Category: North Korea

The North Koreans will be very unhappy with this news:

A New York court has formally handed the US ownership of a North Korean cargo ship seized for violating international sanctions, the Justice Department said.

The 17,061 ton bulk carrier Wise Honest — the first North Korean vessel seized by Washington for sanctions violations — was caught carrying a $3 million shipment of coal in Indonesian waters last year and later handed over to US authorities.

The court in the Southern District of New York ordered the vessel to be forfeited to Washington and for the Treasury Department to “dispose of” it, an order released by the Justice Department showed.

The sale process has already taken place, according to the US Coast Guard, which earlier this month said the ship had been auctioned in a court-ordered process.

AFP

You can read more at the link, but seizing the Kim’s regime ships caught smuggling and then selling them off is an idea I have long advocated for.

It may be unviable now, but if they keep testing it will eventually become viable like their current ICBM capability:

 A U.S. defense analyst on Tuesday dismissed North Korea’s possible pursuit of a nuclear retaliatory strike capability using a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) as unviable for now, noting vulnerabilities of its easily traceable underwater platform.

Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at RAND Corp., made the case amid concerns that Pyongyang’s recent test of a new SLBM could mark a fresh threat to Seoul and Washington, as its submarine could be capable of launching unpredictable, retaliatory strikes.

“The North Korean submarine, which was apparently developed from a Romeo-class submarine, remodeled and refit, is not extremely quiet. So, if they put nuclear weapons on that kind of submarine, it is going to be tracked from the time it leaves port,” he said during a lecture on nuclear forces hosted by a local think tank, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

“If conflict develops, it is going to be sitting at the bottom of the ocean and just destroyed. So, that is not a viable strategy to get to a second-strike capability,” he added.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Kim Jong-un is apparently sending a strategic message with his supposed horse trip to the summit of Mt. Paekdu:

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un rode a white horse to visit Mount Paekdu, the highest peak on the Korean Peninsula considered the birthplace of his late father, slamming U.S. sanctions and calling for greater “self-reliance” efforts to frustrate them, state media reported Wednesday.

Kim has visited the mountain, considered one of the peninsula’s most sacred places, ahead of big political or diplomatic decisions and events, and the latest trip has spawned speculation about whether another big decision might be forthcoming.

The leader “climbed up Mount Paekdu, riding a white horse through the first snow,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported, releasing a series of photos of him riding a horse running up the snow-covered mountain.

Kim also visited a special tourist zone under construction in Samjiyon County at the foot of the mountain, and lashed out at the United States for sanctions and pressure against the communist nation. 

“The situation of the country is difficult owing to the ceaseless sanctions and pressure by the hostile forces, and there are many hardships and trials facing us,” Kim said, according to KCNA. “The pain the U.S.-led anti-DPRK hostile forces inflicted upon the Korean people is no longer pain, but it turned into their anger.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I have to wonder if he really rode the horse to the summit or not? I think it is more likely he took a few staged shots at the bottom of the mountain and then had a helicopter take him to the summit for more staged shots.

Anyway the reason the photos were taken was to signal to the U.S. that they are running out of time to drop sanctions against the regime. Kim Jong-un has given the Trump administration until the end of this year to reach a denuclearization deal before another likely provocation cycle starts.

General McMaster is not a fan of dropping any sanctions on North Korea:

Herbert R. McMaster, the Donald Trump administration’s second national security adviser from 2017 to 2018, said at a seminar in Washington on Thursday that premature sanctions relief should not be granted to Pyongyang and that doing so would be the “definition of insanity.”

The remark came only days after working-level discussions between the United States and North Korea resumed for the first time in seven months but subsequently fell apart over the course of a day.  

McMaster claimed if Washington submitted to the North’s “provocation cycle” with its recurrent weapons tests, it would only enable Pyongyang to engage in “long, drawn-out negotiations, during which the North Koreans try to extort more money and payoffs.”  

“And then ultimately what do you get? You get a weak agreement that locks in the status quo as the new normal. And then North Korea breaks that agreement right away,” he added.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

This is like the North Korean version of a maximum pressure strategy and we will see in the coming months if it works:

U.S. negotiators tried to cast the impasse in the best light, stating that they’d raised “new initiatives” and describing the discussions as “good.” They noted that the United States and North Korea “will not overcome a legacy of 70 years of war and hostility on the Korean peninsula through the course of a single Saturday,” and that they sought “more intensive engagement” and another meeting in the optimistic Pompeoian time frame of a couple of weeks.

The North Korean delegation, however, appeared unwilling to enter into a substantive and structured diplomatic process, let alone technical conversations about dismantling the country’s nuclear program. Instead of presenting themselves as the empowered negotiators U.S. officials had hopedto finally confront after previous rounds of abortive working-level nuclear talks, the North Koreans seemed to once again be primarily in listening mode.

“Rather than the breakdown of talks, what we are seeing resembles classic North Korean negotiating tactics: demand more concessions, minimize denuclearization commitments, and figure out how to cheat,” Easley told me by email. “Kim Myong Gil does not have authority to compromise on anything until approved by Kim Jong Un. He probably went to Stockholm with talking points and instructions to receive the updated U.S. position before walking out to buy time and apply pressure.” (…..)

Now that the Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry into the president’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government into investigating the Bidens ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, North Korean officials (who are known to closely follow U.S. politics) may be calculating that they are in a stronger negotiating position, and that Trump, a “self-advertised dealmaker” without many actual deals in foreign affairs, will be interested in “a distraction” from his domestic troubles in the form of a nuclear accord, Yun noted.

The Atlantic

You can read more at the link.

Here is more from the standard North Korean negotiating playbook:

North Korea threatened again Thursday to resume nuclear and long-range missile tests, accusing the U.S. of having instigated some members of the U.N. Security Council to condemn its recent weapons tests.

The warning by Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry followed the weekend breakdown of North Korea-U.S. nuclear negotiations in Sweden, the first such talks between the countries in more than seven months. North Korea said the talks collapsed because the U.S. didn’t have any new proposals, and whether it maintains a self-imposed moratorium on major weapons tests was up to Washington.

Some observers say North Korea’s threat may be a tactic to pressure the U.S. into making concessions as a restart of nuclear and long-range missile tests would likely derail negotiations, deepen its international isolation and further dim prospects for rebuilding its moribund economy.

Associated Press

You can read more at the link.

It appears the North Koreans are up to their usual negotiating tricks:

North Korea will return to nuclear disarmament talks with the United States despite last week’s breakdown in Sweden, as it intentionally made the decision to leave the first negotiations early to increase its political leverage, experts said Monday.

Ending a months-long hiatus in their denuclearization dialogue, officials from Washington and Pyongyang met in Stockholm amid expectations of a possible breakthrough in the suspended talks.

But Pyongyang declared a breakdown just a few hours after the meeting started in the Swedish capital. It stepped up criticism of Washington for sticking to an “old-fashioned” attitude, even after the fiasco of the failed Hanoi summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in February.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.