The Steve Bannon of the President Moon administration may be putting out a trial balloon of the North Korea policy the ROK President may ultimately move towards:
Moon Chung-in
Meanwhile President Moon has declared a commitment to avoiding war no matter what, and last week Moon Chung-in, his special envoy for unification issues, approvingly stated that many South Koreans are ready to decouple the alliance in order to keep the peace. The Yonsei professor also renewed his opposition to the stationing of THAAD and called for recognition of the North as a nuclear power. While claiming not to speak for the president, despite his special status, he made sure to add that many people in the Blue House agree with him.
Let there be no doubt that Professor Moon is saying what President Moon would say if Kim Jong Un could just bring himself to sit quietly for a month or two. The envoy’s apparent function (his famous bluntness precluding any traditionally diplomatic one) is to habituate a domestic audience to messages the Blue House will issue in due course. [B.R. Myers]
I highly recommend reading the entire article by ROK Drop favorite B.R. Myers at the link. However, is anyone else seeing a possible perfect storm of events that could lead to a massive shake up in the US-ROK alliance?
NJ bizman Bob Egan fondly recalls his friendship w Dep FM Han in memoir, "Eating with the Enemy: Peace w NK from My BBQ Shack in Hackensack" pic.twitter.com/APKjQbDSno
Shown is a file photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s younger sister, Yo-jong. She was elected as an alternate member of the Political Bureau of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) at the party’s central committee meeting in Pyongyang on Oct. 7, 2017. (Yonhap)
Here is the latest on what the expert class think of President Trump’s latest statements about negotiating with North Korea:
President Donald Trump said North Korea has been making “fools of U.S. negotiators” and “only one thing will work,” the latest hint of possible military action against the communist state.
The comments came amid fears that the North may test-fire another missile in connection with the anniversary Tuesday of the foundation of its ruling party. (……)
“Trying to ‘out Kim Jong Un’ Kim Jong Un in the threat department is not a winning strategy,” said Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the U.S.-based Arms Control Association.
“It’s only making the problem worse and reinforces North Korea’s desire to advance its nuclear and missile development as rapidly as possible in order to strengthen deterrence against a possible U.S. attack,” he added. (……)
Past efforts at negotiating an end to North Korea’s missile and nuclear development have had limited success in exchange for concessions from the West.
Washington and Pyongyang signed a deal known as the “agreed framework” in 1994 in which the North committed to freezing its plutonium weapons program in exchange for aid. But that agreement collapsed in 2002.
Subsequent six-party talks involving the two Koreas, China, Russia, the United States and Japan fell apart in 2009 after the North launched a rocket shortly after President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Reif pointed out talks have been effective in the past.
“A more effective strategy would be to marry continued pressure, deterrence and containment with pursuit of diplomatic off ramps,” he said. “There is no military solution to this growing problem.” [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but first of all President Trump’s makes comments are irrelevant to North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. They were rapidly pursuing them during the Obama administration and they are rapidly pursuing them now. It doesn’t matter who is in the White House the Kim regime has made this a national goal to become a nuclear weapons state regardless of who is in the White House. The US could re-elect Jimmy Carter and Kim Jong-un would still be pursuing nuclear weapons.
As far as President Trump’s comments, it is clearly a negotiating strategy for those that pay attention. Based off of Trump’s Art of the Deal style negotiations he wants the North Koreans to think he is about to launch a massive military strike on them. This actually strengthens the State Departments negotiations attempts to find an off ramp.
Plus anyone that thinks there has been any success with negotiations with Kim Jong-un is fooling themselves. Prior negotiations brought delays in the North Koreans nuclear program when Kim Jong-il was in power, but did not end it. Can anyone name one success negotiations has brought the United States during Kim Jong-un’s time in power? The Kim Jong-un regime has made it quite clear that they plan to become a fully developed nuclear weapons state.
However, as I stated before the off ramp is not going to be North Korea giving up their nuclear weapons program. At best some sort of freeze deal could be worked out which is what the Russians, the Chinese and the academic class has been advocating for in recent months.
I doubt the Chinese would want to overnight take on responsibility for the basket case that is North Korea, but if they did it seems this would be one of the least bad options for the United States to resolve the nuclear issue:
Flags of China and North Korea are seen outside the closed Ryugyong Korean Restaurant in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, China, April 12, 2016.
Bill Emmott, the former editor-in-chief of The Economist magazine, said such a move by China would not only gain Beijing a solid foothold on the Korean Peninsula, but also the opportunity to strengthen its own geopolitical position, enhance its global power status, perhaps even the ability to claim the reputation of a peacemaker.
That is the “least bad military option” vis a vis North Korea, Emmott said, in that it would avoid subjecting U.S. allies in Asia, including South Korea and Japan, to North Korea’s retaliation that could potentially devastate large parts of South Korea.
China’s takeover of North Korea, as Emmott sees it, would put North Korea “where the country’s post-Korean War history suggests it belongs: under a Chinese nuclear umbrella, benefiting from a credible security guarantee.”
He also said he sees incentives for North Koreans to go along with the plan: “Whereas a nuclear exchange with the U.S. would mean devastation, submission to China would promise survival, and presumably a degree of continued autonomy.”
Emmott said this strategy could win over a majority of North Korea’s military, “except those closest to Kim.” [VOA News]
You can read more at the link, but considering the importance of race based nationalism in North Korea getting the military to go along with this idea I think would be a very tough sell.
Choe Ryong-hae, vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling party and known to be one of the closest aides to leader Kim Jong-un, has been picked as a member of the party’s powerful military commission, the North’s state-run media reported Sunday.
Choe, 67, was elected to the Central Military Commission of the North’s Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) during the second plenum of its seventh central committee Saturday in Pyongyang, according to the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Choe is currently one of five standing committee members of WPK’s politburo — which also includes Kim Jong-un, President of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly Kim Yong-nam and Hwang Pyong-so, director of the general political bureau of North Korea’s armed forces.
He was once believed to have fallen out of Kim’s favor and punished for mishandling a hydro power plant project in November 2015 but has apparently returned to the party leadership.
The KCNA added that Choe was also appointed a director at the party’s central committee without specifying which division or branch he would head. Saturday’s reshuffle raised the number of Choe’s official roles in the party to eight in total. [Yonhap]
When Choe fell out of favor he was sent for reeducation at the Kim Il Sung Higher Party School. South Korean intelligence predicted this was just a minor setback and he would make a political comeback which ended up being accurate. So why is Choe Ryong-hae so important to Kim Jong-un? There have been reports that his son is married to Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong. If so having Choe as a regime inner circle figure makes sense because the inner circle is traditionally limited mostly to the Kim family.
Speaking of Kim Jong-un’s sister, she received a promotion as well:
Kim Yo-jong
In the reshuffle, conducted ahead of the founding anniversary of the party which falls on Oct. 10, Kim’s younger sister, Yo-jong, has also been elected as an alternate member of the WPK central committee’s Political Bureau, according to the report.
Yo-jong, 30, was first elected a member of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, in March 2014 and then a member of WPK’s central committee in May last year. She is believed to have been educated in Switzerland along with her brother Kim Jong-un.
All these promotions are showing is that Kim Jong-un is continuing to solidify has political power base with family members he trusts that will stay loyal to him.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (C) attends a central committee meeting of the North’s Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) in Pyongyang on Oct. 7, 2017, ahead of the founding anniversary of the party which falls on Oct. 10. (Yonhap)
I found it interesting in the below article how the North Koreans have pretty much told the Russians they plan to conduct a ICBM test in the near term. If so it will be additionally interesting to see what trajectory they use to test its full capability because if it lands too close to Hawaii or Alaska it could give the Trump administration the excuse it needs to conduct an attack to destroy their nuclear and missile programs:
The next rocket launch by North Korea could be another Hwasong-12 (HS-12), which is a mobile, solid-fueled, nuclear-capable medium-range ballistic missile, or the Hwasong-14 (HS-14), first tested in July, which is believed to be a two-staged version of the HS-12, giving it a longer and intercontinental range.
“I think they are not done with testing the HS-12 into the Pacific. They also have yet to start testing the HS-14 at anything like its full range,” said Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
“Once they have done that a couple of times, I would be concerned about the potential for an atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific,” Pollack, also editor of the Nonproliferation Review, told VOA.
Russian media on Friday quoted a lawmaker in Moscow as saying North Korea is preparing to test a long-range missile able to reach the West Coast of the United States.
The comment was made by Anton Morozov, a member of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee, who was among lawmakers who returned home Friday after a four-day visit to Pyongyang for “high-level meetings.”
“They are preparing for new tests of a long-range missile. They even gave us mathematical calculations that they believe prove that their missile can hit the West Coast of the United States,” Russian media quoted Morozov, a member of a right-wing populist party, as saying.
“As far as we understand, they intend to launch one more long-range missile in the near future,” Morozov explained. “And in general, their mood is rather belligerent.” [VOA News]
Noted journalist Blaine Harden has a good piece published on the PBS Frontline website that explains why North Korea has such an adversarial relationship with China despite the Kim regime being dependent on their aid:
Kim Il-sung grew up in northeast China, where in the 1930s he became a guerrilla leader and fought alongside Chinese Communist partisans against Japanese occupiers. Without warning, local Communists turned on Kim and his men. Several hundred ethnic Koreans were tortured and murdered in a racist purge based on the party’s paranoid, and false, belief that they were secretly working with the Japanese.
Kim was arrested in China in 1934 and was lucky to survive. He later called the purge “a mad wind … [Koreans] were being slaughtered indiscriminately by [Chinese] with whom they had shared bread and board only yesterday.”
During the Korean War, his bitter memories were compounded by a painfully public loss of face. Kim Il-sung started the war in 1950 by invading South Korea with the backing of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But his army was soon obliterated by an American-led coalition and North Korea all but disappeared — until Chinese forces entered the fight and forced Kim to the sidelines of his own war. China’s top general, Peng Dehuai, chided Kim for his “extremely childish” leadership, telling him, “You are hoping to end this war based on luck.”
Kim Il-sung would never forget how he was treated. After the war, he made sure that China’s role in saving and rebuilding his state was largely erased from official histories. His resentment was compounded in 1980, when China publicly denounced as feudalism his decision to transfer absolute power to his son, Kim Jong Il, a succession that made North Korea the world’s only hereditary Communist kingdom.
Ill feelings between North Korea and China have often been mutual. Mao Zedong regarded Kim Il-sung as rash and doctrinaire — once describing him as “a number-one pain in the butt.” In 1992, China infuriated the Kim family by establishing diplomatic relations with South Korea, the archenemy of the North. [PBS Frontline]
You can read more at the link, but just like his grandfather Kim Jong-un is being a “pain in the butt” to China. However, he knows he can be adversarial because the Chinese will likely do nothing to remove the Kim regime because of the alternatives to the “pain in the butt” are worse. That is why the Chinese will never completely abandon the regime until there is a better alternative offered.
Here is the latest in the war of words between the Kim regime and President Trump:
The latest threat from Kim Jong-un’s rogue state was delivered through state media Rodong Sinmum.
In an extraordinary attack, North Korea branded the US President “the boss of hooligans and gangsters.”
And Kim’s mouthpiece warned Mr Trump is “driving the destiny of the U.S. doomed to ruin into bottomless abyss of total destruction.”
It said: “Recently the US and the South Korean puppet forces staged a combined drill for infiltrating into enemy camp for preemptive attack at strategic objects in the north and introduced a field artillery brigade to South Korea from the US mainland to fire artillery shells.
“Meanwhile, a formation of B-1B nuclear strategic bombers flew over international waters of the East Sea of Korea in a show of force”.
“What matters is the US saber-rattling coincides with the reckless remarks made by Trump, the boss of hooligans and gangsters, at the UN arena that he would totally destroy the DPRK.” [UK Express]
