This news makes me wonder if the intent behind the raid was to cause the Hanoi Summit to fail?:

Days before President Donald Trump was set to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam, a mysterious incident in Spain threatened to derail the entire high-stakes nuclear summit.
In broad daylight, masked assailants infiltrated North Korea’s Embassy in Madrid, restrained the staff with rope, stole computers and mobile phones, and fled in two luxury vehicles.

The group behind the late February operation is known as Cheollima Civil Defense, a secretive dissident organization committed to overthrowing the Kim dynasty, people familiar with the planning and execution of the mission told The Washington Post.
The group’s alleged role in the attack has not previously been reported, and officials from the governments of North Korea, the United States, and Spain declined to comment on it.

But in recent days, rumors have swirled about the motivations behind the attack in the Spanish media, including a report in El Pais alleging that two of the masked assailants have ties to the CIA.
People familiar with the incident say the group did not act in coordination with any governments. American intelligence agencies would have been especially reluctant to do so given the mission’s sensitive timing and brazen nature. But the raid represents the most ambitious operation to date for an obscure organization that seeks to undermine the North Korean regime and encourage mass defections, they say.
“This group is the first known resistance movement against North Korea, which makes its activities very newsworthy,” said Sung-Yoon Lee, a North Korea expert at Tufts University. [Washington Post]

You can read more at the link, but I would think there is going to be a covert war against the dissidents now by North Korea and their allies.

What is it about N Korea that appeals to both far left & the far right, makes David Duke approvingly republish Bruce Cumings, & makes the alt-right exalt the racism & misogyny that the alt-left overlooks?
Maybe it just attracts inadequate souls who want to burn the world down. https://t.co/LLXSobdaHw

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) March 15, 2019

If the US Defense Secretary is to be believed, the recent media reports of the Trump administration pushing a Cost Plus 50 strategy are fake news:

Anchor: The acting U.S. defense chief has flatly denied media reports that the Trump administration is set to demand U.S. allies to pay 150 percent of the base costs for hosting American forces. 
Choi You Sun has more.

Report: Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that Washington will not impose a U.S. troop payment of “cost-plus-50” on its allies in Asia and Europe.

[Sound bite: Acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan]
(Sen. Dan Sullivan: So those reports in the press, all over the press, are incorrect?)
“They’re erroneous. We’re not going to run a business, we’re not going to run a charity. The important part is that we.. people pay their fair share and payment comes in lots of different forms, could be contributions, like in Afghanistan.”

KBS World Radio

You can read more at the link.

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

All Korean people? https://t.co/UOeMHeJM9s

— 🇰🇷Edward Oh🇺🇸 (@EdwardHBOh) March 13, 2019

It looks like the North Koreans are confirming what we all already knew, they never had any intention of really denuclearizing:

 A senior North Korean official announced Friday that her regime is rethinking whether to continue nuclear talks with the United States and maintain a moratorium on missile tests, according to foreign news reports.
Speaking at an urgent meeting with diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui cited the U.S. attitude in the recent Hanoi summit.
“We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind,” she was quoted as saying by Russia’s TASS news agency.
The Associated Press also quoted Choe as saying that her country was deeply disappointed by the failure to strike an agreement in Hanoi late last month.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but all President Trump said during the summit was that if the Kim regime closed down all their nuclear facilities he would remove the economic sanctions. The Kim regime clearly is not ready to do that.

In the Japan Times they have an op-ed published in response to the White House’s Cost Plus 50 strategy for paying for the stationing of US troops.

The “Cost Plus 50” formula means the White House is aiming for allies to pay 100 percent of U.S. stationing costs plus a premium of 50 percent on top of that. While there are arguments to be made about whether such a goal is even achievable (spoiler alert: it is not), it is important to highlight some of the bad assumptions that underwrite the belief that “allies don’t pay enough.” (……..)

Bad assumption 4: It is easy to tally up the cost of stationing forces overseas.
Reality: For the administration to demand Cost Plus 50, it must first assess how much it actually costs to station forces overseas. Take it from a former alliance manager who has run the “cost drill,” there are simply too many inputs to produce a figure without arbitrarily making decisions on what to include or exclude.
Do you include the salaries of overseas service members? What about costs for moving personnel and their families? How about rotational units who are only in a host nation for a few months out of the year? Do you add the cost of running overseas schools for dependent family members? Commissaries? Recreation areas? Uniform clothing sales stores?
How about research and development for the equipment that is stationed there? Should a country pay more if it has F-35s instead of F-16s or ballistic missile defense-capable destroyers instead of non-BMD capable ones?
The list goes on and on, and even then, the list ignores things like sunk costs and the fact those forces are overseas for U.S. interests.

Japan Times

You can read more at the link.

Here is what the USFK commander General Abrams recently had to say to Yonhap News after the end of the Dong Maeng exercise:

(…….) On Tuesday, Seoul and Washington wrapped up their new weeklong Dong Maeng command post exercise, which replaced the usually two-week Key Resolve drills. Dong Maeng is the Korean word for alliance.
The allies introduced the exercise, seen as a truncated version of Key Resolve, to back diplomacy for lasting peace on the peninsula. But conservatives here voiced concerns that the smaller-scale exercise could harm military readiness when Pyongyang has yet to take any substantive steps toward denuclearization.

The hard-bitten commander, who has led the USFK, U.N. Command (UNC) and South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC) since November, stressed that his troops “train at every level to develop mastery-level skills.”

“I have been doing this for 37 years … I consider myself an expert (at a) mastery level of operational art in training and readiness,” he said. “If I tell you that what we are doing is meeting the requirements for us to have a trained and ready force, you need to take that to the bank.” (………)

‘USFK presence has nothing to do with peace treaty’

The commander reiterated that the American troop presence in South Korea has nothing to do with any potential future peace treaty with North Korea.

Commenting on his recent controversial congressional remarks seen as signaling the possibility of the U.S. troop withdrawal — or drawdown — in the event that a peace treaty is signed with Pyongyang, Abrams said that it was “completely taken out of context.”

“That one sentence did not take into context the entire interchange I had with that particular senator,” he said. “Our troop presence is an alliance decision that has nothing to do with any potential future peace treaty.”
In response to a senator’s question on Feb. 12, he said the 28,500-strong USFK will stay on the peninsula “until there is a peace treaty, because we still remain in a state of armistice, a cessation of hostilities.”

Yonhap