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Category: Diplomacy

March 11, 2008

Six Two Party Talks: Doubling Down a Bad Bet?

Back on February 23rd, I predicted that we’d see the first signs that the Bush Administration was losing patience with North Korea’s stall tactics. I also predicted that this recognition would amount to little in practice. Things seems to be turning out pretty much as expected. United States Ambassador to South Korea Alexander Vershbow said … there is a ‘sense of impatience building up’ among participants in the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program over the long delay by...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
March 11, 2008

I Have a Bad Feeling ….

The chief U.S. and North Korean nuclear negotiators will meet this week in Geneva to seek a breakthrough in stalled disarmament talks, news reports said Tuesday. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was to meet North Korean Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan during a visit to the Swiss city Thursday and Friday, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported from Washington, citing sources there it did not identify. [AP, via IHT] It’s rumored that Chris Hill will offer the North...
Categories Six-Party Talks
March 10, 2008

The Forked Tongue of Lee Jong-Seok, Part 4

You’ve probably already forgotten him, but the man who once sustained Kim Jong Il’s centrifuge fund the North Korean people with trainloads of cash so recently is now trying to make the transition to scholar and elder statesman. In the course of doing so, he reveals a rather obvious fact -that North Korea’s per capita annual income is fact much lower than the official Bank of Korea estimate, $1,100. The real figure is probably closer to $400, putting North Korea...
Categories Appeasement/Famine & Food Aid
March 10, 2008

Wall Street Journal Video on the N.Y. Phil Visit

The reporter, Evan Ramstad, covers Korea regularly and does a good, balanced report in his narration. Bonus points for anyone who can identify the background music. Update: Keep pedalling! Their plane hasn’t taken off yet! We were feted with multi-course dinners of salmon, crab gratin, lamb and pheasant. Our breakfast buffet was decorated with ice sculptures and included foods meant to cater to American palates. OK, some of it was a little weird, like the banana and tomato sandwich. But...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming
March 8, 2008

Need me to translate that for you?

Top U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill said Thursday it is important for North Korea to submit a full and complete declaration of its nuclear activity as required under a six-party deal by the end of this month.   ”It’s important we’ll get through this declaration in March. There is no drop-dead deadline, but it is important to try to get through this in March because we’re running out of time,” Hill said, referring to the change in the U.S. administration next...
Categories Six-Party Talks
March 8, 2008

Hill: Gas Chambers, Concentration Camps, and Refugee Massacres No Impediment to Full Diplomatic Relations After All

Last February, just after Chris Hill rolled out that  landmark achievement called Agreed Framework 2.0 — how is that working out, by the way? —  he went to Congress to defend  his amorphous  cloud of ether  against some obvious questions about how the North Koreans might interpret it and  what laws the agreement might actually break in its application.  You mentioned certain laws of ours that reflect human rights issues and humanitarian law. I can assure you that any agreement...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Six-Party Talks
March 7, 2008

State Dep’t Airbrushes Its N. Korea Human Rights Report

Back during law school,  I  took the Foreign Service exam, passed on the first try,  and interviewed for a job in the State  Department.   Today, I’d be less ashamed if I’d auditioned for La  Cage Aux Folles, so this isn’t easy for me to admit.  I flew all the way down to Dallas for  the interview phase,  only to come face-to-face with a bunch of pony-tailed hippies in suits.  If there’s one thing I cannot pretend not to despise, it’s...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights
March 6, 2008

We’re screwing up the U.S.-Japanese alliance … but what for?

On the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, Kyoko Nakayama, a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, tries”>tries to keep America’s attention on  an issue the Bush Administration wants you to forget.  If South Korea care about its abductees as much as Japan does about its abductees, a lot more of them  might be free.  Of course, if the United States cared as much about Japan’s abductees as it once pretended to, it would not have done such lasting...
Categories Abductions/Appeasement/Japan
March 6, 2008

Just Seven Months to Go: Kim Jong Il Stalls, We Let Him

All signs point to North Korea viewing last week’s New York Phil concert as a substituting for denuclearization, rather than complimenting it. We are no closer to a North Korea presenting its declaration. To the extent North Korea believes that the Clapton Gambit has shifted our public conversation to superficial gestures, or that stalling will earn more concessions, we’re further from it. Evans Revere’s “16-inch broadside of soft power” impressed Kim Jong Il approximately as much as three inches of...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Russian Far East
March 4, 2008

Nazis Loved Classical Music

OK, I lied.  But Sonagi’s post and the piece she links here inspire further thought. And of course, plenty of us who aren’t Nazis also love classical music.  So when Lorin Maazel says, “in the world of music, all men and women are brothers and sisters,” I wonder if he knew that Auschwitz had an orchestra, too, or why:  The orchestra played at the gate when the work gangs went out, and when they returned. During the final stages of...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming
March 1, 2008

May This Be the Last N.Y. Philharmonic Post

I am really, really tired of blogging about this, but I have two more links that I can’t pass up (thanks to the readers who forwarded them). Both have to do with the N.Y. Philharmonic’s financial backers, and both reflect very different ways of viewing the orchestra’s visit — with and without its moral context. The first story, from long-time Korea hand Don Kirk, is mildly inspiring: During one of the carefully scripted tours of the capital prior to Tuesday’s...
Categories Appeasement/Deprogramming/Korean Society
February 29, 2008

Do Not Resuscitate

You know it’s time for Plan B when even the New York Times deems Plan A comatose. The concert would have had even more significance if it could have celebrated continuing progress toward shuttering North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. That effort unfortunately has stalled, and the fault — at least this time — is undeniably Pyongyang’s. [….] North Korea has said it would produce the accounting, but first it wants Washington to remove it from the list of state sponsors...
Categories Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks
February 28, 2008

Louise Arbour, an Exceptionally Ineffective U.N. Bureaucrat, to Step Down as High Commissioner for Human Rights

I would like to think that on defending human rights, the U.N. may soon become a little less worthless, but we might have said so when Mary Robinson stepped down, too. Recent history isn’t encouraging. You can’t defend something you can’t define. Still, Rep. Ileana-Ros Lehtinen is pleased: (WASHINGTON) ““ The announcement that United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour would not be seeking a second term is “the first step toward saving the broken UN human rights...
Categories "United" Nations/The Camps
February 27, 2008

The Clapton Gambit

Say you’re the beleagured tyrant of a certain Northeast Asian country.  In a moment of financial duress, you signed an agreement in which you agreed to disclose and eventually give up  a nuclear arsenal in which you’ve invested a great deal of money, pride, and prestige.  You know that in a year, there’s an even chance that you might be dealing with the most naive and pliable U.S. President since Jimmy Carter.  You also know that if too many people...
Categories Appeasement
February 23, 2008

Agreed Framework 2.0: The Shelf Life of Happy Talk

There are probably several good reasons I’ve never really enjoyed a musical except while looking at the lovely France Nuyen, who does not sing. If legacy was its object, Agreed Framework 2.0 won’t be a positive contribution to one. President Bush must know this, or he would have mentioned it in his State of the Union speech. Events turned against the agreement during the last quarter of 2007: specifically Syria, uranium, North Korea’s false declaration, and its failure to give...
Categories Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
February 21, 2008

The Morally Retarded Lorin Maazel, Part 2

Lorin Maazel could really use a publicist who understands the concept of “stop digging.” Just when we thought we’d put this flame war behind us, he goes off again, in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page. With time for further reflection and careful editing, here’s how he rephrases his central point: If we are to be effective in bringing succor to the oppressed, many languishing in foreign gulags, the U.S. must claim an authority based on an immaculate ethical record,...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Deprogramming/Human Rights/WTF?
February 20, 2008

Hill Denies Nukes Talks Stalemated, Larry Craig Still Not Gay

One day, I must cease picking on poor Larry Craig. Maybe tomorrow. Though Hill denies the obvious, at least for now, he’s sticking to his guns on the North Korean declaration: But Hill said that is not good enough for the “complete and correct declaration” that was promised at the arms talks. “We cannot pretend that activities don’t exist when we know that the activities have existed,” he said, without giving specifics. [IHT] North Korea also continues to deny any...
Categories Six-Party Talks
February 20, 2008

Updates on the 22 Executed North Koreans

Original post here. – Via the Joongang Ilbo, the South Korean NIS claims that they found oysters in the two boats, and that they notified President-Elect Lee’s transition team of the impending repatriation. (Note that various descriptions of the boats continue to be wildly inconsistent — fishing boats? rubber rafts? powered or unpowered?). – Via the Chosun Ilbo, outraged North Korean refugees are finding their voice, and giving us some factual context: The [Committee for Democratization of North Korea] slammed...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Refugees