Category: North Korea

The change in the US-ROK joint military exercises I think was more for international consumption than what the Kim regime thinks. The Trump administration likely knew the Kim regime would protest the military drills since they did not get what they wanted from the Hanoi Summit. The Trump administration beat them to the punch by messaging how the drills were cancelled and replaced with scaled down drills. Now North Korea’s complaints seem hollow:

North Korea on Thursday (March 7) attacked ongoing joint military exercises between Seoul and Washington as an “all out challenge” to moves towards peace on the Korean peninsula.
The US and South Korea agreed on Sunday to replace two major war games that take place every spring – the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle drills – with a shorter “Dong Maeng” or “Alliance” exercise which kicked off this week.
The move was designed to further ease tensions with the North following the dramatic detente since early 2018. (……)

But the North’s official KCNA news agency has now warned that the ongoing nine-day drills were an “all out challenge” against efforts for peace and stability.

“The suspicious activities by the US and South Korean military are a reckless violation of the joint statement signed by Washington and Pyongyang and North-South declarations that commit to ending hostilities and easing military tensions,” it said.

New Straits Times

You can read more at the link.

#breaking Commercial satellite imagery analyzed by @ArmsControlWonk & @mhanham indicates North Korea may be preparing for a launch, possibly in the very near future. They say it’s impossible to know if it’s a missile or space rocket. Sohae launch facilty now fully operational. pic.twitter.com/SyS54zXphD

— Will Ripley (@willripleyCNN) March 8, 2019

"Contain the threat"? How about eliminating it? https://t.co/cZP4qVYcH0

— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) March 7, 2019

I think President Trump is signaling to the Kim regime it will not be business as usual if they restart a provocation cycle:

President Donald Trump said he’d be very disappointed in Kim Jong Un if reports are accurate that North Korea has begun rebuilding a missile test site it dismantled last year.
“I would be very disappointed if that were happening,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “It is a very early report — we are the ones who put it out — but I would be very, very disappointed in Chairman Kim.” (……)

In a separate report, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service spotted “special activities” with transport vehicles at a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) research and production site called Sanumdong located in the Pyongyang area, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper of South Korea reported, citing an unidentified member of parliament’s intelligence committee.
U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton warned North Korea that it must be willing to completely give up its nuclear weapons program or it may face even tougher sanctions.
“If they’re not willing to do it, President Trump has been very clear they’re not getting relief from the crushing economic sanctions that have been imposed on them,” Bolton told the Fox Business Network on Tuesday evening. “And we’ll look at ramping those sanctions up, in fact.”

Bloomberg

You can read more at the link.

North Korea’s Hidden Cobra operatives have been robbing banks through cyber attacks for years. One of their biggest heists was stealing $81 million from a bank in Bangladesh and even tried to steal $1 billion from the US Federal Reserve. According to the below report the Kim regime has stepped up their cyber attacks against global financial institutions due to sanctions:

US officials said last week that Washington believes the North Korean government has stepped up cyberattacks targeting financial institutions in a desperate bid to acquire cash, as international sanctions levied against Pyongyang have squeezed its economy. 
Kim and Trump’s meeting in Hanoi ended abruptly without a deal, as the two sides could not agree to a detailed plan exchanging sanctions relief for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
Trump said in a news conference after the meeting that North Korea insisted that Washington lift all sanctions. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho disputed that assessment in a early morning impromptu press conference just hours after Trump spoke. He said that Pyongyang only asked the Trump administration to remove the sanctions “that hamper the economy and the livelihood of our people.” 
Demers, the Justice Department official, said much of the hacking is motivated by North Korea’s desire for cash. 
“They just need money,” Demers said. “They need hard currency. That’s a good way to get it.”

CNN

You can read more at the link, but regardless of any future lifting of sanctions, I believe the cyber crime by North Korea will continue because of the plausible deniability the Internet provides their operatives.

Watch your money folks because Kim Jong-un wants to pick your pocket.

Remember when people were making a big deal about the concession from North Korea of disassembling a rocket test stand? At the time I said this was largely meaningless because they did not need the test stand and was something that could be easily reconstructed when needed again. Sure enough he we go again:

Satellite imagery suggests that North Korea may be taking steps to reactivate a partially decommissioned long-range rocket test site on the country’s west coast.
Experts say they see evidence that workers are rebuilding at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station. In a matter of days, a rocket-engine test stand and a large transfer structure have been reassembled, according to Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., a senior fellow for imagery analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The structures were taken down over the course of last summer, Bermudez says, and reassembled in a matter of days.

NPR via a reader tip

You can read more at the link, but the rebuilding of the test stand is the least provocative response that Kim Jong-un can take after President Trump walked away from the Hanoi Summit because Kim would not denuclearize.

I expect that in the future if the Kim regime feels they are not getting any progress on lifting sanctions that they will begin a launch cycle at Sohae and claim it is for a friendly space launch. This will increase tensions while give them plausible deniability of continuing ICBM development.

North Korea has enacted sanctions on family reunions for decades. These families could be reunited, forever, tomorrow. Their continued separation is North Korea’s conscious choice. https://t.co/YGf2iJtCYr

— the oranckay (@oranckay) March 5, 2019

If North Korea is committed to denuclearization as Kim Jong-un and President Moon Jae-in keep telling us, then why won’t they shutdown their uranium enrichment facility? As I have been saying the Kim regime has no interest in real denuclearization, they want “pretend denuclearization” which is what closing Yongbyon in return for dropping sanctions would be:

The second North Korean nuclear site that U.S. President Donald Trump wanted eliminated were the covert underground highly enriched uranium facilities at Bungang, just a few kilometers away from Yongbyon, according to multiple sources familiar with last week’s summit in Hanoi.

In a post-summit press conference, Trump said the United States knew about “every inch” of North Korea and that at the summit he “brought many, many points up that [he] think[s the North Koreans] were surprised that we knew,” in reference to U.S. demands for denuclearization measures from Pyongyang that went beyond dismantling the nuclear complex at Yongbyon. 

Ri Yong-ho, the North’s foreign minister who took part in the closed-door discussions at the summit, also confirmed the Americans had demanded “one more measure” in addition to scrapping the Yongbyon facilities which they could not accept. 

Disagreement on demolishing a second plant is believed to have been a crucial sticking point in Hanoi that ultimately resulted in Trump walking out without signing a much anticipated deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last Thursday. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

ROK Drop favorite, Professor B.R. Myers has posted his thoughts about the outcome of the Hanoi summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. In the article Myers says President Trump did the right thing walking away from the summit which will probably not win Professor Myers too many fans in academia and the media:

Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.

In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.

B.R. Myers

You can read more at the link, but Myers believes that the Moon administration will now highly pressure the Trump administration to allow an “ethnic exemption” to sanctions to reopen Kaesong and the Kumgang Resort tours. I don’t see President Trump bending on this unless the North Koreans give something up just as valuable in return.

Myers in the rest of the article also provides a good historical analysis how the Korean left was just as much if not more collaborating with the Imperial Japanese than the Korean right. This is significant because with the failure of the summit, the Moon administration in South Korea will likely further push anti-Japanese sentiment to create a common cause with North Korea.

The Korean left also uses Japanese sentiment to label their domestic political enemies on the right as pro-Japanese collaborators even though historically the left was probably the more significant collaborators.