The Kim regime has officially agreed to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics:
This photo, taken by the Joint Press Corps on Jan. 9, 2018, shows South Korea’s chief delegate Cho Myoung-gyon (L) shaking hands with his North Korean counterpart Ri Son-gwon before holdinghigh-level talks between South and North Korea. (Yonhap)
North Korea on Tuesday accepted Seoul’s proposal to hold military talks to reduce tensions and agreed to send a delegation to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South, according to a joint press statement issued after their high-level talks.
In their first formal dialogue in two years at the border village of Panmunjom, they also agreed to reactivate cooperation and exchanges through diverse levels of talks including a high-level meeting, Seoul officials said.
The agreement marked a major breakthrough in the years of frosty ties between the two countries and in last year’s heightened tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile provocations.
North Korea offered to send high-ranking officials, cheerleaders, performing artists, taekwondo demonstration teams and journalists in addition to athletes. The South promised to provide them with necessary conveniences.
They will hold working-level talks to further discuss details of the North’s participation. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but those of us who have watched North Korea for years know they are not participating in the Winter Olympics out of good will. There will undoubtedly be a bill to be paid by the South. One way the South may end up paying is if the North Koreans demand inflated travel costs:
North Korea’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics will require agreements over a series of logistics issues, such as how to transport the North Korean delegation to the host city, where to accomodate them and who will ultimately cover the bill. [Newsweek]
Why should the South pay for the Kim regime to attend the Olympics? It should be the responsibility of the Kim regime to pay their own way like all the other countries. If the North Koreans have enough money to lob missiles everywhere and set off nuclear bombs they have enough money to cover travel and lodging for their delegation going to the Winter Olympics.
If the ROK government gives in to covering travel and lodging costs I hope President Trump tweets that he will send the ROK government the US’s travel bill as well.
Here is one theory on what the Kim regime is attempting accomplish with its offer of talks with South Korea over its attendance at the upcoming Winter Olympic games:
But perhaps Kim is a smarter student of the cutthroat game of geopolitics than we give him credit for—seeking to delay a showdown on terms more favorable to him. What if Kim keeps the talks focused on his nation’s participation at the games—and asks for nothing in return?
If talks go smoothly and North Korea does indeed join the games he appears like a winner back home, having secured his nation’s place at the Winter Games. He could even send his sister, Kim Yo Jong, as the lead representative.
Kim could even score another PR victory: imagine athletes from a divided Korea marching into the Olympic stadium together under a unified flag—with members of the Trump family sitting in the same stadium looking on. With there being almost no downside to this for Kim, I would argue this is very likely what North Korea is banking on.
And here is where Kim could get quite slick. He could leverage the positive nature of the talks to propose many other sweeteners to enhance inter-Korean ties—restarting joint development projects, offering family reunifications and even going so far to propose an inter-Korean summit between the two heads of state. This would occur of course while not talking to the Trump Administration—and quite on purpose, dodging key questions about Kim’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. Negotiations would move slowly—with North Korea adding to its list of demands over time, but not quite sabotaging the talks. Negotiations seem to start to drag on, but overall, there is hope—just what Kim is wants. [Harry J. Kazianis – Center for the National Interest]
You can read the rest at the link, but the analysis continues that eventually the Kim regime will restart missile tests while the negotiations continue. The restarting of the missile tests is to perfect the reentry technology they have yet to master. The talks will buy them time to do this which they may otherwise not have under the current dynamic of possible military action from the US. With ongoing negotiations the ROK may not support any US military action in response to continued testing. This has the potential of driving a wedge in the US-ROK alliance if the two allies do not agree with how to respond to renewed testing.
Moon Jae-in's proposal to give service credit for membership in "civic groups" looks suspiciously like a scheme for politicizing the civil service by packing it with hard-left activists. https://t.co/9DZ80hhdWShttps://t.co/9DZ80hhdWS
Members of the ship salvage unit of the Navy’s First Fleet run before a maritime rescue drill off the eastern coastal city of Gangneung on Jan. 8, 2018, in this photo provided by the fleet. The drill is meant to help ensure the safe and successful hosting of the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics. (Yonhap)
Here is what will be discussed and who will be discussing it at this week’s inter-Korean talks:
This file photo shows Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon (L), the chief South Korea delegate for high-level inter-Korean talks scheduled for Jan. 9, 2018, and his North Korean counterpart Ri Son-gwon, the chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the agency in charge of inter-Korean affairs. (Yonhap).
South Korea will seek to discuss ways to ease military tensions and reunite divided families during this week’s high-level talks with North Korea, Seoul’s chief delegate said Monday.
Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon made the remarks one day before South and North Korea will hold their first formal talks in more than two years to discuss the North’s potential participation in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and ways to improve their ties.
“Basically, the two sides will focus on the Olympics. When discussing inter-Korean relations, the government will seek to raise the issue of war-torn families and ways to ease military tensions,” Cho told a group of reporters.
Cho will lead a five-member government delegation to the first inter-Korean dialogue since December 2015. The North’s chief negotiator is Ri Son-gwon, the chairman of North Korea’s state agency in charge of affairs with the South.
The South’s delegation also includes Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung, who has a range of experience in inter-Korean talks. It will be the first time that the country’s top point man on unification and the vice minister are included together in a delegation. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but what is interesting is that the North Korean lead representative Ri Son-gwon is the long time aid of North Korean General Kim Yong-chol. Kim is believed to have been the person who planned the sinking of the ROK Naval vessel the Cheonan and shelled Yeonpyeong island in 2010.
The selection of RI as a negotiator makes me wonder if he was specifically chosen to remind the ROK negotiators that if the Kim regime does not get what they want from the talks more Cheonan and Yeonpyeong island attacks could happen during the Winter Olympics.
Here is what President Trump had to say about the planned talks between North and South Korea in regards to the upcoming Winter Olympics:
President Donald Trump, accompanied by Republican congressmen and members of his cabinet, departs after speaking at a news conference following a congressional Republican leadership retreat at Camp David, Md., Saturday, Jan. 6, 2018. (Andrew Harnik/AP)
“Right now they’re talking Olympics. It’s a start, it’s a big start,” Trump said during a question-and-answer session after meetings with GOP leaders in Congress and Cabinet members on the administration’s 2018 legislative agenda.
Kim “knows I’m not messing around. I’m not messing around, not even a little bit, not even 1 percent. He understands that,” Trump said.
Assessing next week’s discussions, Trump said “if something can happen and something can come out of those talks, that would be a great thing for all of humanity. That would be a great thing for the world.”
The president also said that he had spoken with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in, who “thanks me very much for my tough stance.”
“You have to have a certain attitude and you have to be prepared to do certain things and I’m totally prepared to do that,” Trump said, contending his tough words have helped persuade the North to sit down with the South.
Trump had tweeted last week: “Does anybody really believe that talks and dialogue would be going on between North and South Korea right now if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total ‘might’ against the North.” [Associated Press]
This is just another example of why these military sexual assault cases are not as black and white as the advocates want people to believe:
What started as a consensual relationship of rough sex and role playing between two Army attorneys could be headed to court-martial.
Members of the defense and prosecution teams made their closing statements Friday, on the third and final day of a preliminary hearing for Capt. Scott Hockenberry, an Army attorney and former special victims prosecutor accused of sexual assault and battery against a former girlfriend.
Hockenberry faces three counts of sexual assault and three counts of assault consummated by battery, based on accusations that he choked, slapped and held a knife to the accuser’s throat, in addition to forcing her to have sex without a condom during the summer of 2016.
The case’s fate hangs on whether Hockenberry was mistaken about the nature of the incidents, in the context of a relationship in which both accuser and accused agree that acts like slapping and hair-pulling were fair game.
The prosecution presented the accuser, who declined to testify at the hearing, as an educated, professional woman who — despite her knowledge of self-defense techniques — froze up when she felt threatened by a man she was intimate with.
“She doesn’t hide the fact that she’s done things she’s not proud of,” special victim prosecutor Lt. Col. Carol Brewer said. “She doesn’t deny that she should have known better.”
The defense pushed back with multiple letters and testimonies from Hockenberry’s friends and former lovers, who described him as a top-notch officer, as well as kind and considerate of the women he had been intimate with. [Army Times]
Here is what Hockenberry did in one instance of rough sex:
Where Hockenberry crossed the line, Brewer said, was in holding a knife to the alleged victim’s neck and forcing her to have sex without a condom, despite condom usage being an explicit rule of their relationship.
This is what Hockenberry claims his accuser is really upset about:
Helixon pushed back, alleging that the alleged victim is out for revenge.
“It’s at that time that she discovered the breadth and depth of the other individuals” he was having a sexual relationship with, Helixon said.
You can read the rest at the link, but this article read more like the Duffel Blog than the Army Times.
Foreign tourists show off a trout that they caught on a frozen river in Hongcheon, some 100 kilometers east of Seoul, on Jan. 5, 2018, the opening day of an annual trout fishing festival. (Yonhap)
The Washington Post is not happy that the US is not participating in talks with North Korea and the ROK and has thus declared that the President is now irrelevant:
But whatever happens, it does look like U.S. policy on North Korea is rubbing up against the limitations of Trump’s unilateralist view of the world — what Evan Osnos of the New Yorker recently dubbed “retreating from the front.” When Seoul-Pyongyang talks go ahead next week, Trump will be in an unusual position — watching from afar, having capitulated on one key North Korean demand.
The Trump administration had hoped to further isolate North Korea on the world stage. Thanks to Trump’s brash tactics, though, it may be the United States that ends up on the outside. [Washington Post]
First of all, President Trump did not capitulate on the delay of the Key Resolve exercise. North Korea wants joint exercises cancelled and so does the Chinese. The US did not cancel the exercise, they delayed the exercise at the request of the ROK who did not want it to overlap with the Winter Olympics especially if the North Koreans decide to attend. The exercise is still going to happen just like it does every year and thus there has been no capitulation.
As far as “retreating from the front” and claims of unilateralism, these critics of the President must be living in an alternate reality. The Trump administration has arguably pursued more multilateral measures than past Presidents. The Trump administration has aggressively pursued and implemented United Nations sanctions on North Korea. The Treasury Department has aggressively worked with international partners to target the Kim regimes finances through the global banking system. They have also worked with other countries to kick out North Korean diplomats often responsible for bringing in foreign currency to the regime. Unprecedented pressure has also been put on China by the US to faithfully implement sanctions on North Korea. US intelligence has worked with the ROK to seize ships smuggling oil into North Korea.
Just because the US is not sitting at the table with the ROKs and the North Koreans to discuss a delegation attending the Olympics does not mean US policy is unilateral and the Trump administration has made themselves irrelevant.
