It is still business as usual for North Korea’s hackers:
North Korean hackers are suspected of carrying out cyber attacks aimed at raising profits and collecting data despite warm relations between the two Koreas, security experts here said Thursday.
According to security sources, North Korea has not desisted from attacking South Korean organizations even though Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to stop hostile acts against each other after the landmark summit held in late April.
A North Korea-based hacking group, dubbed “Hidden Cobra,” recently infected local hospitals and manufacturing firms with malicious codes, cyber security sources said. The group is also presumed to have attacked financial and media companies around the globe to collect data.
ESTsecurity Corp., a local security firm, said Wednesday a hacking group is sending out e-mails disguised as a South Korean governmental agency carrying out research on separated families of the two Koreas. The email can infect the computer with advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. [Yonhap]
I hope no one is surprised by this because this has always been one of the long game end states:
Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to work toward the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea during their third summit in China, according to a Japanese press report.
The Asahi Shimbun reported Thursday the two leaders agreed to cooperate strategically on a shared objective of the removal of the 28,500 U.S. soldiers in the South, following the summit in Singapore where President Donald Trump described joint drills as “very provocative” and costly.
The Asahi’s source, described as well versed in China-North Korea affairs, said Beijing and Pyongyang also agreed to bide their time and not rush negotiations with Washington.
The report comes a day ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo‘s visit to Pyongyang, his third known trip to North Korea.
China and North Korea see an opportunity to ask U.S. troops to leave if and when a peace treaty is signed. [UPI]
You can read more at the link, but you can add the Russians and South Korean leftists to this list as well that want US troops off of the peninsula. Despite claims in the media that Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in want US troops to stay after any peace deal is reached, this is just all rhetoric to prevent energizing South Korean conservatives against Moon.
Remember Moon is a very skilled politician that needs to keep the Korean right at bay and public anxiety down. If he advocated openly for a USFK withdrawal that would give the South Korean right an issue to strongly attack him with and cause much public anxiety after decades of security guarantees provided by US forces. That is why I think the Moon administration will publicly say they support USFK staying, but will then have their surrogates do things to make life difficult for USFK.
Possibly the future of USFK after a peace treaty could look a lot like the current THAAD site in Seongju. President Moon will say all the right things that he supports USFK, just like he supposedly supports the THAAD site, but will set conditions to make it difficult for its continued existence and cause the US to withdraw troops on its own accord.
A former nuclear envoy from past six party talks believes things are different now and Kim Jong-un really does mean to denuclearize:
Joseph DeTrani, a former U.S. special envoy for the six-party talks with North Korea, speaks to The Korea Times during an interview at The Shilla in Seoul on June 29. / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
DeTrani, currently a professor at Missouri State University’s Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies in Fairfax, Virginia, believes that this time will be totally different from the past in three aspects.
3 reasons to be optimistic
The first thing that he thinks we should pay attention to is that the ongoing movement has been spearheaded by the top two leaders ― U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, not negotiators.
“The difference is that the two leaders are talking about these critical issues and coming up with the path to resolve it. It’s their words and commitment. That changed the equation,” he said in an interview with The Korea Times at The Shilla hotel in Seoul on June 28.
“In the past we were working through negotiators and looking for approval of leadership. It has been reversed productively. So it’s a different equation,” he added. “Literally, Kim, President Trump, Moon and Xi Jinping all are saying the same thing. We have never had this before.”
The second reason he cited for his optimism is that the North’s economy is in a dire situation.
According to DeTrani’s assessment, without sanctions relief, Kim won’t be able to push for economic developments he has promised to his people so he has made a strategic decision to denuclearize the isolated country.
“The key here is economic development. Kim has said that he had to do more for the people and we see elements of economic reform going on now. This is the path seemingly he wants to take,” he said.
“If he has crushing sanctions and intimidating joint military exercises, (it means) total isolation. So I think he has made strategic decision to change that equation.”
The third reason behind his optimism is his belief that Kim, who studied in Switzerland, is a different person from his father or grandfather.
“Recently, North Korea had worked with UNICEF. That’s significant. I think he is a different leader and he wants to do more for the people,” he said. [Korea Times]
Here is the latest from the State Department on North Korean denuclearization efforts:
The U.S. State Department on Tuesday declined to specify a deadline for North Korea’s denuclearization ahead of negotiations to be led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later this week.
Pompeo is slated to travel to Pyongyang Thursday to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and flesh out a denuclearization agreement signed by Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump at their historic summit last month.
U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said Sunday that he expects Pompeo to discuss with the North Koreans a plan to dismantle the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in a year.
“I know some individuals have given timelines. We’re not going to provide a timeline for that,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said at a regular press briefing.
“The secretary’s looking forward to having these meetings. A lot of work is left to be done, certainly. We go into this eyes wide open, with a very clear view of these conversations,” she added. [Korea Times]
Is max pressure dead? Well, there's moderate pressure. If "max pressure leading to engagement" was 2017, then 2018 might be "engagement supported by moderate pressure." Need to be plugged in to know re movement of military hardware? No, it's all pub infohttps://t.co/8M5UAKRojg
Kim Jong-un should have invited Dennis Rodman to attend this:
South and North Korean men’s and women’s basket ball teams will play goodwill matches today and Thursday in Pyongyang, possibly with the North’s leader Kim Jong-un attending.
The “Unification Basketball Competition” is the fourth of its kind and is being held for the first time in 15 years since the last games were played in 2003. The Koreas agreed to schedule the event at a meeting on sports cooperation last month.
A 101 member delegation departed for Pyongyang Tuesday, led by Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon. The delegation includes 50 basketball players, government officials, reporters and a broadcasting team.
“The PyeongChang Winter Olympics became the foundation of peace on the Korean Peninsula, so I hope that the Pyongyang unification basketball competition serves as an occasion to further develop peace on the peninsula,” Cho told reporters before departure.
The delegation headed to Pyongyang Sunan International Airport from Seoul Airport in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, via an air force transport aircraft, given international sanctions on North Korea.
This is the first time for the unification minister to visit Pyongyang in 11 years. His last visit was in 2007 as a presidential secretary. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but I wonder what the cost of the “hotel bills” are that South Korea will have to pay to North Korea to play these games?
ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers has posted some thoughts about the Singapore Summit:
Considering how much of the agreement was obviously worked out before the summit — and with how many portents of American weakening — it’s wrong to blame Trump for what happened on the day itself. His buffoonery was mortifying, yes, but edifying too. All he did was act out the hoary conventional wisdom as if on a pantomime stage. The spectacle was a devastating caricature of all our wishful dealings with the North.
As the day unfolded it became clear that, once again, our side had devoted far more attention to event-planning than to ideological reconnaissance. We saw the usual indifference to the question of how the North could justify its existence after disarming. We saw the lie given to our tough-guy rhetoric. We saw a familiar and quintessentially American combination of credulity and condescension.
All this was as old as the nuclear crisis itself. But for once we got it without any dignifying sheen of sophistication. I suspect many observers who professed to be appalled by Trump’s performance were really only lamenting the lack of that sheen. Their criticism of him for not getting more from Kim in writing makes little sense. Either the regime has changed fundamentally or it hasn’t. If it has, it would indeed be counter-productive to impose a series of hurdles that must be jumped over within a certain time. If it hasn’t, no concessions it might commit to paper are going to have any more value than the last ones. [B.R. Myers]
As always I recommend reading the whole posting at the link, but Professor Myers’ big issue with the Trump administration is that they are viewing North Korea as a failed communist state eager to open up and develop like China. Myers believe this is wishful thinking if one studies and understands the ideology of the Kim regime. The very legitimacy of the ruling Kim regime is threatened if it disarms and no longer seeks reunification under North Korean terms.
Professor Myers has been one of the strong advocates of the viewpoint that the overall goal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is to force the withdrawal of US troops and create a confederation of the Korean peninsula under North Korean terms. This viewpoint has led to criticism by people who think the nuclear weapons are just to keep the US from trying to militarily remove the Kim Regime and that the North Koreans are not stupid enough to think they can actually unify the peninsula on their terms.
What this viewpoint does not understand is that the Kim regime is not going to seek reunification in a 1950’s like invasion, but rather through a war of skirmishes ending in a confederation on North Korean terms. One Free Korea sums up the Kim regime’s strategy the best in the below analysis:
The fall of Seoul will not end with the crash of tank treads through the Blue House gates, or by renaming Seoul Kim Il-Sung City, but with signatures, handshakes, smiles, clicking shutters, and the praise of editorialists that two warring states “de-escalated tensions pragmatically” by embarking on a “peace process.” The surrender will be too gradual, and the terms too vague, to be recognizable as such. It will have something like the consent of the governed — that is to say, the soon-to-be-ruled — through the assent of elected leaders who will approve a series of easy, lazy decisions to yield to Pyongyang’s calculated confrontations, embarking irreversibly toward the gradual strangulation of free debate, and then, a slow digestion into one-country-two-systems hegemony on Pyongyang’s terms. [One Free Korea]
