June 23, 2017

Pyongyang’s freeze gambit is a transparent pre-summit ploy.

I’m going to give the reports that North Korea’s Ambassador to India floated the idea of negotiations for a freeze deal all they attention they deserve. The proposal, such as it is, came during an English-language interview with a local journalist. First, the proposal is an obvious ploy to divide the U.S. and South Korean governments just before Moon Jae-In’s visit to Washington. (As I noted yesterday, that visit already looks to be a difficult one.) Even Moon Jae-In appears...
Categories Diplomacy
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
June 20, 2017

How to hold North Korea accountable for Otto Warmbier’s death

In North Korean prisons (at least, in those from which release is possible at all) when the guards conclude that a prisoner is about to die, they release her and send her away to die at home, so that disposing of her body will be someone else’s problem, and so that the warden can manipulate the camp’s rate of in-custody deaths downward. (Perhaps in some small way, even the wardens of North Korean prisons fear being held accountable, one day,...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions/U.S. Law
June 15, 2017

Breaking: DOJ files $1.9M forfeiture complaint against North Korean front company in China

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia issued a press release this afternoon announcing that it has filed a complaint under the civil forfeiture statute at 18 USC 981, to forfeit $1,902,976 from Mingzheng International Trading Limited of Shenyang, China. According to the complaint, Mingzheng conspired to evade sanctions and launder money through the United States on behalf of the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea (FTB). Treasury designated the FTB under Executive Order 13382 in March 2013, for proliferation financing. Under the...
Categories Money Laundering/Proliferation/U.S. Law
June 15, 2017

Meet the fresh-faced kids who want you to commit a felony for Kim Jong-un

I confess that I’ve always hated Facebook, but every now and then, I see something there that interests me. One such example is the Facebook page of a group called Delegations for Dialogue, which led me to this slickly produced website. As it turns out, Delegations is run by a cast of improbably young characters promoting investment in North Korea through a “fact-finding” trip to Rason this August. Now, I suppose there are two kinds of people in this world...
Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 14, 2017

One American tragedy, millions of North Korean statistics

The idea that foreign tourists in North Korea could escape the evil they help, however minimally, to propagate, was never sustainable. Tourism in North Korea reduces the physical and mental slavery of totalitarianism to a circus performance and its subjects to zoo animals. It doesn’t only endanger the tourist, it plays some unquantifiable role in sustaining that horrid system, and in endangering the lives of people from Seoul to Seattle to Aleppo by giving cash to a regime obsessed with the...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
June 13, 2017

C4ADS: Pyongyang’s networks in China are “centralized, limited, and vulnerable” to sanctions 

Because I’ve already given too many minutes of my life to the moveable farce named Dennis Rodman, I’m devoting today’s post to something more consequential: the Center for Advanced Defense Studies’s new report exposing more North Korean financial networks in China, and dispelling the misinformation that North Korea is isolated from the financial system and thus sanctions-proof. (Full disclosure: I advised C4ADS on the drafting of the report, without compensation of course.) Money quote: The continuing misperceptions of North Korea...
Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
June 12, 2017

Moon Jae-In passes an early test on North Korean refugee policy, but for how long?

In recent years, growing numbers of North Korean boats have drifted into the waters of neighboring countries. Most of these incidents probably weren’t attempts to defect, but cases of North Korean fishermen coming under rising pressure to stray further out to sea, to bring home bigger catches (which are often exported for hard currency, including to the U.S. and South Korea) and who are given only a marginal amount of fuel to make the journey home. Dozens of these North Koreans...
Categories Defectors/Human Rights/Refugees
June 8, 2017

China is cheating on the North Korea coal import ban (again) (with updates)

Via the indispensable Leo Byrne: Two North Korea-linked ships have arrived at two separate coal terminals in Shanghai since Sunday, while one other was departing the area after having left a third facility at a similar time. Satellite imagery shows that each of the terminals is equipped to handle coal. The UN currently restricts member states from importing North Korean coal, while Beijing has said numerous times that it has suspended all imports for the remainder of 2017. “Imagery indicates...
Categories China/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
June 7, 2017

North Korean man stabs, nearly kills Ministry of State Security officer

The Daily NK is reporting another case of a North Korean citizen attacking and nearly killing an officer of the dreaded Ministry of State Security (MSS), the agency that runs most of North Korea’s political prison camps, possibly over official corruption. It has been reported that an [sic] Ministry of State Security agent working as a surveillance patrol officer at the No. 10 guard post in Hoeryong City, North Hamgyong Province, was stabbed by a knife-wielding assailant while on duty....
Categories Resistance
June 5, 2017

Trump & North Korea: In search of maximum pressure (Pt. 1)

Last week’s North Korea designations from the Treasury Department were the second round since Inauguration Day, and like the first round, they omitted the essential element for sanctions against North Korea to be effective: secondary sanctions to deter Chinese | banks and companies from enabling North Korean proliferation and money laundering, as they’ve been | doing for so long, and so flagrantly. On this point, I need not repeat Anthony Ruggiero’s arguments, so I’ll just refer you to his post. In other words,...
Categories "United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 1, 2017

What the Chinpo Decision doesn’t mean for the U.N.’s North Korea sanctions

Since the High Court of Singapore reversed part of the conviction of Chinpo Shipping for its role in financing the 2013 Chong Chon Gang arms shipment just over two weeks ago, and despite the crush of other (still unfinished) commitments that have eaten up my blogging time, I’ve wanted to set a few minutes aside to post some thoughts on the decision. (If you haven’t already looked up “chinpo” at Urban Dictionary, you really shouldn’t.) Let’s start with what the decision...
Categories "United" Nations/Arms Trafficking/Sanctions/Southeast Asia
May 26, 2017

H.R. 2732 would ban the North Korea tourist racket from the dollar system

Yesterday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D, Cal.) and Joe Wilson (R, S.C.) introduced a bill that would ban transactions incident to travel to, from, and within North Korea. The text isn’t posted on Congress.gov yet, but Schiff and Wilson have issued identical press releases describing what the bill would do: Today, Congressmen Adam Schiff (CA-28) and Joe Wilson (SC-02) introduced the bipartisan North Korea Travel Control Act, which would require the Treasury Department to issue regulations requiring a license for transactions...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea/U.S. Law
May 18, 2017

Sung-Yoon Lee: Why do we appease N. Korea?

Professor Lee recounts the long history of North Korea committing outrages against peace, international order, and every standard of human civilization, and of American presidents of both parties doing approximately nothing about it. Pyongyang’s countless provocations since the Korean War have never set off a meaningful punitive response. Even in egregious cases like assassination attempts against South Korean leaders or the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane in international airspace in 1969, the United States and its allies have...
Categories Appeasement
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