to...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
October 3, 2008

If only America was watching ….

Or, to put it another way, if the media had reported other aspects of George W. Bush’s presidency the way they’ve mischaracterized his failed North Korea deal as a “rare triumph of diplomacy,” or so says the cliche-o-meter, Bush would probably have a 60% approval rating right now.* The Weekly Standard blog also digs at Chris Hill’s “choreography” and links to Mike Chinoy’s unintentionally damning description of just how chummy Hill has become with the Heydrichs and Eichmanns of Pyongyang...
Categories Appeasement/Regime Change/Six-Party Talks
October 1, 2008

CHRNK Updates “Failure to Protect”

Recall that I characterized the original report as “the ultimate must-read” on human rights in North Korea.  The report was “sponsored” by Vaclav Havel, Kjell Magne Bondevik, and Elie Wiesel, but actually written by the law firm DLA Piper, in close cooperation with scholars from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.  The original 2006 report called for the U.N. to impose Chapter VII sanctions if the regime did not progress toward ending the mass murder and starvation of...
Categories "United" Nations/Activism/Human Rights
September 29, 2008

Chris Hill prepares to sell us out one last time

[Update:   I guessed right.  Have a barf bag ready for this one, particularly when you get to the part where David Albright says that our proposed verification plan would have infringed on North Korea’s “sovereignty.” Remember Albright?   He’s the guy who was accusing the Bush Administration of trumping up charges that the North Koreans were enriching uranium … until we found enriched uranium all over the same documents and aluminum samples North Korea submitted, in part, to prove...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
September 22, 2008

Grim Vindication: Predictably, Appeasement Fails to Disarm North Korea … Again

[Update:   Now they’re asking the IAEA to remove the seals and cameras.  More here.] There are some who can look back on decades of failure and learn nothing, while some of us looked into the future two years ago and foresaw everything.  One Agreed Framework should have been enough for any observer possessed of an average ration of common sense.  Crediting myself with that much, in March of 2007, I wrote a post in the form of news reports...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
September 17, 2008

Ho Hum, North Korea Violates 2 More U.N. Resolutions, World Yawns

Remember that fancy new North Korean missile test site that was in the news the other day?  North Korea has reportedly conducted an engine ignition test for a long-range missile, presumably the Taepodong-2 missile with a range of 6,700 km, at a new long-range missile test site under construction in Dongchang-li, North Pyongan Province. For the test, the rocket engine of a missile is laid out horizontally at the test site and ignited to test its performance. The test confirms...
Categories "United" Nations/Proliferation/WMD
September 7, 2008

Hill: We Would De-List N. Korea Even Before Verification

Why, all we need is one more set of promises: THE United States will take North Korea off its terrorism list “immediately” if it can agree on a way to verify its nuclear facilities, America’s top nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said today. The renewed pledge followed a flurry of meetings here after North Korea said it had stopped dismantling its Yongbyon nuclear reactor and started taking equipment back to the site. “I want to stress that we’re not looking to...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
August 30, 2008

Suckers ….

THE FULL TEXT OF KCNA’S PENULTIMATE TANTRUM is at the link after this money quote: The U.S., however, raised all of a sudden an issue of applying an “international standard” to the verification of the nuclear declaration, abusing this agreed point. It pressurized the DPRK to accept such inspection as scouring any place of the DPRK as it pleases to collect samples and measure them. The “international standard” touted by the U.S. is nothing but “special inspection” which the IAEA...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
August 26, 2008

Chris Hill Resignation Watch: N. Korea Halts Disablement, Balks at Verification, Accounting for Abductees

You had to know that verification was where this thing was destined to fall apart.  And that certainly looks like what’s happening today. North Korea said Tuesday it has suspended work to disable its nuclear reactor in anger over Washington’s failure to remove it from the U.S. list of terror sponsors. The North said it will soon consider a step to restore the plutonium-producing facility.  The announcement poses the biggest hurdle yet to the communist nation’s denuclearization process under a...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Uncategorized
August 24, 2008

Joe Biden and North Korea Policy (Updated)

“The biggest threat to the US is, right now, North Korea.”  — Joe Biden, South Carolina Primary Democratic Debate, 2007 “I’m not the guy.”  — Joe Biden, Aug. 19, 2008 The Bigger Picture   It is notable that today I find rare probative value in what Kos says.  His first reaction was  far from  enthusiastic,  and that’s  still way more favorable than, “It’s clear his career has dragged on one election cycle too many.”  One Talk Left blogger says, “The...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/U.S. Military
August 22, 2008

Leon Sigal: Never mind that reactor in Syria

If you read enough obscure publications about North Korea and our policies toward it, you’ll eventually run across something by Leon V. Sigal, who is the Director of something called the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project  (note the word “hegemony” in its url.)   A reader forwards me this piece by Sigal published on  Napsnet, a publication  of the Nautilus Institute, which was also published in the Japan Focus. Sigal’s piece is entitled,  “How A Mock Trial Could Turn Victory...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks