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Category: South Korea

April 24, 2018

Will the real Im Jong-seok please speak up?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, AS IF TO ANSWER THE QUESTION I RAISED in the final paragraph of yesterday’s post, reports on the background of South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, or rather, some of it. It’s an unsatisfying report by first-rate reporters that reads as if it has been edited too heavily by lawyers. Its most glaring omissions are the word “Chondaehyop,” what it did, or when Im led it. Specifically, it fails to answer the questions that I’ve been...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
November 8, 2017

Trump’s speech in Seoul was the best thing he’s done. In his entire life.

Just over nine months into his presidency, Donald Trump is best known for two qualities: doing terrible things, and doing things terribly. Inevitably, he and his party are starting to pay the political price for that. But this is not a blog about Obamacare, The Wall, Richard Spencer, Twitter fights with the grieving parents of dead heroes, or the Russia investigation. There are other blogs for those subjects. This is a blog about North Korea, which leads to my paradox....
Categories Human Rights/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
November 7, 2017

The Moonshine Policy failed because Kim Jong-un demands surrender, not engagement

Just before Air Force One took off for Tokyo, the New York Times printed a story by Choe Sang-hun, mourning for Moon Jae-in’s failure to revive the Sunshine Policy, wallowing in self-pitying nationalism, and pinning most of the blame for this on Donald Trump ” not Moon, for failing to read the U.N. Security Council resolutions before promising initiatives that would violate them, not Korean voters who don’t trust Pyongyang and don’t want a revival of the Sunshine Policy. Choe...
Categories An Alliance?/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
September 14, 2017

South Koreans like Moon Jae-in personally, but are uneasy with his North Korea policies

If Moon Jae-in and his inner circle are, in the pits of their souls, as extreme as I think they are, why hasn’t Moon moved forward with his plans to reopen Kaesong, or Kaesongograd? Probably because he can read a poll, such as this one from the center-left Korea Herald: A recent poll by Gallup Korea, conducted from Sept. 5, after the Sept. 3 nuclear weapons test by the North, shows a clear sign of hardening attitudes among South Koreans....
Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/Korean Society
September 11, 2017

Moon Jae-in, Putin & Kaesong 2.0: Why the state of the U.S.-Korea alliance is not strong

Of the many reasons why the U.S. and South Korea failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, one of the most important is that, despite their nominal alliance, Washington and Seoul have been fundamentally misaligned on North Korea policy since Bill Clinton and Kim Young-Sam led their respective nations. The most important of these differences was their mutually canceling economic policies toward Pyongyang. As the U.S. moved (however slowly and haltingly) toward isolating Pyongyang economically to slow and...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/U.S. & Korea
July 10, 2017

Why Moon Jae-In can’t make the sun shine again

Given the background of Moon Jae-In and some of his closest confidants, the question that has nagged at me is whether Moon is (1) a closet hard-left ideologue who has managed to let everyone around him say and do the extreme things he avoids saying and doing himself; (2) just another oleaginous opportunist who paddled his canoe to the swifter currents on the left side of the stream; or (3) a hopelessly naive squish who thinks he can simultaneously charm,...
Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/North-South/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
July 3, 2017

The Moon-Trump Summit: Catastrophe averted, for now

Korea-watchers are relieved that the uniquely volatile combination of Moon Jae-In and Donald Trump did not cause a catastrophe at last week’s summit. If avoiding catastrophe was the objective, then mission accomplished, for now. But if the objective was to build trust between the two governments or resolve the thorniest issues between them, the two governments achieved little. They tabled the issue of THAAD and already have an emerging split on free-trade renegotiations. Difficult USFK cost-sharing talks lie ahead. On...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
June 22, 2017

Moon Chung-In’s visit was a fiasco. Moon Jae-In’s summit with Trump might be the next one.

Next week, South Korean President Moon Jae-In will arrive in Washington for his first meeting with President Trump. North Korea policy is certain to be at the top of their agenda. Months ago, I predicted that the combination of Moon Jae-In and Donald Trump would be a uniquely volatile one, and all the indications so far are bearing this prediction out. Volumes of august and cerebral analysis may soon be nullified by 140 characters. This is partially (but only partially) due to differences...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
May 15, 2017

We should be very worried about Moon Jae-in (updated)

Is South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, forming a cabinet or a politburo? As I’ve written here, there has long been good reason to be worried. Moon has a long association with Minbyun, the hard-left lawyers’ group that is acting as Pyongyang’s law firm in South Korea by using the courts to wage lawfare against refugees, in violation of their human rights. He was chairman of the campaign of Roh Moo-hyun, the “anti-American” and “a little crazy” president who rode to power on...
Categories Anti-Americanism/The Fifth Column
May 12, 2017

North Korea policy in the South Korean election: what (little) the data tell us

What exit polling data I do have come to us from the Asan Institute. And while Asan’s analysis contains much interesting information that political types would call “internals,” it doesn’t tell us all that much about voters’ attitudes about North Korea policy. The first thing it tells us is that North Korea didn’t really weigh much on the minds of voters at all, compared to economic issues. I wonder whether you’d see more concern among Americans about the North Korean threat if...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/South Korea/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
May 10, 2017

No, Moon Jae-In’s election probably doesn’t mean Sunshine 2.0

I’ll have to keep this post short because of time constraints, but my interest in South Korea’s election is mostly related to how Seoul’s policies toward North Korea will shift. I’ll refer you to this post and this one on why it’s likely to change less than John Delury might like, this piece in NK News where I offer some thoughts, and this excellent post by Marcus Noland and Kent Boydston. Much will depend on how hard President Trump pushes...
Categories Kaesong/Korean Politics/Sunshine
April 26, 2017

How Moon Jae-in rode a wave of violent anti-Americanism from obscurity to power

Like Roh Moo-hyun, the President he served, Moon Jae-in’s ideological origins are found within the leftist lawyers’ group Minbyun (which has since become Pyongyang’s instrument for intimidating North Korean refugees in the South). As lawyers defending left-wing radicals and pro-democracy activists alike against the right-wing dictatorship, Moon and Roh became close friends and law partners in Pusan. Moon went on to become the legal advisor to the Pusan branch of the Korea Teachers’ and Educational Workers’ Union, a radicalized union that...
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/U.S. & Korea
April 21, 2017

Moon Jae-in lied, people died

We now revisit the curious case of a leader inside South Korea’s Blue House who sought and followed the counsel of a cult leader with no official position in the South Korean government and (let us hope!) no security clearance, regarding a highly sensitive question of government policy. By which I refer, of course, to Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-il (who else were you thinking of?). To refresh your memory: Just before the Park Geun-hye scandal buried every other news story...
Categories Korean Politics/Sunshine
March 8, 2017

China is waging economic war against S. Korea. We must stand by our ally.

Less than two years ago, I wrote of the coming Korea missile crisis. That crisis has now arrived. As I’ve documented at this site, that crisis is, in large part, a crisis of China’s making. North Korean missiles are made in part from Chinese technology, in large part from components purchased in or smuggled through China, and that are almost always procured by North Korean agents who operate more-or-less openly on Chinese soil. North Korea’s missiles ride on Chinese trucks....
Categories An Alliance?/China/China & Korea/Japan & Korea
February 23, 2017

Must read: Brian Myers on what North Korea really wants (hint: it’s South Korea)

Over the years, the soft-liners’ explanations for why Pyongyang sacrificed billions of dollars and millions of lives to build a nuclear program have shifted. First, they said it just wanted the electricity. Then, they said it wanted a bargaining chip to trade away for better relations with us. Now, they say it just wants to protect itself from us. Unlike them, Brian Myers has listened to what Pyongyang has been telling its own subjects — it wants reunification, on its own terms. North...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Korean War II
February 10, 2017

Eight reasons why reopening Kaesong could be a deal-breaker for the U.S.-Korea alliance

More and more, I am hearing that Moon Jae-in, the left-wing front-runner in the South Korean presidential election, is talking about reopening and expanding the Kaesong Industrial Complex. It’s apparent that Mr. Moon and his supporters haven’t thought through the potential legal and diplomatic consequences of that. Perhaps this post will help concentrate some minds by telling Koreans, in frank terms, what most people in Washington really think about that idea. 1. Kaesong violates U.N. sanctions. I heard somewhere that...
Categories An Alliance?/Kaesong/Sunshine
December 15, 2016

What’s that? You want the Sunshine Policy back? Good luck with that.

If Nate Silver is feeling humble these days, just let him try to predict who wins the next election in South Korea. In the 12 months between now and the time South Korea elects its next president, the ruling Saenuri party will probably break up. God willing, new candidates will emerge to supplant the dismal fare it has served until now. Divisions between the pro- and anti-Park Geun-hye factions may or may not heal. Ban Ki-moon may or may not...
Categories Kaesong/Korean Politics/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
December 9, 2016

South Korea does not trust Trump. America would not trust Moon Jae-in.

After Donald Trump’s election, many South Koreans experienced shock and abandonment issues about their alliance with America. It would not be necessary for our man in Seoul — whose face was recently slashed by an anti-American fanatic — to reassure Koreans about the strength of the alliance if most people felt certain about its strength. Trump’s post-election call with President Park seems to have calmed Koreans’ fears, after which they returned their energy to finding the most anarchic formula possible for holding...
Categories An Alliance?/Korean Politics/U.S. Politics