Author: GIKorea

I guess someone must have realized how lame renaming Key Resolve to the “19-1 Exercise” was and have instead now named it the “Dong Maeng” exercise:

South Korea and the United States will launch the new Dong Maeng combined exercise this week to replace their springtime Key Resolve drills, their militaries announced Sunday.
Seoul’s Joint chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) said that the nine-day command post exercise kicks off on Monday, two days after the allies’ defense chiefs decided to end the annual Key Resolve and Foal Eagle maneuvers to back diplomacy for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
“Dong Maeng, which means alliance in English, has been modified from the previously held spring exercises Key Resolve and Foal Eagle and will focus on strategic, operational and tactical aspects of general military operations on the Korean Peninsula,” they said in a joint press release.
Seoul’s JCS Chairman Gen. Park Han-ki and CFC Commander Gen. Robert Abrams jointly said that the upcoming exercise is important for professional armies to train and maintain “a standard of readiness.”
“These exercises are crucial in sustaining and strengthening the alliance,” they were quoted as saying.
With the Key Resolve effectively supplanted by the new exercise, the allies are expected to conduct low-key battalion-or lower-level drills in place of the Foal Eagle field training throughout the year.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the Dong Maeng exercise appears to be the Key Resolve, but just under a different name and less fanfare.

This time the New York Times is piling on President Trump for not reaching a deal with Kim Jong-un during the Vietnam summit:

As President Trump settled into the dining room of a French-colonial hotel in Hanoi on Thursday morning, the conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader with whom he had struck up the oddest of friendships, was already turning tense.
In a dinner at the Metropole Hotel the evening before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took cover during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand bargain: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and facilities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy.
An American official later described this as “a proposal to go big,” a bet by Mr. Trump that his force of personality, and view of himself as a consummate dealmaker, would succeed where three previous presidents had failed.
But Mr. Trump’s offer was essentially the same deal that the United States has pushed — and the North has rejected — for a quarter century. Intelligence agencies had warned him, publicly, Mr. Kim would not be willing to give up the arsenal completely. North Korea itself had said repeatedly that it would only move gradually.

Several of Mr. Trump’s own aides, led by national security adviser John R. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, thought the chances of a grand bargain for total nuclear disarmament were virtually zero. Some questioned whether the summit meeting should go forward.

New York Times

You can read more at the link, but if President Trump had struck a deal to drop sanctions in return for dismantling Yongbyon these same critics would be saying it was a bad deal for the reasons listed in this article, which it would be. That is why the only option was to get them to agree to give up all their nuclear capabilities in return for dropping sanctions even if as Mr. Bolton believed the odds were close to zero of it happening.

I have not seen anyone in the media yet discuss how President Trump is setting up Kim Jong-un for stronger actions in the future if he restarts a provocation cycle strategy. If the US has a strong reaction to a North Korean provocation, the Trump administration would have a strong case that they have tried all diplomatic measures to include canceling military exercises, not putting out provocative statements, treating Kim Jong-un with respect, and even meeting with him, not once, but twice to hash out a deal. That is why I think the Vietnam summit went forward more than hoping an almost 0% chance of a deal would be struck.

The fact that President Trump kept expectations low before the summit, so readily offered up the grand bargain, and then left quickly afterwards shows this was the strategy going in to the summit. It has now been made very clear to Kim Jong-un what the price for dropping sanctions will be and now the ball is in his court on how he wants to respond.

The AP is taking the side of the North Koreans in regards to their sanctions demands:

President Donald Trump said he walked away from his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un because Kim demanded the U.S. lift all of its sanctions, a claim that North Korea’s delegation called a rare news conference in the middle of the night to deny.
So who’s telling the truth? In this case, it seems that the North Koreans are. And it’s a demand they have been pushing for weeks in lower-level talks. (…….)

The U.N. Security Council has imposed nearly a dozen resolutions targeting North Korea, making it one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. So Kim was indeed seeking a lot of relief — including the lifting of bans on everything from trade in metals, raw materials, luxury goods, seafood, coal exports, refined petroleum imports, raw petroleum imports.
But Kim wasn’t looking for the lifting of sanctions on armaments. Those were imposed earlier, from 2006, when the North conducted its first nuclear test.
For Pyongyang, that’s a key difference.

Associated Press

I think it is more accurate to say that the North Koreans are trying to get a lifting of all the sanctions that matter. Lifting the sanctions they want would be a huge economic boon to the Kim regime without fully denuclearizing. That money would all the regime to further modernize their military and illicit weapons programs.

Notice how President Moon is not using the term “peace regime” like he usually does, he now is saying “peninsular regime”. Is he signaling that he wants his confederation with North Korea without an agreed upon peace treaty between the US and North Korea?:

South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in laid out his vision for a “new Korean Peninsula regime” Friday, calling it a community for peaceful and economic cooperation that breaks with the country’s checkered history of conflict and ideological divide.
Speaking at a ceremony marking the centennial anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement against Japanese colonial rule, Moon said that the regime will create a peaceful order in the coming century in which “we will take on a leading role.” (…..)

Moon said the new peninsula regime will be a new community of economic cooperation. For this, he said his government will consult with the U.S. on ways to resume stalled tours to Mount Kumgang on the North’s east coast and the operation of the joint industrial complex in the North’s border city of Kaesong.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I recommend reading my prior posting on Moon’s confederation idea with North Korea.

It will be interesting to see what the US reaction would be if Moon decides to unilaterally break sanctions by restarting the tourism project or the Kaesong Industrial Park. Moon is probably under enormous pressure from North Korea now to do something to relieve sanctions since the 2nd Trump-Kim Summit failed to do so.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

In Gwanghwamun Plaza on March 1 — how cool is that! Today is the 100th anniversary of #Samiljeol, a national holiday commemorating one of Korea's most important independence movements. Join me in honoring those who fought for Korea's freedom and democracy. pic.twitter.com/a5zMx0XNy3

— Harry Harris (@USAmbROK) March 1, 2019

With someone as unhealthy looking as Kim Jong-un this probably a prudent thing to do:

Former South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun also said her holding the ashtray was “normal.”

“It is more natural for Kim’s sister to hold the ashtray than for others to do it. If it was another person, it could be interpreted as trying to flatter the leader,” Jeong said in a radio interview Wednesday. 

Pundits say it is very important for the North to limit access to anything that could possibly reveal information about Kim’s health, and that collecting the cigarette butts is an important task. According to sources, North Korea is making sure to collect everything that Kim has used, such as tissues and towels. Kim is also said to bring along his own toilet when he travels.

Korea Herald

It looks like there will be a vodka shortage for a little while for the Kim regime elite:

Dutch customs officials at the port of Rotterdam have seized 90,000 bottles of vodka believed to be destined for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and his army chiefs.
The discovery, on the eve of Kim’s two-day summit with Donald Trump in Hanoi, was made after Dutch authorities flagged up the suspicious route and records of a Chinese-owned container ship, Nebula.

The Russian vodka, contained in 3,000 boxes, had been recorded as being due for unloading in China, via the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam.
When officers sought to retrieve the container from the ship’s hull, it was found to be concealed and hemmed in by the fuselage of an aircraft also due to be exported to China.

The Guardian

You can read more at the link.

The Warmbier case is clearly taking a backseat to the larger US goal of trying to get North Korea to denuclearize:

Donald Trump took Kim Jong Un’s word that he knew nothing of the torture of an American college student while in North Korean custody, an about-face that sparked a bipartisan backlash back home on Thursday.
The US president appeared to side with the reclusive leader about the 2017 case of Otto Warmbier, drawing outrage from incredulous Democrats who accused Trump of repeatedly aligning with tyrants.
The 22-year-old Ohio native was returned to the United States in a coma and died shortly afterwards. A US judge concluded Warmbier was tortured by North Korean authorities.
At the conclusion of his Hanoi summit with Kim, Trump told reporters he talked with Kim about the “horrible” Warmbier case.
“He knew the case very well, but he knew it later,” Trump said, adding that “some really bad things” happened to Warmbier while he was detained.
Kim “tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”

AFP

You can read all the so called outrage from the usual suspects at the link.