This should come as no surprise that the Moon administration is openly collaborating with North Korea for a “pretend denuclearization” deal:
South Korea is in the process of persuading the United States to accept a piecemeal deal for the North’s denuclearization, Seoul’s spy chief told the National Assembly on Friday.
According to one lawmaker who sat through a briefing by Suh Hoon, head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the director said the South Korean government is in the midst of “constant discussions” with the United States in regard to a denuclearization process by the North that “can only proceed piece by piece.”
“Complete denuclearization is not something that can be done immediately since it requires a gradual process,” Suh reportedly said. “But the United States and South Korean positions are not divergent.”
The step-by-step approach at the center of Seoul’s campaign is closer to the “small deal” favored by the North compared to the U.S. push for an all-in-one plan that has reduced negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang to a stalemate since the collapse of the summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, from Feb. 27 to 28.
You can read more at the link, but a piece by piece deal means that the US will drop sanctions for little to nothing in return from North Korea. We have seen this happen already twice during the Clinton and Bush administrations; this is why the Trump administration has been pushing for an all or nothing deal.
I am sympathetic to the Jayu Joseon group’s goal of removing the Kim regime, but it is a slippery slope to support raiding foreign embassies:
A member of the North Korea’s embassy tells reporters not to take pictures of the diplomatic building in Madrid, Spain. on March 13, 2019.
Spain has issued two international arrest warrants in the case, one for a Mexican national residing in the U.S., Adrian Hong Chang, and the other for an American citizen. After lifting a secrecy order in the case, a Spanish investigating judge revealed the identities of seven of the alleged 10 intruders in a court document on Tuesday. It remained unclear if the Spanish government identified the suspects in the raid through their own investigation or whether U.S. authorities had passed on the names of the alleged intruders.
The group has alleged the U.S. betrayed its trust after members approached the FBI.
“The organization shared certain information of enormous potential value with the FBI in the United States, under mutually agreed terms of confidentiality,” the group said on its website. “This information was shared voluntarily and on their request, not our own. Those terms appear to have been broken.” Lee Wolosky, an attorney for Free Joseon and a former U.S. envoy for Guantanamo, told NBC News that “when all the facts come out regarding Madrid, it will be clear that the Spanish judge reached a number of inaccurate conclusions.”
“Certainly the decision of the Spanish judge to publicly disclose the names of those working in opposition to the Kim regime — which routinely assassinates its adversaries — was irresponsible and put these individuals in unnecessary jeopardy.”
You can read more at the link, but if the Jayu Joseon group was not on North Korea’s hit list already, this raid has definitely made them a target for some Kim Jong-nam style retaliation.
The Moon administration is further pushing the confederation idea with no hint of North Korea denuclearizing:
The South Korean government is planning to fund research projects into a range of potential models for unification with North Korea, documents seen by NK News showed this week, with case-studies including federation and EU-style confederation among several under consideration. In plans for the two research projects, the South Korean Ministry of Unification (MOU) asked prospective participants in the project to examine cases of gradual unification. Previous research on unification, it said, has concentrated on comparing Korea’s case to that of the “radical unification” of Germany in 1990, asking researchers to assume the North and South would likely take a more gradual approach. Participants are also asked to look to the step-by-step process of unification suggested in the “Korean National Community Unification Formula” and pay attention to “implications that could be considered in the process of gradual change.” The formula has long been the South Korean government’s formal plan for unification and is composed of three stages: reconciliation and cooperation, inter-Korean confederation, and unification.
You can read more at the link, but if these so called researchers try to copy the EU model, then their analysis is already a failure. There were no countries in the EU that were international pariahs threatening world peace by threatening their neighbors with conventional or nuclear attack. There was no countries in the EU launching terrorist attacks and a non-stop propaganda campaign into a neighboring country to undermine it either.
I can save the Moon administration all the money they are paying for this research by stating that any confederation that happens will occur on North Korean terms. That means a peace treaty that leads to the withdrawal of USFK, North Korea does not denuclearize, and South Korea carries the burden of rebuilding North Korea’s infrastructure, modernizing their military, and funding the Kim regime’s lavish lifestyle.
There will be no political or social openness in North Korea in return, instead the ideological indoctrination will be strengthened by the “victory” over the Americans by getting them to withdraw and the tribute the South Korean “puppets” are paying to Kim Jong-un in preparation for North Korea’s final victory.
Hmm, I wonder if North Korea was behind all those emails I got from the Ugandan prince wanting to give me ten million dollars if only I gave my bank information. 😀 https://t.co/eoiqNsc3eL
Is anyone surprised that CNN is trying to sensationalize this nuclear football story to make the claim that President Trump doesn’t care about Puerto Ricans:
He was there to survey the path of destruction left by Hurricane Maria. But when President Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico in October 2017, the island’s dire predicament was hardly the only topic on his mind. People familiar with the visit said the President was distracted by other matters — including his then-devolving war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — as he toured devastated neighborhoods and took an aerial tour of the damage. At one point, Trump pointed to the “nuclear football” — a briefcase always in the President’s vicinity that can be used to authorize a nuclear attack — and claimed he could use it on Kim whenever he felt. “This is what I have for Kim,” he said, according to three people familiar who witnessed the remark.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the incident. The episode came amid an increasingly acrimonious period that saw Trump boast of the size of his “nuclear button” and threaten to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea. Since then, he and Kim have developed a warm friendship and met for two summits. But at the time, the casual reference to his nuclear capabilities was another sign of the spiraling rhetoric that marked his early interactions with Kim. And, to some officials, it was an indication of Trump’s disinterest in the plight of Puerto Ricans, who suffered for months without power and limited resources as their island recovered from the walloping storm. “There were other topics that were being discussed and my view is that the sole focus of that trip should have been on Puerto Rico,” said Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló in an exclusive interview on Thursday.
If I was this group I would keep a very low profile because I would not be surprised if the Kim regime is plotting to give their leadership the Kim Jong-nam treatment:
Adrian Hong Chang
A political group that claimed responsibility for a raid on the North Korean embassy in Madrid last month announced on Thursday it will temporarily cease all activities, but said it will eventually shake the North’s Kim Jong-un regime “to its roots.”
Free Joseon, also known as Cheollima Civil Defense, defined itself in a statement released on its website as an international group composed of North Korean refugees around the world mobilized under the “conviction to break [North Korea’s] dynastic succession under the Kim family.”
Adding that it had no links to North Korean defectors residing in the South, whose activities are monitored by Seoul, the group also asked international media to stop paying attention to its structure and members for security reasons, since “greater acts lie in store.”
A Spanish High Court investigation report released on Wednesday said 10 assailants from Free Joseon stormed the North’s embassy in Madrid on Feb. 22. Armed with knives and fake guns, the group allegedly stole computers and pen drives reportedly containing sensitive information before successfully escaping to the United States.
Court papers named the mastermind behind the attack as Mexican citizen Adrian Hong Chang, a longtime figure in North Korea-related activist circles in the United States. Upon returning to the United States after the successful raid, Hong apparently tried to offer the information he obtained to FBI officials. It remains unclear whether the FBI accepted the offer, but the State Department denied the U.S. government had any ties to the group on Wednesday. According to Reuters on Thursday, an FBI investigation into the raid is currently in the works.
Hong is said to be one of the co-founders of the North Korea refugee support group LiNK, or Liberty in North Korea, and the head of a strategic consulting firm called Pegasus Strategies LLC, which he described in a published article as a company that uses modern technology to “penetrate closed societies and empower people in those nations.”
N.K. leader attends military meetingNorth Korea’s top leader Kim Jong-un (front, L) attends a military meeting in Pyongyang on March 25-26, 2019, in this image from the North’s Korean Central TV broadcast on March 27. It was Kim’s first reported public appearance since March 10 when he voted in the parliamentary election. Kim gave opening and closing speeches at the meeting. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)
Here is what well known author and Korea expert Michael Breen has to say about the current efforts to denuclearize North Korea by the Trump administration:
The Korea Times roundtable to tackle the aftermath of the no-deal Hanoi summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the U.S.’s Donald Trump is under way at the Times conference room, March 14. From right are Prof. Hwang Jae-ho, director of the Global Security Cooperation Center, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; Asia Times correspondent Andrew Salmon; Michael Breen, author of “The New Koreans;” Michael Hay of HMP Law, who ran North Korea’s only foreign law firm; and The Korea Times digital managing editor Oh Young-jin. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
What does North Korea want? North Korea’s leaders may be rational and consistent, but they are opaque, which leads to a lot of guessing about them. One certainty is that they want sanctions lifted. After that, it becomes unclear. Possibility number one is that they want to come in out of the cold, develop their economy and that for this they are prepared to destroy their known nuclear weapons and facilities, but retain the potential to re-arm.
Another possibility is that they plan no real change and are approaching Trump from a risk management perspective. If that is the case, they might serve up a missile launch when Trump announces his plan for re-election. A third possibility is that they still want to unify the peninsula on their own terms and see nuclear weapons as integral to this aim.
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common ― there is a role for nuclear weapons. A fourth possibility ― that North Korea wants to give up being a nuclear power and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its tail between its legs ― would be nice, but appears to be the least favored by analysts.
It is precisely because it is this last scenario that the U.S. is pushing for that suggests the talks may well fail. I hope I am wrong, but the answer to our question of whether Trump is failing may well be, no, not yet.
You can read more at the link, but I think it is pretty clear what North Korea wants. First of all they want to keep their nuclear weapons not as a deterrent, but instead to unify the Korean peninsula. Remember their artillery threat on Seoul has been enough of deterrent to prevent a US attack on North Korea for decades. Remember the Kim regime has killed many American troops over the decades with no US counterattack because of this artillery threat.
So clearly the expense and political capital they have put into their nuclear weapons program is intended to give them a military advantage over South Korea. This will all factor into the future confederation that the Kim regime wants to establish with South Korea that they can use their nuclear weapons to help extort the ROK to implement once the US-ROK alliance is ended.
This is why the Kim regime wants “Pretend Denuclearization” in return for dropping sanctions, followed by a peace treaty that would ultimately lead to a US troop withdrawal to make the Confederation under North Korea’s terms fall into place.
