February 15, 2017

The man who wouldn’t be king: the short, happy life of Kim Jong-nam

Kim Jong Nam, the estranged older half-brother of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, was killed in an attack at Kuala Lumpur airport, Malaysian police confirmed on Tuesday, in an apparent assassination. The 46-year-old was assaulted by a woman who covered his face with a cloth laced with liquid as he was waiting for a flight to Macau, said Fadzil Ahmat, a Malaysian police official. He was confirmed dead after being taken to hospital. [Financial Times] The kindest way to...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/Terrorism (NK)
February 14, 2017

Trump struggles on North Korea, but it’s still the first quarter (updated)

By this time tomorrow, we’ll know whether initial reports that Kim Jong-nam was assassinated by two North Korean women with a poison needle at the Kuala Lumpur Airport were wrong or only half-wrong. For now, I’ll dwell on grading the Trump administration’s answers to its first North Korean test ” the test of a missile system whose moderate range belies its potential dangerousness, given its potential to be launched from a mobile carrier or a submarine. So far, that grade is...
Categories "United" Nations/Missiles/Washington Views
February 13, 2017

Some on-point congressional testimony on sanctions as part of a broader N. Korea policy

Reuters reports that, following North Korea’s weekend missile test, the Trump administration “will consider a full range of options in a response to Pyongyang’s missile test” that are “calibrated to show U.S. resolve while avoiding escalation.” Those options will include increasing “pressure on China to rein in North Korea,” “new U.S. sanctions to tighten financial controls, an increase in U.S. naval and air assets in and around the Korean peninsula and accelerated installation of new missile defense systems in South Korea.”...
Categories Sanctions/Washington Views
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
February 8, 2017

Leaked U.N. report reveals record seizure of North Korean arms last August (updated)

The 2017 report of the U.N. Panel of Experts isn’t due to be published for another month, but a Kyodo News reporter has already obtained and published leaked excerpts. The focus of Kyodo’s story is the now-familiar (and unquestionably accurate) castigation of member state governments for not putting enough will or resources into the enforcement of North Korea sanctions, but I’d like to start with this revelation: “An interdiction of the vessel Jie Shun was the largest seizure of ammunition...
Categories Arms Trafficking/Shipping sanctions
February 8, 2017

Roberta Cohen at 38 North: A Serious Human Rights Negotiation with North Korea

Roberta Cohen, Co-Chair Emeritus of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and one of the lions among those speaking out for the rights of the North Korean people, has published a detailed and well-thought-out case for why human rights should be part of any negotiation with Pyongyang, along with a tough-love strategy for conducting that negotiation. Anyone in the Trump administration who may be tempted to sideline human rights should read it in full, but I’ll summarize it:...
Categories Diplomacy/Human Rights
February 7, 2017

Kim Jong-un flips the freeze deal crowd the Hawaiian good luck sign

Unlike most of the appease-now scolds, Jeffrey Lewis also writes things that are worth reading. He can snark with the best of them. He can be genuinely interesting when he sticks to technology, despite his occasional lapses into tendentiousness. His imagery analysis and geolocation are as persuasive as his policy views are surreal. If Lewis never talked policy at all, frankly, I might never question him, but when he talks about what a swell and moderate guy Shen Dingli is,...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy
February 6, 2017

The Commerce Department should review PUST’s export licenses for North Korea

Last week, several news outlets reported that representatives of PUST, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, are in the United States, seeking support to expand their curriculum in North Korea. PUST didn’t say what kind of support it seeks, but recent reports suggest that PUST has lost donors and had to slash its budget. PUST is probably looking for money. Donors, however, would be wise to keep their checkbooks closed until the Commerce Department and a U.N. Panel of...
Categories Cyberwar/Engagement/Technology
February 3, 2017

Kim Won-hong may have just lost the world’s most dangerous job

Three weeks ago, as mandated by section 304 of the NKSPEA, the Treasury Department designated seven North Korean officials, including Kim Won-hong, head of North Korea’s Ministry of State Security, or MSS. The MSS operates Pyongyang’s horrific political prison camp system, and the basis for his designation was human rights abuses that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry has called “crimes against humanity.” Clearly, Kim Won-hong bears a large share of the responsibility for those crimes. At the same time the Treasury...
Categories Human Rights/Kremlinology
February 1, 2017

Yesterday’s Senate hearing on North Korea policy

Yesterday’s hearing before the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee on North Korea policy was a one-panel affair, with no administration witnesses and two experts — Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute and Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. The full hearing is on video here. In his testimony, Snyder called for (of course) strengthening the alliances with South Korea and Japan, tougher secondary sanctions on North Korea’s Chinese enablers, and “that we erode Kim Jong Un’s internal...
Categories U.S. Politics/Washington Views
January 31, 2017

Rimjin-gang source: North Korean army units understrength due to draft-dodging

He reported that “According to an officer of the Military Service and Mobilization Division, the number of new recruits is only around 86% in proportion to the number of discharged soldiers.  Since the military is facing recruit shortage, the state authority has ordered to conscript every potential recruit”“except people with a serious physical problem.  Therefore, the division has already started to go to each school to carry out medical checks for the next recruitment in the coming spring.  It is...
Categories NK Military
January 27, 2017

China’s latest cheating on North Korea sanctions is a test for Trump

Like most people, I would prefer that the new President of the United States refrained from conducting diplomacy by Twitter. Without endorsing the medium, I gave a qualified endorsement to the message President Trump sent to China when he accused it of not helping to reign in His Porcine Majesty. Trump was right about this, of course. Over the last several years, the U.N., no less, has published a wealth of evidence that China has (almost certainly willfully) violated the North...
Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions
January 26, 2017

God and Eric Hoffer in North Korea

Since yesterday’s post, I’ve had a chance to watch the interview with Thae Yong-ho. Thae said many interesting things, but none was so striking as the point when, about 9 minutes into the interview, he talked about the good fortune of getting his family to South Korea and said, “God help[ed] me.” Thae did not strike me as an emotional or spiritual man. He has spent his whole life shielded from religion. We know that his political conversion was a gradual...
Categories Religion
January 25, 2017

Thae Yong-ho is giving North Korean resistance a voice & a vision it never had

Sometime today, Arirang TV will publish an exclusive, hour-long English-language interview with Thae Yong-ho, who was North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Kingdom until the day last August when he gathered his two sons and gravely told them that he was cutting off their “slave chains.” NK News has a summary of the interview here. I’ll link it when Arirang posts it. (Update: Here’s the full interview, and a Wall Street Journal story on Thae by Jonathan Cheng.) Of course, Thae isn’t the...
Categories Defectors/Regime Change/Resistance
January 24, 2017

North Korean market traders are fighting The Man

Via Yonhap: “It’s not that hard nowadays to see women stand up to despotic wardens and security agents while shaking their fingers at them at jangmadang,” the Radio Free Asia (RFA) said, citing a source in Pyongyang who recently visited China. “In such cases, nearby observers also join in and push the officials, something that was very rare to see just a few years ago.” Now North Korean people are no longer giving in to officials unconditionally, the source said....
Categories Capitalism/Resistance
January 23, 2017

RFA: North Korean border guard under arrest after killing seven comrades

This blog has closely followed reports of indiscipline within the North Korean military, resistance against the state, strategies for political subversion, and the breakdown of border control. Last week, another report of a mass shooting incident by a North Korean border guard reinforced my belief that morale and discipline within the border guard force are declining. A young North Korean man conscripted to guard a customs post on his country’s border with China in (sic) under arrest for shooting dead seven...
Categories Border Control/NK Military/Regime Change
January 19, 2017

Why North Korea will go back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism this year

As I write, Yonhap is reporting that North Korea may be fueling up two ICBMs for a test. Meanwhile, in Washington, Texas Republican Ted Poe has already shaped one part of the likely response to that. Poe isn’t one to back down from a fight — not with leukemia, and not with North Korea. He’s back at the helm of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, where one of his first acts this year was to reintroduce a...
Categories Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)
January 18, 2017

Why talk of human rights unnerves North Korean diplomats so much, and why that matters

The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Cheng has taken note of the rise in defections by members of the North Korean elite. Over the last year, this blog closely followed that trend, including the unprecedented group defections of workers in Malta, China, and Russia; soldiers guarding the Yalu River border; high-ranking intelligence officers; and even diplomats. Last week, a Chinese media report also claimed that “approximately 10 North Korean IT technicians and hackers went missing around 9 p.m. Wednesday in Changchun in...
Categories Defectors/Deprogramming/Propaganda/Subversion