Tag: North Korea

It looks like more people are beginning to catch on to my idea that the North Koreans may attempt a satellite launch:

The expert added that a more likely explanation was that the North is feigning a missile launch to press Washington for a renegotiation and would not go forward with the act since too much is at stake. 

Another possibility, according to a South Korean government source who asked not to be named, is that the North is preparing to actually launch a satellite equipped with technology recently brought in from friendly countries like China.

“The last time the North shot up a satellite was in 2016 with the launch of the Kwangmyongsong-4,” the source said. 

“Since then, North Korea has been focusing on obtaining satellite technology through unofficial cooperation with other countries or by hacking, and latest intelligence suggests they have completed a new reconnaissance satellite.”

North Korea maintains a distinction between military testing of its ballistic missiles and that of its satellites, though nuclear experts abroad say the fact that the same type of rockets are used for both purposes makes that difference hollow.

UN Security Council Resolution 1718 – approved unanimously by all members in 2006 – forbids any type of rocket launches from the North, be it for satellite or missile purposes.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but I thought they may attempt a satellite launch to give them plausible deniability they are testing ICBMs and say they have every right to peaceful space exploration. This also gives the Chinese and Russians some cover to shutdown any more sanctions the US may try to impose after the launch through the United Nations.

This becomes a way the Kim regime can increase tensions and put pressure back on the Trump administration with likely little consequences.

The change in the US-ROK joint military exercises I think was more for international consumption than what the Kim regime thinks. The Trump administration likely knew the Kim regime would protest the military drills since they did not get what they wanted from the Hanoi Summit. The Trump administration beat them to the punch by messaging how the drills were cancelled and replaced with scaled down drills. Now North Korea’s complaints seem hollow:

North Korea on Thursday (March 7) attacked ongoing joint military exercises between Seoul and Washington as an “all out challenge” to moves towards peace on the Korean peninsula.
The US and South Korea agreed on Sunday to replace two major war games that take place every spring – the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle drills – with a shorter “Dong Maeng” or “Alliance” exercise which kicked off this week.
The move was designed to further ease tensions with the North following the dramatic detente since early 2018. (……)

But the North’s official KCNA news agency has now warned that the ongoing nine-day drills were an “all out challenge” against efforts for peace and stability.

“The suspicious activities by the US and South Korean military are a reckless violation of the joint statement signed by Washington and Pyongyang and North-South declarations that commit to ending hostilities and easing military tensions,” it said.

New Straits Times

You can read more at the link.

#breaking Commercial satellite imagery analyzed by @ArmsControlWonk & @mhanham indicates North Korea may be preparing for a launch, possibly in the very near future. They say it’s impossible to know if it’s a missile or space rocket. Sohae launch facilty now fully operational. pic.twitter.com/SyS54zXphD

— Will Ripley (@willripleyCNN) March 8, 2019

I think President Trump is signaling to the Kim regime it will not be business as usual if they restart a provocation cycle:

President Donald Trump said he’d be very disappointed in Kim Jong Un if reports are accurate that North Korea has begun rebuilding a missile test site it dismantled last year.
“I would be very disappointed if that were happening,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. “It is a very early report — we are the ones who put it out — but I would be very, very disappointed in Chairman Kim.” (……)

In a separate report, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service spotted “special activities” with transport vehicles at a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) research and production site called Sanumdong located in the Pyongyang area, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper of South Korea reported, citing an unidentified member of parliament’s intelligence committee.
U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton warned North Korea that it must be willing to completely give up its nuclear weapons program or it may face even tougher sanctions.
“If they’re not willing to do it, President Trump has been very clear they’re not getting relief from the crushing economic sanctions that have been imposed on them,” Bolton told the Fox Business Network on Tuesday evening. “And we’ll look at ramping those sanctions up, in fact.”

Bloomberg

You can read more at the link.

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.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

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

— the oranckay (@oranckay) March 5, 2019

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. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

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:

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.

B.R. Myers

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.

New York Times

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:

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.

Korea Herald