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Category: U.S. & Korea

August 24, 2018

Why the domestic troubles of Trump & Moon are grave news for Koreans

POLITICIANS DO THEIR WORST DIPLOMACY WHEN THEY’RE WEAK AT HOME. SCANDAL TEMPTS THEM TO SEEK GLORY ABROAD. The hyenas of the world’s ecosystem see them limp and decide to prey on them, or on the calves they can’t protect. Of Mr. Trump’s troubles, you already know plenty that I need not repeat here. Whatever your view of those troubles, they aren’t going away, and if you correctly acknowledge their political element, they’re apt to be more serious next January. The...
Categories America/An Alliance?/Korean War II/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
August 22, 2018

If the deal-maker didn’t make a deal & the peace-maker didn’t make peace, could Twitter be wrong?

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually believe that Agreed Framework III proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. It often seems that everyone on Twitter but me belongs to one of these tribes, which despite...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Korean War II/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
August 21, 2018

A new report says South Korea spends more to influence Washington than Israel, China & Saudi Arabia combined

IN WASHINGTON, THERE IS GROWING UNEASE ABOUT how far and how fast South Korea’s anti-anti-North Korean President, Moon Jae-in, is moving to undermine the pressure of U.S. and U.N. sanctions before Pyongyang takes meaningful steps to disarm. The unease is greatest in Congress, where there is also unease that both Moon and Trump have done so much to legitimize a tyrant who would, in a more just world, be hauled before a tribunal and sentenced to spend the remainder of...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
May 8, 2018

Moon Chung-in throws U.S. Forces Korea out the Overton Window (Update: & so does Trump)

A PATTERN WE’VE SEEN REPEATED OVER THE LAST YEAR goes roughly as follows: First, Moon Chung-in, the left-wing South Korean President’s crazy old uncle1 shouts something wacky from his attic when the Americans are within earshot. The Americans wince and pretend they didn’t hear. President Moon Jae-in and his cabinet walk the wacky remark back and gently hush the crazy old uncle. But once Moon Chung-in has defenestrated the wacky idea out of his attic’s Overton Window, the hard-left base loots...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Military
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 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 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
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
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
November 16, 2016

Trump & Korea Policy: We Now Enter the Bargaining Stage

If South Korea’s most sober and cool-headed people are checking the prices of houses in Fairfax this week, there are some good reasons for that. Our next president-elect’s Korea policy could not be more unsettled if he had written it on an Etch-a-Sketch, set the Etch-a-Sketch on the bed of the honeymoon suite in Trump Tower, and fed four quarters into the magic fingers. In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump advocated a surgical strike against the North’s...
Categories An Alliance?/Korean War II/U.S. & Korea/U.S. Politics
April 22, 2015

Craig Urquhart: Withdraw U.S. soldiers from Korea

Writing at NK News, Craig Urquhart makes a punchy but powerful case for withdrawing U.S. soldiers from South Korea: South Korea has been allowed to act like an overgrown child for decades. The U.S. exercised exclusive military command because South Korea could not be trusted not to start a world war, and now resists the American push to transfer operational command. It relies on U.S. protection when it flubs its own diplomatic efforts. It carved out a state-sponsored industrial policy...
Categories An Alliance?/U.S. & Korea
March 11, 2015

Roh Moo Hyun’s ex-campaign manager just hates it when politicians exploit tragic isolated incidents

The good news is that Ambassador Mark Lippert has been released from the hospital, and is recovering well. [Joongang Ilbo] Give the South Koreans credit for making lemonade from lemons — the news coverage here has been filled with images of well-wishers greeting Lippert, or expressing regret for the attack on him. The greetings look both staged and sincere,* but because of that reaction, most Americans will see Kim Ki-Jong as one small turd in a vast, sweet, fizzy bowl of gachi gapshida....
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Terrorism (NK)/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea
October 10, 2014

Seoul finally decides it needs a missile defense plan

South Korea and the United States are drawing up a joint contingency plan to employ Washington’s missile defense (MD) system against growing threats from North Korea’s ballistic missiles, a government source here said Tuesday. The joint contingency plan would employ not only missiles and surveillance equipment the U.S. Forces Korea and South Korea have been developing under their Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) project, but also key assets of the U.S. MD system, according to the source. The U.S....
Categories An Alliance?/Missiles/U.S. & Korea
September 13, 2014

On Think Tanks, Propaganda, the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, and Korea

Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me. Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do?                                           – Tongsun Park, to the House Ethics Committee, April 1978 A detailed story in The New York Times, examining grants and gifts by foreign governments to U.S. think tanks — and how those gifts influence scholars (and through...
Categories U.S. & Korea/U.S. Law/Washington Views