February 5, 2016

Obama’s weakness and Xi Jinping’s bullying are about to start a nuclear arms race in Asia

Next Wednesday, the full Senate will vote on, and almost certainly pass, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, an almost unprecedented bipartisan vote of no confidence against a sitting president’s foreign policy. If the bill becomes law, it will legislate the biggest shift in our North Korea policy in more than two decades. Meanwhile, our Asian allies are holding another, quieter vote of no confidence on our North Korea policy. During the power vacuum of the Obama years, China...
Categories Proliferation/WMD
February 2, 2016

Of the North’s crimes against humanity, the world will ask, “Where was South Korea?”

South Korea’s political left, which has long been divided over whether to be violently pro-North Korean, ideologically pro-North Korean, or merely anti-anti-North Korean, has again blocked a vote in South Korea’s National Assembly on a North Korean human rights law that’s been languishing there since 2005. The law itself is weak bori-cha. It had been watered down until it did little more than fund NGOs seeking direct engagement with the North Korean people. But even as a symbolic gesture, as a...
Categories Human Rights/Japan & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Politics/North-South
February 1, 2016

Senate Foreign Relations Committee agrees on, passes North Korea sanctions bill

Last week’s big news was that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the last real legislative obstacle to a North Korea sanctions law, reached a compromise and unanimously approved a tough new version. Both Republicans and Democrats gave supportive statements before and after the vote: “We have a bill that, in many respects, is stronger than the House bill,” said the Senate committee’s top Democrat, Ben Cardin of Maryland. “What we do is put pressure on not just the government, but...
Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
January 31, 2016

CSIS: Deter North Korea with subversive information (Update: You had one job!)

Penetrating outside information into North Korea questioning the legitimacy of leader Kim Jong-un should be considered as a key means to retaliate against and curb the communist nation’s cyber attacks, a U.S. think tank said. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) made the suggestion in a report on policy suggestions on how to counter the North’s cyber operations, saying reponding to cyber attacks with cyber attacks won’t be effective because the North isn’t as dependent on networks as...
Categories Propaganda/Subversion
January 29, 2016

Rev. Tim Peters is feeding N. Korea’s hungry, and showing us how to re-think food aid

The Rev. Tim Peters, a man who embodies everything I admire about the word “Christian,” leads the group Helping Hands Korea, which has been helping North Koreans escape for more than a decade. Now, he’s putting into action what I call “guerrilla engagement,” reaching inside North Korea covertly and helping its oppressed and starved classes achieve material independence. He’s doing it by harnessing the private sotoji farms that operate on the edge of legality, and which may have saved North Korea...
Categories Activism/Capitalism/Famine & Food Aid
January 27, 2016

Meet the assassin/killer/hacker/terrorist Kim Jong-un just put in charge of relations with S. Korea

With all recent movement on sanctions legislation in the House and Senate, I’ve skimmed over the developments in North Korean Kremlinology, reports about which often read like the dossiers in a lost, bad-acid fueled manuscript for a “High Castle” sequel. If you believe that personnel is policy, however, Kim Jong-un’s choice of a replacement for Kim Yang-gon, who ran Pyongyang’s so-called United Front Department until he died in a car-maybe-not-accident recently, is a dark omen about Kim Jong-un’s policy instincts. The...
Categories Cyberwar/North-South/Terrorism (NK)
January 26, 2016

Senate sanctions bills pick up new co-sponsors

It may be of no more than symbolic value at this point, with intense behind-the-scenes discussions ongoing over a bipartisan compromise bill, but symbols do matter, and a few more senators have lined up behind different versions of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act in the Senate. One of the Senate bills, S. 2144, has picked up Republicans David Perdue and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Steve Daines of Montana, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Kelly Ayotte of New...
Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
January 24, 2016

Did a U.S. university teach North Korea to track down dissidents?

Just after Christmas, Reuters reported on the analysis of two German IT experts who downloaded a copy of North Korea’s Linux-based Red Star operating system and analyzed its code. Inside, they found something both horrifying and completely predictable. Red Star contains code for “tagging, or watermarking, every document or media file on a computer or on any USB stick connected to it.” Meaning? That means that all files can be traced. “It’s definitely privacy invading. It’s not transparent to the user,”...
Categories Censorship/Engagement
January 23, 2016

How Congress can ban tourist travel to North Korea, and why it should

[Update: If I had known when I wrote this that the North Koreans would torture and, for all practical purposes, kill Otto Warmbier in custody, I’d have written this post very differently. Frankly, I’m ashamed to reread it today, and can only ask you to understand that at the time, I had every reason to expect that this young man’s misadventure would end as anti-climatically as other arrests of foreigners in North Korea had ended until that time, and as...
Categories Foreigners in N. Korea
January 23, 2016

Arguments to Impotence, Part 2: A response to Joseph DeThomas

As Professor Lee and I have flogged, and flogged, and flogged, and flogged this horse that our sanctions against North Korea were far weaker than was widely assumed, we knew a few of you were rolling your eyes and wondering how long we would go on flogging it. The answer, of course, is, “As long as it takes.”  If the published opinions of Michael Green, Victor Cha, Bruce Klingner, Scott Snyder, the editors of The Washington Post, Evans Revere, Robert Gallucci, and...
Categories Anju Links
January 21, 2016

In The Weekly Standard: Ed Royce’s Bipartisan Coup Against a Bipartisan Failure

If President Obama ends up signing a North Korea sanctions bill in the next 30 days — and at this point, I don’t know what interest he has in vetoing one — it will effect the biggest change in our North Korea policy since the 1994 Agreed Framework. That, in turn, will have been due to years of principled dissent and patient, bi-partisan coalition building by Ed Royce, the California Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. A certain,...
Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics/Washington Views
January 21, 2016

WaPo: Senate Foreign Relations hopes to mark up N. Korea sanctions bill next Thursday.

Via the Washington Post this morning, we’re still pretty much where I said we were last week, but at least we have an expected date for a committee markup. The Senate is still trying to work out a bipartisan compromise between Senator Bob Menendez’s (D, NJ) weaker S. 1747 and Cory Gardner’s (R, CO) tougher S. 2144, rather than voting on the House bill that passed last week “with huge bipartisan support.” While the House and Senate bills contain generally the same...
Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
January 20, 2016

Two (Kinda) Free Koreas?

My friend, Adrian Hong, argues in an op-ed for The San Diego Union-Tribune that we should sacrifice one free Korea for specific, pragmatic goals — disarmament, the cessation of Pyongyang’s proliferation and “export of terror,” the closure of the prison camps and other human rights abuses, and ending the North Koreans’ perpetual hunger: Regional stakeholders regularly reaffirm their desire to see a unified Korea. They do not mean it. They do not desire the status quo — only Pyongyang’s rulers...
Categories Reconstruction
January 19, 2016

In The Weekly Standard: N. Korea sanctions worked before, and they can work again.

In lieu of an OFK post today, I’ll direct your attention to this legal analysis, in The Weekly Standard, of the wide range of sanctions President Obama has not imposed on North Korea, and why history tells us that financial sanctions can be an effective tool for modifying North Korea’s behavior, with or without the cooperation of the Chinese government. Also, in case you missed it, here’s the latest op-ed by Professor Lee and me, at CNN.com.
Categories Sanctions
January 18, 2016

On MLK Day, remember North Korea’s state-sanctioned racism

Today, my multiracial family and I reflected on the debt we owe to the movement that Martin Luther King, Jr. symbolized and, for a too-brief period in our history, led. My children and I reflected on this day by talking about the fact that in the state where we live, within my lifetime, the marriage of their parents would have been unlawful under local anti-miscegenation laws. These, thankfully, were struck down as unconstitutional under the wonderfully named case of Loving...
Categories Racism
January 17, 2016

If S. Korea won’t close Kaesong, let it pay N. Korea in food.

The bad news from North Korea’s nuclear test is that its yield exceeded those of its 2006, 2009, and 2013 tests. The good news is that while the blast wasn’t thermonuclear, it was still hot enough to burn away plenty of policy fog. In Congress, sanctions legislation has sailed through the House, and seems to have good prospects in the Senate. Opinions are shifting among Korea scholars here, too. This morning, I had a chance to finish reading last week’s testimony before the...
Categories Kaesong/Sunshine
January 14, 2016

North Korea, sanctions, and the argument to impotence

With support for the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy collapsing in Washington, the White House desperately needs a win at the U.N., by showing that it can get the Security Council to pass tougher sanctions and make sanctions work. Let’s review what we know about the substance of a potential resolution: Two administration officials said the United States was now drafting a proposed resolution for United Nations Security Council approval that would impose sanctions on North Korean trade and finance,...
Categories Sanctions