Tag: negotiations

This is another example of the momentum building towards a freeze deal with North Korea:

A pro-North Korean newspaper in Japan said Tuesday that President Moon Jae-in should not expect a positive response from Pyongyang to his latest reconciliatory proposal, as Seoul is still not giving up its submission to the United States.

The Chosun Sinbo also called on South Korea to end its joint annual military exercises with the U.S. if it hopes to prove its willingness to improve ties.

Moon unveiled a broad vision for bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula during his speech in Berlin last Thursday, two days after the North test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

“If the proposal is based on South Korea’s subversion to the U.S. and hostility toward the North, Seoul cannot expect Pyongyang’s positive response,” the newspaper said.

The paper serves as an unofficial mouthpiece for Pyongyang. North Korea’s state media has yet to unveil its official response to Moon’s proposal.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but calls from the North Korean media to end US-ROK military drills will be ceased upon by the freeze deal advocates as a sign that the Kim regime is acceptable to such a deal.  The Chinese and Russians have also come out in support of suspending US-ROK military drills in return for North Korea suspending their missile and nuclear programs.

Here is yet another example of the “expert class” advocating for a freeze deal with North Korea, this time it is coming from the New York Times:

William J. Perry, a former secretary of defense, said in January, “It is my strongly held view that we don’t have it in our power today to negotiate an end to the nuclear weapons program in North Korea.”

Rather, he said, the United States should aim to “lessen the danger” by seeking an end to missile tests.

Mark Fitzpatrick, a scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, this week advocated something known as “double suspension.” The United States would suspend its military exercises with the South while the North would suspend its nuclear and perhaps missile tests.

There has been a broader shift toward such thinking. The ambition is no longer to roll back North Korea’s programs, but to mitigate the risk they pose day to day.

This is a tacit acknowledgment that North Korea’s preferred negotiations model — in which the United States takes steps away from the Korean Peninsula in exchange for peace — is increasingly accepted.

Even if North Korea never achieves its vision of full victory, it has shifted the conversation to its terms.

Mr. Fitzpatrick and others say that the United States should pursue such steps only if they point toward North Korean disarmament, but some consider this optimistic.

Ankit Panda, a senior editor at The Diplomat, and Vipin Narang, a professor at M.I.T., wrote this week that there were “no good options” for the United States, “only bad ones and catastrophic ones.”

Any viable deal with the North Koreans, they suggested, “would require explicit acceptance of their nuclear state status and significant rollbacks to the U.S. conventional military presence in the Northeast Asian theater, both of which are nonstarters for the United States.”  [New York Times]

You can read more at the link.

Here is another example of the “expert class” advocating for more negotiations with North Korea in order to sign a freeze deal:

That leaves “the least of the bad options,” which means calling for negotiations, as Mark Fitzpatrick, executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in America, has said. Talks could be started to explore “a variation on China’s proposal, backed by Russia, that the United States and the Republic of Korea suspend joint military exercises in exchange for North Korean suspension of nuclear and missile tests,” he says. South Korea and Japan back this idea, as do many former officials including former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry. A Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Korea that included former Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Senator Sam Nunn, recommended such an approach last year.

“Rather than halting joint exercises, they could be reduced in scale and length or moved, if military professionals judge that this can be done without undermining their readiness purpose or the affirmation of U.S. deterrence commitments that they represent,” says Fitzpatrick. “Drills practicing ‘decapitation’ might be omitted, for example, as well as overflights by nuclear-capable aircraft, which are only for show. Scaling back the exercises in other ways could be tied to military confidence-building measures that might also relieve North Korea of some of the expense of conducting large-scale exercises.”  [Defense One]

You can read more at the link, but if a freeze deal is struck the next thing you will here from the expert class is to have the US sign a peace treaty with North Korea.  This whole approach plays into the slow motion surrender of South Korea to North Korean hegemony and the end of the US-ROK alliance. Is it any wonder why China and Russia continue to enable the Kim regime?

I think the interviewer could have used a better word choice, but I think this is much to do about nothing:

South Korea or its head of state Moon Jae-in does not need permission from the U.S. president or anyone else to engage North Korea in dialogue, Seoul’s presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said Wednesday.

“Resumption of dialogue with North Korea may need to be pursued in close cooperation and consultation with the United States, but South Korea does not need to be allowed by the U.S. to do so,” Kwun Hyuk-ki, a Cheong Wa Dae spokesman, told Yonhap News Agency.

The remarks came in reaction to a question by a U.S. journalist in a recent interview with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, in which the interviewer from U.S. broadcaster CBS stated it was not clear whether U.S. President Donald Trump would “agree to allow” his South Korean counterpart to negotiate with the North Koreans.  (…..)

Many South Koreans reacted with anger in online postings.

“The president must have been very offended when given the question. He still managed very well,” one Internet user said on a local internet bulletin board.

Without interpreting what the word “allow” may have intended to mean, the Cheong Wa Dae spokesman flatly dismissed the notion that the South Korean president would ask for U.S. permission to engage with North Korea.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link, but President Moon’s interview with Norah O’Donnell can be viewed at this link.

So, the feeling is mutual then.https://t.co/pbvZZkskq2 https://t.co/4yLD6al2ov

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) April 19, 2017

Every time someone writes an op-ed calling for talks with North Korea, I ask myself, "Talk about what?" https://t.co/gdS2dWZmij

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) March 7, 2017

Why didn't anyone think of that before? https://t.co/pDHBibHLoc

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) February 16, 2017

There have been many North Korea experts arguing that President Trump should pursue a deal with North Korea to freeze their nuclear and ICBM programs.  One US expert has now called any freeze deal with North Korea a “mirage”:

Most proponents are more careful than Mr. Clapper and refer to a “freeze” rather than a “cap.” A cap suggests U.S. acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state for the indefinite future. Doing that would destroy U.S. credibility not only with its allies in Seoul and Tokyo but throughout the world as well. It would also undermine the global nuclear nonproliferation regime and signal to Iran that it could violate its own nuclear agreement with impunity.

Most cap proponents understand this and so talk publicly instead about a freeze, arguing that it would just be a steppingstone on the way to elimination. This is disingenuous because they themselves don’t believe Pyongyang will ever give up the nuclear weapons it already has or even fully stop its nuclear development activities under a freeze.

In truth, a freeze now would just be a cap in disguise. The entire international community would also regard it as such, unlike in earlier years when the North’s nuclear capabilities were not as advanced and their elimination was still considered possible.

A negotiated freeze is like a mirage, an illusion that recedes as quickly as one tries to approach it. That applies both to what we would need Pyongyang to do and what Pyongyang would demand of us in return for a freeze.  [The Hill]

You can read more at the link, but the way I look at it is that any freeze deal should not include a peace treaty and only scaling down of US-ROK military exercises plus some lifting of sanctions.  A peace treaty should only be offered in return for the complete dismantlement of their nuclear and ICBM programs which we know they will never do.

The freeze deal should then have strong language in it that any non-compliance by North Korea opens them to a bombing strike to ensure compliance.  Including bombing strike wording then gives the US world opinion on its side if it needs to use force and makes it in the Chinese regime’s interest to ensure their benefactors in Pyongyang comply with the deal.

1/6: Once again, Pyongyang does not want peace or even a peace treaty. It wants an endless peace treaty negotiation. https://t.co/e5nKmlJxkj

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) December 12, 2016

Over at One Free Korea he has a great read posted in response to Joel Wit’s recent article in the Atlantic advocating for President-Elect Trump to negotiate a deal with the North Koreans.  You can read my response to Wit’s article at this link.  In One Free Korea’s post he does a good job articulating what North Korea’s negotiating strategy really is:

What North Korea really wants is a peace treaty negotiation — the longer and more inconclusive, the better. Its diplomatic strategy is to draw the U.S. and South Korea into an extended “peace process” in which it would make a series of up-front demands (the lifting of sanctions) in exchange for (at most) a partial freeze of its nuclear programs, which would effectively recognize it as a de facto nuclear weapons state. In short order, it would also demand the end to U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the curtailment of missile defense, and other demands that would ensure its nuclear and military hegemony over South Korea. Then, Pyongyang would demand an end to diplomatic and humanitarian criticism of its regime, censorship of anti-regime leaflets, demonstrations, and satirical films — in short, a limited recognition of its political supremacy over Seoul that would end in a one-country-two-systems Korea under North Korean domination, with Pyongyang gradually escalating its financial and political demands. [One Free Korea]

I recommend reading the whole thing at the link.