Tag: North Korea

Long time Korea watchers are probably not surprised by the below statement from Kim Jong-un who has backed down from his supposed plan to fire four missiles towards Guam:

The state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Tuesday that the army had finalized the blueprint and presented it to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as he inspected his Strategic Force command the day before.

“He examined the plan for a long time and discussed it with the commanding officers in real earnest,” KCNA said, adding that Kim offered praise for the “close and careful plan.”

The leader reportedly said “he would watch a little more the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees,” as the North calls the Americans, and warned that he may “make an important decision as it already declared” if the conduct persists.
KCNA quoted Kim as saying “that if the planned fire of power demonstration is carried out as the U.S. is going more reckless, it will be the most delightful historic moment when the Hwasong artillerymen will wring the windpipes of the Yankees and point daggers at their necks.”

Kim said the U.S. “should stop at once arrogant provocations against [North Korea] and unilateral demands and not provoke it any longer,” the agency said.
Analysts said Kim was trying to tamp down skyrocketing tensions that have generated the most serious crisis on the divided peninsula in years. But they also warned he left the door open to launch a missile if he feels provoked.
“By North Korean signaling it’s a clear de-escalation, and it’s also an ask for the de-escalation from the American side,” said John Delury, an Asia expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but the whole threat was clearly just rhetoric because the regime is not suicidal.  They know full well attacking Guam would lead to the end of the regime.  This backing down from attacking Guam doesn’t mean they will not launch a provocation.  With the upcoming UFG military exercise they will very likely do something.

As I have said before if there are any deadly provocations planned they will be launched against a ROK target not the US.  North Korea has killed and injured many ROK servicemembers and civilians over the decades to include in recent years with little to no retaliation.  They know killing Americans will lead to retaliation which is why provocations directed towards the US have been missile and nuclear tests.  I don’t see anything right now changing this calculus for the Kim regime.

The recent tensions with North Korea has caused the US media to stop in and see what former US Army defector to North Korea, Charles Robert Jenkins is up to:

Now, Jenkins — 77 but looking much older, with a deep-lined face and distant expression — lives a quiet life on Sado, a small, pastoral island in the Sea of Japan. He speaks in the thick Southern accent of his North Carolina childhood, and the stories he tells, 13 years after the end of his North Korean adventure, recall decades of solitude, deprivation and torture.

“In North Korea, I lived a dog’s life,” he said in a rare interview, as he drove his boxy Subaru through Sado Island’s rice paddies and sleepy villages. “Ain’t nobody live good in North Korea. Nothing to eat. No running water. No electricity. In the wintertime you freeze — in my bedroom, the walls were covered in ice.”

Jenkins works now as a greeter in Mano Park, a placid tourist attraction on the Japanese island, selling senbei, a type of rice cracker. Tourists see him and squeal with delight — “Jenkins-san!” — as he passively poses for photos.  [LA Times]

Here is what he had to say about the death of Otto Warmbier and the safety of his family:

Jenkins was aghast that Americans would visit North Korea as tourists. “It’s crazy,” he said. “North Korea will do anything to keep a foreigner.” (The U.S. has banned tourism to the country, starting this month).

Yet he said North Korea’s medical system likely contributed to Warmbier’s death. Authorities there, he said, had forced Jenkins into several seemingly arbitrary medical procedures. “Had about five operations,” he recalled. In one day, they removed his appendix, followed by a testicle. “Because I was kicked when I was a school kid,” he said. “I didn’t have no problem, but they found out about it, and they said, ‘That’s gotta come out.’”

After his release, complications that developed from the two procedures could have killed him — and likely would have, if Japan didn’t immediately hospitalize him on his release.

Then there was the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam — Kim Jong Un’s half-brother — in a Malaysian airport in March. Two women ambushed Kim with VX nerve agent, one of the world’s most toxic substances. To Jenkins, it was a reminder that Pyongyang’s brutality knows no bounds — and no one is immune.

“I worry about my daughters more than anything,” he said as he drove his Subaru along the coast. He has forbidden them to comply if Japanese police should attempt to pull them over while driving. Anyone could be a North Korean agent.

“North Korea give them enough money, you don’t know what they’ll do,” he said. “North Korea wants me dead.”

You can read the rest at the link, but it seems that if the Kim regime wanted him dead they would have killed him by now.

This is the most original & important North Korea op-ed I've read in a very long time. You should read it, too. https://t.co/3yVCTAodca

— Joshua Stanton (@freekorea_us) August 13, 2017

It seems that further an American is away from the US mainland the better their perspective becomes on the recent rhetorical wars between President Trump and Kim Jong-un because I think Guam Governor Eddie Calvo is correct in his assessment:

Guam’s leader said Monday that “sometimes a bully can only be stopped with a punch in the nose”, in a spirited defence of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric against North Korea which has the island in its crosshairs.

While Trump’s critics accuse him of inflaming tensions with Pyongyang, Guam governor Eddie Calvo said he was grateful the US leader was taking a strong stance against North Korean threats to his Pacific homeland.

“Everyone who grew up in the schoolyard in elementary school, we understand a bully,” Calvo told AFP.

“(North Korean leader) Kim Jong-Un is a bully with some very strong weapons… a bully has to be countered very strongly.”

Calvo, a Republican, said Trump was being unfairly criticised over his handling of the North Korea crisis, which escalated when Pyongyang announced plans to launch missiles toward Guam in a “crucial warning”.

He said North Korea had threatened Guam — a US territory which hosts two large military bases and is home to more than 6,000 military personnel — at least three times since 2013.

Trump has responded by threatening “fire and fury”, warning last week that the US military was “locked and loaded” to respond to any aggression.

“President Trump is not your conventional elected leader, what he says and how he says it is a lot different from what was said by previous presidents,” Calvo said.

But he pointed out previous presidents had also used strong words to warn off Pyongyang, including Barack Obama who said last year that “we could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals”.

“One president (Obama) said it one way, cool and calmly with a period… the other said fire and fury with an exclamation point, but it still leads to the same message,” Calvo said.

He rejected suggestions that Trump and the North Korean dictator were as bad as each other when it came to the sabre-rattling playing out in the western Pacific.

“Well there’s only one guy that has vaporised into a red mist his uncle or a general because he fell asleep in a meeting with an anti-aircraft gun, that’s Kim Jong-Un,” he said.

“There’s only one guy that’s killed his brother with one of the most toxic nerve agents ever created, that’s Kim Jong-Un.”  [AFP]

You can read more at the link, but the statement that Governor Calvo is referring to is when President Obama threatened that the US could destroy North Korea in response to a submarine launched ballistic missile test just last year.  The media did not freak out and it did not lead to a global crisis where everyone thought war was imminent.

The phone call between President Trump and Guam Governor Eddie Calvo may have been about assuring the island the US government completely supports them, but it is amazing how many news headlines I saw that focused on the joke Trump made about how the current tensions will improve Guam tourism:

If there’s one thing that Guam does not have to worry about while the tiny island is in the nuclear cross hairs of North Korea, it’s tourism, President Trump told the island’s governor in a phone call made public on Saturday.

The threat by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to create “an enveloping fire” around the tiny United States territory in the Western Pacific will bolster Guam tourism “tenfold,” Mr. Trump said in the recorded conversation with Gov. Eddie Calvo.

The recording was put on the Republican governor’s Facebook page and other social media accounts.

Mr. Trump said: “I have to tell you, you have become extremely famous all over the world. They are talking about Guam; and they’re talking about you.” And when it comes to tourism, he added, “I can say this: You’re going to go up, like, tenfold with the expenditure of no money.”  [New York Times]

You can read more at the link and watch the video of the phone call below:

The North Koreans bombed an airliner prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the games still occurred so I don’t think a bunch of rhetoric is going to stop the Winter Olympics:

But here we are, talking about miniaturization and intercontinental ballistic missiles, fretting about that inflection point where words turn to bombs, understanding that not only PyeongChang next year but Tokyo in 2020 will live under the constant threat of annihilation from the most irrational of actors.

Amazingly a Washington Post writer is declaring the North Korean nuclear crisis as being former President Reagan’s fault:

Over the past few days, the United States and North Korea have become locked in nuclear brinkmanship. After North Korea declared that its ballistic missiles could hit anywhere in the United States, President Trump vowed that continued North Korean provocations would be “met with fire and fury and — frankly — power.” North Korea responded by threatening to attack the tiny island of Guam, a U.S. territory.

But it was another tiny island that set the United States and North Korea down this path. Few Americans will recall the 1983 invasion of a small Caribbean nation thousands of miles from North Korea. But in fact, this conflict set the stage for the nuclear standoff today. It intensified the animosity between the two countries, sending North Korea on a quest for nuclear weapons to combat what it saw as a looming U.S. threat.

In October 1983, the United States invaded Grenada. The Kim family regime that controls North Korea saw this invasion as an early warning sign: If the United States could perceive even a small spice island as a threat, so too could it eventually train its sights on North Korea. Without an effective deterrent, any regime perceived as a threat would be little match for American military might.  [Washington Post]

You can read the rest at the link, but comparing Grenada to North Korea is completely apples and oranges.  Does anyone think the US would have invaded Grenada if there was a massive artillery and WMD threat that could kill millions to include large numbers of US troops and American expats?  That has the been reality for decades with North Korea’s strategic military advantage with Seoul within convention artillery range.  This fact has kept American military action against North Korea in check despite numerous deadly provocations over the decades.

If anything is driving Kim Jong-un to develop his missile and nuclear programs it is what he saw happen to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi under the last two Presidents, not Reagan.  Kim Jong-un probably cannot even find Grenada on a map.

Quoted in @joshrogin @washingtonpost article on the need to sanction China & no longer give it immunity from US law https://t.co/pSh3NRCopd

— Bruce Klingner (@BruceKlingner) August 9, 2017

Shown is a stamp issued by North Korea on Aug. 8, 2017, to commemorate the successful test launch of a Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile on July 4, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said. (Yonhap)

This is very interesting that the Chinese government has apparently given the US the go ahead to attack North Korea in response to a strike against US soil, but not to the extent that it leads to regime change:

China won’t come to North Korea’s help if it launches missiles threatening U.S. soil and there is retaliation, a state-owned newspaper warned on Friday, but it would intervene if Washington strikes first.

The Global Times newspaper is not an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, but in this case its editorial probably does reflect government policy and can be considered “semi-official,” experts said.  (…..)

“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral,” it added. “If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.” [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.