February 12, 2014

Open Sources, February 12, 2014

~  1  ~ HERE COMES THE PARK DOCTRINE: The government plans to announce a set of guidelines on the Park Geun-hye administration’s national security policies next month to better publicize her handling of national security issues, an official said Tuesday. [….] He said the guidelines may also delve into Park’s global push for the unification of South and North Koreas and lay out in details each policy step of Park’s so-called Korea Peninsula Trust Process, aimed at denuclearizing North Korea....
Categories Anju Links
February 11, 2014

Must-read: Myers (again) and Noland on the ethics of engagement

Brian Myers isn’t finished making his argument that “engagement” transforms its foreign participants more than it transforms North Korea. The [Associated Press’s] presence in Pyongyang is a good example, I think. Its staff is too afraid of losing access even to test the limits of what can be said, so the regime gets the image benefit of hosting foreign reporters without having to worry about negative consequences. Whether those contacts are moral or immoral is a much more difficult question to answer...
Categories Capitalism
February 10, 2014

Kim Jong Un purges the army

In North Korea, it’s 1937 all over again: The North Korean military has refrained from conducting “joint exercises” due partly to poor fuel supplies, but mainly because “an effort to replace those linked to Jang Song Thaek in the military is ongoing,” according to sources from the country’s military officer corps.  “Joint exercises during the winter this year were not even planned,” a military source in northern Yanggang province told RFA’s Korean Service. “The brakes have likely been put on...
Categories Kim Jong Un/NK Military
February 7, 2014

Open Sources, February 7, 2014

~  1  ~ ROK, U.S. MILITARIES PREPARE “TAILORED” DETERRENCE: In 2010, North Korea attacked South Korea twice without eliciting any military response at all. If you ask me, that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Bombing a few shriveled conscripts wouldn’t perturb Kim Jong Un a whit. He might even spin that as a great military victory. We have other, non-military options (banking sanctions and subversive information operations) that would deter him much more. Unfortunately, but for understandable reasons, military planners...
Categories Anju Links
February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...
Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
February 5, 2014

Can Park Geun-Hye prepare Korea, and the world, for reunification?

Yesterday, Yonhap reported that an unusual billboard had appeared in Times Square in New York: “Korean Unification would be an immeasurable BONANZA for any nations with interests in the Korean Peninsula.” To most of the Americans who read it, the billboard will seem odd, but Korea-watchers will recall when Korean-Americans took out similar ads in the United States, about things that matter much less. Beneath the paywall, we learn that “[t]he ad was set up by Han Tae-gyuk, a 66-year-old Korean-American man, at his own expense,”...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Reconstruction/Regime Change/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
February 4, 2014

Post-Sunshine South Korea is sober, pragmatic, and grouchy.

In this post last week, I cited polling data showing how South Koreans’ views of North Korea have hardened in recent years, representing a dramatic swing since the fervent anti-Americanism and pro-appeasement sentiment of the Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun years. I reckoned that the 2010 Cheonan and Yeonpyeong attacks were the tipping point in this shift, but a wealth of polling data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project changes my mind about this. I wish the data...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
February 3, 2014

Open Sources, February 3, 2014

~  1  ~ BRIAN MYERS’S TAKEDOWN OF “ENGAGEMENT” proponents at NK News is a must-read, a more erudite version of the argument I’ve made about North Korea changing the Associated Press rather than the opposite. What worries me is the subversion of our media. This usually comes about through interviews with self-styled engagers: charity workers, tour operators, exchange organizers, industrialists, film-makers. On the one hand they make claims of a decidedly political nature, to the effect that their work is...
Categories Anju Links
January 31, 2014

Open Sources, January 31, 2014

~  1  ~ OH LOOK, North Korea restarted a nuclear reactor. ~  2  ~ AND NOW, A LIST OF POLITICIANS WHO DID GOOD:  H.R. 1771 has some new co-sponsors in the House. Rep. Pete Sessions (R, Tex.), Rep. Jeff Duncan (R, S.C.), and Rep. Adam Smith (D, Wash.) have signed on. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa (D-HI), joins early supporter and fellow Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard. The biggest surprise? Rep. Jim McDermott, who is known for his outspoken liberal views on foreign...
Categories Anju Links
January 30, 2014

An unlikely convergence of views

What a difference the last six weeks have made. Since the December purge of Jang Song Thaek, the consensus about North Korea’s ruler has moved from “undecided” to “negative.” Maybe I should have said “strongly negative.” It’s rare that I make this observation, but for once, I believe that this can be said of the prevailing views in all five of the cities where it matters most — in Beijing, Washington, Seoul, Pyongyang, and Chongjin. In each case, this is...
Categories Kim Jong Un
January 28, 2014

OFK readers spot expansion of Camp 12, Cheongo-ri

Reader Andy Green* has spotted a significant expansion of Camp 12, Cheongo-ri. [Before: Christmas Day, 2008. What were you doing that day?] [After: April 13, 2013] Andy speculates, reasonably I think, that the expansion is a barracks. You can see that the perimeter wall and guard towers were also expanded around the new buildings. If it is a barracks, it probably couldn’t hold more than a few hundred prisoners. This isn’t the answer to the question of what happened to...
Categories The Camps
January 28, 2014

Kim Jong Un’s border crackdown is a case study in how trade can help isolate, starve, and terrorize the North Korean people.

Rimjingang and the Daily NK have been running a stream of bleak reports on the dramatically worsening situation along the border between China and North Korea. In the six-week period since the purge of Jang Song Thaek, North Korea has virtually sealed that border by ordering border guards to shoot would-be defectors, increasing its use of cell phone detectors, torturing and bribing people into revealing the names of others, and flooding the zone with the most insufferable petty despots the human mind can conjure...
Categories Anju Links/Border Control
January 28, 2014

Please buy Don Kirk’s new book on Okinawa and Jeju

A few weeks ago, it was my pleasure to meet up with Don Kirk for beers at the Press Club. Don was kind enough to give me a copy of his new book. I’ve only had time to poke through it so far, but it does (as you would expect) a comprehensive job of discussing the politics of military basing on both islands, each with its own history of conflict and controversy. Don asked me to give it a plug,...
Categories Books & Films/Korean History/ROK Military/U.S. Military
January 27, 2014

Open Sources, January 27, 2014

~  1  ~ NORTH KOREA PLANNED AN ATTACK ON INCHEON AIRPORT? If Park Geun Hye seems “skeptical about North Korea’s recent conciliatory proposals” and suspects that they could be “a prelude to an attack on South Korea” this may be why: North Korea secretly carried out military exercises simulating an attack on a civilian airport in South Korea, mobilizing special jet fighters designed to infiltrate Southern territory, a source told the JoongAng Ilbo. A South Korean government official who is...
Categories Anju Links
January 26, 2014

Five ways to spot a bullsh*t story about North Korea

Some people, including at least one TV station in Arizona, are reprinting reports circulating on the internet that North Korea claims to have landed a man on the sun. Those reprinting this report are giving it the too-good-to-check treatment – they imply that they don’t quite believe North Korea said it, but they’re also too lazy and sloppy to check. Follow the trail of links to the source, however, and you come to a blog post that’s an apparent parody,...
Categories Media Criticism
January 23, 2014

Aid donors give up on North Korea

My friend, Andrei Lankov, is again proclaiming that North Korea has reformed its agricultural sector, which he credits for last year’s improved harvest. I’ve grown comfortable with my pessimism about reform in North Korea, because events have never failed to vindicate it. Regrettably, nothing in my friend’s report dissuades me from adherence to my default view. First, Lankov claims that these reforms have resulted in a 30% increase in last year’s harvest; however, the most reliable data we have show...
Categories Famine & Food Aid
January 22, 2014

Open Sources, January 22, 2014

~  1  ~ PARK GEUN HYE, WHO HAS a (ruthlessly) capable intelligence agency to inform her, sounds quite convinced that North Korea is about to “provoke” the South, and at least publicly, some U.S. officials say they’re worried, too. President Park Geun-hye called for an “airtight” security posture against North Korea from South Korean soldiers and other officials on Saturday, viewing the North’s recent charm offensives as a possible prelude to imminent military provocations. “In India, Park ordered the (South Korean) defense minister...
Categories Anju Links