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Category: Diplomacy

January 23, 2008

Classless Condi

[Update:   Miss that warm, moist pungence rising around your ankles?  Here’s your fix for that: “I’m going to have a great deal more to say about elevating the issue of human rights in North Korea, which is clearly a priority for the president and Congress,” he said.  [N.Y. Times, Helene Cooper] Exactly how stupid do these people  think we are?  Condi Rice has scarcely uttered a word about this in four years, has prevented anyone else but the marginalized...
Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights/Washington Views
January 22, 2008

Plan B: How to Disarm Kim Jong Il Without Bombing Him

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.    — Albert Einstein Plan A, gentle diplomacy,  has  again  failed to disarm Kim Jong Il.  Whenever this happens (every time it’s tried) advocates of doing the same thing over and over again fall back on The False Choice, whether expressly or by implication:  it’s  their way or war.  They know better, of course, which technically makes this a lie.   And usually, this lie  stands uncorrected: “People...
Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Six-Party Talks
January 19, 2008

Good Riddance, Ministry of Silly Talks

After weeks of conflicting reports, Lee Myung Bak’s transition team had made it official:  the UniFiction  Ministry goes to the ash-heap, along with  the Ministries  of Truth Information and Communication, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Science and Technology, and the Anti-Sex League Gender Equality and Family.  The  Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade will become a much larger  and more powerful  Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Unification.  As a whole, the government will shrink by more than 5%, about 7,000 employees....
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
January 19, 2008

Good Riddance, Nick Burns

Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s number three diplomat and the man  whom  a reliable  source told me was the one  who blocked  implementation of the North Korean  Human Rights Act,  will step down for “personal reasons.”  Alas, the reasons are not known to include painful bleeding hemorrhoids, and so I must go on doubting  God’s existence.  Burns’s legacy will include such notable accomplishments as  Iran’s nuclear bomb.  His replacement is the eponymous William Burns  (no relation) who has enjoyed such...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Washington Views
January 13, 2008

State Dep’t Denies Groundhog Sighting

The only thing worse than shifting deadlines is no deadlines:  The United States on Friday again denied setting a new target date for North Korea to give a full accounting of its nuclear programs that would replace a missed year-end deadline.   ”We are continuing to work towards the end of getting a declaration in, but there has been no new deadline set by the United States, by the North Koreans or by any other party in the six-party talks,” State...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
January 12, 2008

South Korea to push U.N. for return of its POW’s

President-Elect Lee Myung Bak’s transition team  is speaking more about its plans to finally bring home about 560 prisoners of war  it believes North Korea is still holding, in violation of the 1953 Armistice agreement.  South Korea may seek help from the international community in pressing North Korea to return South Korean prisoners of war, the Defense Ministry said Saturday.   North Korea has so far balked at South Korean requests to return POWs, saying it has never held any South...
Categories "United" Nations/Abductions/Korean War
January 11, 2008

Did Chris Hill lie about North Korea’s declaration?

In the last episode of  our drama, Chris thought he had convinced Kim to out himself in time for  the New Year’s ball, only to have Kim say that he’d said enough when Chris visited his place last November.   At moments like this one, when this blog begins to sound like the screenplay for a gay soap opera, I  understand  why The Lost  Nomad  went fishing. Several days ago, I believe I  caught  U.S. nucyular  negotiator Christopher Hill in a...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
January 10, 2008

Groundhog Day in Pyongyang

Now that we’ve asked North Korea to tell us about its nuclear programs, and now that North Korea has answered by telling us to perform prostate exams on ourselves, I suppose it’s best if we at least pretend to do otherwise. Not that the pretense is a convincing one. When Chris Hill tells us to react “with patience and perseverance,”  understand that translating this into the North Korean dialect yields something that also means, “How about never? Is never good...
Categories Diplomacy/Six-Party Talks
January 9, 2008

Honor, Delayed

President-Elect Lee Myung Bak will finally  honor six South Korean sailors killed in a North Korean attack on their patrol boat on  June 29, 2002.  The sailors’ surviving family members were embittered, believing that their government and outgoing  President Roh Moo Hyun had  snubbed  them to appease Kim Jong Il.  One young widow  even left South Korea for good: Kim Jong-seon, the widow of Petty Officer Han Sang-guk […]  turned her back on her homeland Sunday and boarded a flight...
Categories Appeasement/ROK Military
January 8, 2008

The Restoration

No one should take pleasure in seeing another person worry about  losing his job, but there  is much to celebrate about how Lee Myung-Bak’s new administration is shaping up.  Some doubt is now cast on earlier reports that  the UniFiction Ministry would be abolished, although it’s clear that  its size and influence will be reduced  dramatically.  Its days as a foreign policy player are over,  and the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) will regain its foreign policy...
Categories An Alliance?/Appeasement/U.S. & Korea
January 7, 2008

North Korea’s Moment of Untruth, and Chris Hill’s

Secretary Rice, embrace your legacy.  Agreed Framework 2.0  has  stalled, and probably for good.    Last month,  we  thought we were approaching North Korea’s moment of truth.  Last week, with the  matter of that overdue  declaration,  it was still possible (though gullible)  to  believe they’d still  offer it in due course.  Certainly that was the impression the White House was feeding us when it said on January 3rd that it was “going to keep hammering away” at getting the declaration...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 3, 2008

UniFiction Ministry to be abolished?

[Update:   The Marmot  is giddy about this.]   Had George Orwell lived in modern-day Korea, reality would have  mooted his most sardonic fiction.  After all, a  lying Ministry of Truth  is only marginally sillier than  a Ministry of Unification whose primary function is  keeping the slaves on the other side of the mine fields through the lavish financing of their overseers.  Today comes word that president-elect Lee Myung-Bak may put an end to this cruel joke by abolishing the...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics
January 2, 2008

Condi Going to Pyongyang?

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, citing a report from NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, reports that Secretary Rice intends to accompany the New York Philharmonic to Pyongyang this February.  I’m agnostic on the visit of the orchestra, but  a visit  from America’s senior diplomat will rightly be interpreted as an expression of American approval. This begs a question:  approval of what, exactly?  North Korea is ignoring its obligations under Agreed Framework 2.0, is still  lying about the full extent of its...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
January 2, 2008

U-Tubed! (Part. 3)

Washington has long suspected North Korea of having a program to make highly enriched uranium (HEU) since shortly after it agreed to denuclearize in the first Agreed Framework.  North Korea  denied this at first, admitted it to two U.S. diplomats and three translators in 2002, and  then went  back to denying it.    Those denials  just got even less likely. As I previously noted here,  the U.S. asked for, and North Korea recently provided, samples of aluminum tubes we know it...
Categories Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
January 1, 2008

2007: A Lost Year

[Update 2 Jan 08:   “North Korea failed to fulfill its October promise to declare all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007 — and the United States did not make a big deal out of it.” — WaPo, Blaine Harden] SO ENDS THE YEAR 2007, with this terse statement from the State Department spokesman: In September 2005, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea agreed on a Joint Statement with North Korea that charted the way...
Categories Appeasement/Proliferation/Six-Party Talks
December 30, 2007

Ralph Cossa is wrong; Pressure on North Korea worked, when applied

Generally, I agree with  Robert Koehler  that Lee Myung Bak’s landslide victory was anything but a mandate for a better, more moral North Korea policy.  It will put  less irrational people in charge, but the policy will not be the improvement that Nicholas Eberstadt hopes for unless Kim Jong Il gets seriously on the wrong side of  Lee Myung-Bak’s temper. Why?   First, the election was all about money.  Second, Lee Myung Bak is all about money.  Third, South Korean voters  …...
Categories Appeasement/Korean Politics/Money Laundering
December 30, 2007

Jay who? Christopher Hitchens, President Bush, and the betrayal of the North Korean people

Christopher Hitchens is certainly one of our age’s most compelling thinkers and one of the English language’s best writers. I disagree with him about plenty of things; who could say otherwise? Hitchens’s greatest logical strength is his consistent argument for the moral superiority of freedom — for all of its flaws of application — over slavery. That is a woefully unfashionable idea among popinjays in Europe and America who are too sodden with the smug confidence of liberties taken for...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/U.S. Politics
December 26, 2007

Two more North Korean refugees coming to U.S.

Two North Korean defectors are in the U.S. with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.The UNHCR’s Beijing office says a man in his 20s and a woman in her 30s have been under UN protection since July last year and were granted approval for asylum in the U.S. by Beijing and Washington. [Chosun Ilbo] The report marks only the second known occasion of the UNHCR performing its assigned mission on behalf of North Korean refugees, and...
Categories "United" Nations/Refugees