As Professor B.R. Myers predicted, the Moon administration is quickly pushing the Kaesong Industrial Park and Mt. Kumgang tours on the Trump administration as some kind of “ethnic exemption” to sanctions:
South Korea will talk to the United States about preparatory work for the future resumption of two key inter-Korean economic projects and about waiving sanctions on North Korea if necessary, Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said Tuesday. Cho made the remarks a day after he reported to President Moon Jae-in that the government will discuss with the U.S. ways to resume a long-suspended tour program to the North’s Mount Kumgang and reopen an industrial complex in the North’s border city of Kaesong. South Korea is considering these measures as part of efforts to keep the dialogue momentum alive and create better conditions for negotiations after last week’s breakdown of the second summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump.
North Korea has enacted sanctions on family reunions for decades. These families could be reunited, forever, tomorrow. Their continued separation is North Korea’s conscious choice. https://t.co/YGf2iJtCYr
If North Korea is committed to denuclearization as Kim Jong-un and President Moon Jae-in keep telling us, then why won’t they shutdown their uranium enrichment facility? As I have been saying the Kim regime has no interest in real denuclearization, they want “pretend denuclearization” which is what closing Yongbyon in return for dropping sanctions would be:
The second North Korean nuclear site that U.S. President Donald Trump wanted eliminated were the covert underground highly enriched uranium facilities at Bungang, just a few kilometers away from Yongbyon, according to multiple sources familiar with last week’s summit in Hanoi.
In a post-summit press conference, Trump said the United States knew about “every inch” of North Korea and that at the summit he “brought many, many points up that [he] think[s the North Koreans] were surprised that we knew,” in reference to U.S. demands for denuclearization measures from Pyongyang that went beyond dismantling the nuclear complex at Yongbyon.
Ri Yong-ho, the North’s foreign minister who took part in the closed-door discussions at the summit, also confirmed the Americans had demanded “one more measure” in addition to scrapping the Yongbyon facilities which they could not accept.
Disagreement on demolishing a second plant is believed to have been a crucial sticking point in Hanoi that ultimately resulted in Trump walking out without signing a much anticipated deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last Thursday.
ROK Drop favorite, Professor B.R. Myers has posted his thoughts about the outcome of the Hanoi summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. In the article Myers says President Trump did the right thing walking away from the summit which will probably not win Professor Myers too many fans in academia and the media:
B.R. Myers
Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.
In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.
You can read more at the link, but Myers believes that the Moon administration will now highly pressure the Trump administration to allow an “ethnic exemption” to sanctions to reopen Kaesong and the Kumgang Resort tours. I don’t see President Trump bending on this unless the North Koreans give something up just as valuable in return.
Myers in the rest of the article also provides a good historical analysis how the Korean left was just as much if not more collaborating with the Imperial Japanese than the Korean right. This is significant because with the failure of the summit, the Moon administration in South Korea will likely further push anti-Japanese sentiment to create a common cause with North Korea.
The Korean left also uses Japanese sentiment to label their domestic political enemies on the right as pro-Japanese collaborators even though historically the left was probably the more significant collaborators.
This time the New York Times is piling on President Trump for not reaching a deal with Kim Jong-un during the Vietnam summit:
As President Trump settled into the dining room of a French-colonial hotel in Hanoi on Thursday morning, the conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader with whom he had struck up the oddest of friendships, was already turning tense. In a dinner at the Metropole Hotel the evening before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took cover during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand bargain: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and facilities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy. An American official later described this as “a proposal to go big,” a bet by Mr. Trump that his force of personality, and view of himself as a consummate dealmaker, would succeed where three previous presidents had failed. But Mr. Trump’s offer was essentially the same deal that the United States has pushed — and the North has rejected — for a quarter century. Intelligence agencies had warned him, publicly, Mr. Kim would not be willing to give up the arsenal completely. North Korea itself had said repeatedly that it would only move gradually.
Several of Mr. Trump’s own aides, led by national security adviser John R. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, thought the chances of a grand bargain for total nuclear disarmament were virtually zero. Some questioned whether the summit meeting should go forward.
You can read more at the link, but if President Trump had struck a deal to drop sanctions in return for dismantling Yongbyon these same critics would be saying it was a bad deal for the reasons listed in this article, which it would be. That is why the only option was to get them to agree to give up all their nuclear capabilities in return for dropping sanctions even if as Mr. Bolton believed the odds were close to zero of it happening.
I have not seen anyone in the media yet discuss how President Trump is setting up Kim Jong-un for stronger actions in the future if he restarts a provocation cycle strategy. If the US has a strong reaction to a North Korean provocation, the Trump administration would have a strong case that they have tried all diplomatic measures to include canceling military exercises, not putting out provocative statements, treating Kim Jong-un with respect, and even meeting with him, not once, but twice to hash out a deal. That is why I think the Vietnam summit went forward more than hoping an almost 0% chance of a deal would be struck.
The fact that President Trump kept expectations low before the summit, so readily offered up the grand bargain, and then left quickly afterwards shows this was the strategy going in to the summit. It has now been made very clear to Kim Jong-un what the price for dropping sanctions will be and now the ball is in his court on how he wants to respond.
With someone as unhealthy looking as Kim Jong-un this probably a prudent thing to do:
Kim Yo-jong holds ashtray for her brother at Nanning Station in China, on Tuesday. (Yonhap)
Former South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun also said her holding the ashtray was “normal.”
“It is more natural for Kim’s sister to hold the ashtray than for others to do it. If it was another person, it could be interpreted as trying to flatter the leader,” Jeong said in a radio interview Wednesday.
Pundits say it is very important for the North to limit access to anything that could possibly reveal information about Kim’s health, and that collecting the cigarette butts is an important task. According to sources, North Korea is making sure to collect everything that Kim has used, such as tissues and towels. Kim is also said to bring along his own toilet when he travels.
It looks like there will be a vodka shortage for a little while for the Kim regime elite:
Vodka bottles that were seized by the customs authorities in the port of Rotterdam. Photograph: Robin Utrecht/AFP/Getty Images
Dutch customs officials at the port of Rotterdam have seized 90,000 bottles of vodka believed to be destined for the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and his army chiefs. The discovery, on the eve of Kim’s two-day summit with Donald Trump in Hanoi, was made after Dutch authorities flagged up the suspicious route and records of a Chinese-owned container ship, Nebula.
The Russian vodka, contained in 3,000 boxes, had been recorded as being due for unloading in China, via the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam. When officers sought to retrieve the container from the ship’s hull, it was found to be concealed and hemmed in by the fuselage of an aircraft also due to be exported to China.
The Warmbier case is clearly taking a backseat to the larger US goal of trying to get North Korea to denuclearize:
Donald Trump took Kim Jong Un’s word that he knew nothing of the torture of an American college student while in North Korean custody, an about-face that sparked a bipartisan backlash back home on Thursday. The US president appeared to side with the reclusive leader about the 2017 case of Otto Warmbier, drawing outrage from incredulous Democrats who accused Trump of repeatedly aligning with tyrants. The 22-year-old Ohio native was returned to the United States in a coma and died shortly afterwards. A US judge concluded Warmbier was tortured by North Korean authorities. At the conclusion of his Hanoi summit with Kim, Trump told reporters he talked with Kim about the “horrible” Warmbier case. “He knew the case very well, but he knew it later,” Trump said, adding that “some really bad things” happened to Warmbier while he was detained. Kim “tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
It will be interesting to see if whoever was responsible for this is caught by Spanish authorities:
The North Korean embassy in Madrid.
The Spanish Ministry of the Interior is currently investigating an incident alleged to have occurred at the DPRK embassy in Madrid, an official confirmed to NK News on Wednesday. Spanish outletEl Confidencial first reported that the DPRK embassy had been the subject of an attack and break-in last Friday, with diplomatic staff said to have been tied up and gagged while computer equipment was stolen. “We can confirm that this is under investigation, but that is the only thing we can say,” an official from the communications department of the Ministry of the Interior said. When pressed to confirm a robbery had in fact taken place, the official reiterated that they had nothing more to add.
We promised Libya’s dictator Gaddafi that if he gave up his nuke program, we wouldn’t overthrow him. He gave them up, and we blew him away. NK’s Kim won’t make the same mistake. Just another negative consequence of short-sighted regime-change war policies
