In just a week, the situation in Korea has made yet another U-turn. It is quite normal to wonder “why is all this happening?” The answer is simple: like it or not, "Maximum pressure" seems to have worked – at least for now https://t.co/5MxL2bJLTX

— Andrei Lankov (@andreilankov) March 12, 2018

South Korea’s Jung Seung-won throws a stone at a wheelchair curling match of the PyeongChang Winter Paralympics against Germany on March 12, 2018, in Gangneung, east of Seoul. South Korea lost the game 4-3, ending its four-match winning streak in the round-robin preliminaries. (Yonhap)

There is an interesting read in the Joong Ang Ilbo about how secret talks between the US and North Korea led by the CIA have been going on for months that combined with the US pressure campaign helped lead to the current Kim-Trump summit:

Since last year, the United States has been aware of North Korea’s intent to resolve the nuclear crisis through a summit, a diplomatic source told the JoongAng Ilbo on Monday, contradicting the idea that U.S. President Donald Trump impulsively decided to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“Using its own channels between the United States and the North, Washington detected last year Pyongyang’s idea that only a summit can resolve the issues,” said the source. He added that the North was persistent with the idea of a “top-down” approach and the U.S. leadership, including Trump, was frequently briefed about the situation.

Washington, however, didn’t pursue the idea of a meeting because it was implementing its “maximum pressure” campaign and because it was unsure of Pyongyang’s authenticity. The United States, therefore, decided to wait until North Korea offered talks.

“The United States believed that the appropriate timing would come when the North felt unmanageable pressure,” he said.

After the North decided to participate in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, Washington and Pyongyang began secret contacts, around Jan. 20, the source said.

The contacts became more active after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) got information that the North wanted to have a meeting with Vice President Mike Pence on the sidelines of the opening ceremony in February. The State Department was completely excluded from the process, the source said.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but this helps explain why CIA Director Mike Pompeo was moved over to be the Secretary of State.  The CIA has been the lead with ongoing secret negotiations with North Korea and moving Pompeo over to the State Department will bring them someone the Kim regime may already be comfortable interacting with prior to the summit.

Maybe this is an example of a scale down of the exercise from an aircraft carrier to an amphibious assault ship?:

The U.S. military plans to send a key amphibious assault ship, used for a detachment of F-35B vertical landing stealth fighter jets, to a combined exercise with South Korea in April, a defense source here said Monday.

The allies’ Marines are scheduled to start the Ssangyong (double dragon) exercise here early next month in connection with the Foal Eagle training. They have yet to announce an exact schedule.

Among U.S. assets to take part in the Ssangyong drill are the USS Wasp, the Navy’s 40,500-ton multipurpose amphibious assault ship.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Here is yet another example of a comfort woman statue being built outside of Korea:

A “comfort woman” statue is expected to be erected in France to honor the victims of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery.

According to Ahn Shin-kwon, director of the House of Sharing, a shelter for surviving victims in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, the Gwangmyeong City Government and Koreans living in France are in favor of the idea.

“We are trying to figure out if there is a way to set up a statue in public place,” Ahn told The Korea Times Monday.

“We will surely face hurdles along the way just like we did during our San Francisco project. But we will keep pushing hard to make it happen.”

If erected, the statue will be the first comfort woman statue in France.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

McMaster: Maximum pressure on North Korea until progress https://t.co/ROjmPYlo7g

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) March 13, 2018

Members of the women’s and men’s 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics curling teams are welcomed by residents of Euiseong, 334 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on March 12, 2018. The women’s team won a silver in curling, the first medal in the event for the country, at the Winter Games last month, making proud the city in North Gyeongsang Province where four of the five team members are originally from. (Yonhap)

It looks like the Trump administration is remaining committed to keeping their promise of making the ROK government pay more for the upkeep of USFK:

The negotiations to renew South Korea and the United States’ deal on defense cost sharing are likely to be a “difficult” path, the top South Korean negotiator said Monday following the inaugural round of talks last week.

The allies kicked off the first round of the talks in Honolulu, Hawaii, last Wednesday to renew their five-year Special Measures Agreement governing Seoul’s share of the upkeep of the 28,500 American forces stationed in South Korea for defense against the North.

In the three-day “exploratory” talks last week, the two sides discussed at the “rudimentary level” the contributions each has made to the development of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and the positions they have over the next defense cost sharing deal, a senior government official said in a background briefing.

“Both sides shared the understanding that the current negotiations should be led in a way that intensifies the combined defense posture and further develops the South Korea-U.S. alliance,” the official said.

He noted they are likely to be “difficult negotiations,” adding that the allies may take several rounds of talks to reach a new agreement. His comments hint that the allies had wide differences as they entered into the negotiations, especially after President Donald Trump’s repeated call to raise South Korea’s share of the defense financing.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

Rex Tillerson has been rumored for quite some time to be on thin ice with President Trump.  Apparently the agreement to a summit between Kim Jong-un and President Trump is what has caused his firing:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired on Twitter after returning from an Africa trip in which he was out of the loop on North Korean talks and contradicted the White House position on Russia’s responsibility for poisoning a British spy.

In other words, his last week on the job was just like any other.

In his 14-month tenure as the nation’s top diplomat, Tillerson often found himself trying to interpret President Trump’s mercurial and contradictory foreign policy to the rest of the world.

He reassured NATO allies that the United States remained committed to the alliance even after the president threatened to pull out over “dues” that Trump believed were owed directly to the United States. (They weren’t.)

He tried to salvage the Iran nuclear deal through a European-brokered fix to the Obama-era agreement, rather than having Trump scuttle the deal completely.

Trump specifically cited differences over the Iran deal Tuesday. “I thought it was terrible, I guess, he feels it was OK.”

Now, Trump is heading into an unprecedented face-to-face meeting with North Korea’sKim Jong Un over that country’s nuclear program. The timing of the move was designed to allow Trump to put a new team in place in advance of those talks, said a White House official speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a personnel decision.  [USA Today]

You can read more at the link, but Tillerson late last week undercut Trump in regards to the upcoming summit:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared Friday to undercut President Donald Trump’s expected meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, stressing that only “talks” rather than “negotiations” would take place when the two men sit down sometime in the coming months.

Tillerson, who has clashed with Trump and seen his own work on North Korea publicly admonished by the president, did not clarify his distinction between talks and negotiations when speaking with the Associated Press.  [Newsweek]

CIA director Mike Pompeo is taking over for Tillerson if confirmed by the Senate.  This would give him about two months to put together the summit with Kim Jong-un.

In other news today China has returned to having an Emperor:

China’s rubber-stamp lawmakers on Sunday passed a historic constitutional amendment abolishing presidential term limits that will enable President Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely.

The National People’s Congress’ nearly 3,000 hand-picked delegates endorsed the constitutional amendment, voting 2,958 in favor with two opposed, three abstaining and one vote invalidated.

The amendment upends a system enacted by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1982 to prevent a return to the bloody excesses of a lifelong dictatorship typified by Mao Zedong’s chaotic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. The constitution had until now limited presidents to serving only two consecutive terms.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but President Xi has pretty much made himself Asia’s Putin.