Tag: North Korea

Kim Yo-jong is back in the news again with another alleged promotion within the Worker’s Party:

 Kim Yo-jong, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister, is believed to have been promoted to a higher official position, according to a North Korean media report Saturday.

In the report on a memorial event for late former leader Kim Jong-il held a day earlier, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) listed Kim Yo-jong alongside members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party as having attended the ceremony.

Kim was listed between eight sitting members of the Political Bureau and other alternate members, suggesting she may have been named a member or an alternate member of the organ.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Next month Kim Jong-un will have ruled North Korea for 10 years. Yonhap has a look back at how he has increased his grip on power in North Korea:

One of the first things Kim did upon taking the throne was to restore the party system to keep the military — which had developed immense power under his father’s military-first policy — in check and give authority to the relatively young leader’s decision-making process.

In 2016, North Korea held a four-day party congress, the first of its kind in 36 years, and announced the “byongjin” policy of simultaneously pursuing nuclear weapons and economic development.

In January this year, the North held another party congress and endorsed Kim as the “general secretary,” a title previously held by his father.

Having secured a political system to back his reign, Kim had no hesitation in eliminating those who were considered obstacles to his absolute power.

One of the most high-profile incidents that contributed to Kim’s reputation on the global stage was the 2013 execution of his once-powerful uncle Jang Song-thaek on charges of treason.

In 2017, Kim’s estranged half brother, Kim Jong-nam, was poisoned to death at a Kuala Lumpur airport, an assassination also blamed on Pyongyang.

Despite the brutality, Kim used tightly-controlled state propaganda outlets to position himself as a leader devoted to improving the lives of ordinary people across the nation while seeking to makeover the North’s image into that of a “normal state.”

Kim has put his wife, Ri Sol-ju, in the public eye, unlike his father, and released images of him drinking beer and smoking with party officials.

On the diplomatic front, Kim held a historic first summit with then U.S. President Donald Trump and met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in three times in 2018.

Though the nuclear talks and inter-Korean exchanges are both at a standstill, such a meeting with a U.S. leader was touted as a major achievement of the young leader inside North Korea.

“After achieving a certain level of diplomatic accomplishments, Kim no longer had to depend on the shadows of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il to legitimize his leadership,” Cheong Seong-chang, the director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute, said. “He made that clear in the 2019 constitution revision by redacting all phrases related to his father’s military-first policy.”

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but it is pretty clear that Kim Jong-un was able to increase his grip on power by neutering military leaders that could rival him and then killing anyone, even family members that could replace him.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that follows North Korea:

 An accidental conflict with North Korea is unlikely anytime soon with Pyongyang maintaining a very tight grip on its military, the chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday.

Gen. Mark Milley also dismissed the possibility of something accidental taking place within the North or its military in the near future.

“I would say that the government of North Korea at this point in time appears to be stable and they have good control over their military and their systems and all of their weaponry, etc,” the top U.S. military officer said in a forum hosted by the Aspen Institute think tank in Washington.

“So I don’t think you would see something accidental happen from them. It could, but I don’t think that’s highly probable. They have very, very tight control over their system,” he added when asked about the level of control North Korea has over its weapons and internal security.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the military actions North Korea takes are highly calculated. The shelling Yeonpyeong Island or sinking the Cheonan were all highly calculated military decisions by the regime leadership, not just military commanders going rogue.

This is a standard Kim regime playbook item, make unreasonable demands for little to nothing in return:

North Korea is said to have demanded, as preconditions for talks on declaring the end of the Korean War, that South Korea and the United States stop their combined military exercises and that economic sanctions against Pyongyang be lifted.

A lawmaker who attended a parliamentary audit of the National Intelligence Service on Thursday told reporters later that the agency’s chief had made the revelation. 

South Korea and the US have already reduced their combined drills, both to ease inter-Korean tensions and due to the coronavirus pandemic, to the extent that there is great concern about preparedness.

Above all, there is no chance of Pyongyang giving up on its nuclear weapons. It has tested an array of missiles while reportedly reactivating its nuclear facilities. 

Korea Herald via OFK

Yet this is what the Moon administration wants to do. In fact President Moon wants the U.S. to agree to an end of Korean War peace treaty which even the Korean Herald has now picked up on what I have been saying for years is a very bad idea:

The Moon regime argues that an end-of-war declaration would open the way for denuclearization. But with the war over, North Korea would likely demand the dissolution of the United Nations Command and the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea. A formal end to the war would only obscure the mandate of the UN Command — created under US leadership after the Korean War broke out — and ultimately of the US forces stationed in South Korea.

Without a doubt, these are demands that would jeopardize the nation’s security, and yet the Moon administration is pushing almost blindly for an end-of-war declaration — or even for inter-Korean dialogue to that end. The North, which had been unresponsive to the South’s proposals at first, seems to be seeking to take advantage of Moon’s obsession. It has offered preconditions just for discussion of the issue, not for an end-of-war declaration itself. 

Fortunately so far the Biden administration has resisted these calls from the Moon administration and hopefully it stays that way.

It looks like the Biden administration may be entertaining the idea of pursuing and end of the Korean War declaration with North Korea:

The U.S. special representative for North Korea said Sunday that he looks forward to continuing exploring different options with South Korea to resume dialogue with North Korea, including the proposed declaration of a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War.

Sung Kim also reiterated Washington’s willingness to help address the North’s humanitarian concerns for its people in need, while urging Pyongyang to stop missile launches, which he cast as “concerning and counterproductive.”

Kim made the remarks soon after he held talks with his South Korean counterpart, Noh Kyu-duk, to discuss joint efforts to resume stalled nuclear diplomacy.

“I look forward to continuing to work with special representative Noh to explore different ideas and initiatives, including the ROK’s end-of-war proposal as we continue to pursue our shared objectives on the peninsula,” Kim said, referring to South Korea’s official name, Republic of Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but that didn’t take long for the State Department to change their tune. The Kim regime launches a few missiles and State is now considering the end of war declaration. I guess we will see if they are actually serious about this or not. I would think Sung Kim is smart enough to realize why the North Koreans want the end of war declaration so badly.

The rhetoric for ending the Korean War has been going on for years because both the Moon administration and the Kim regime in North Korea want the peace treaty because it then challenges the legitimacy of the U.S. military presence in South Korea.  If there is peace why is USFK needed? The Korean left and the Kim regime have always wanted the U.S. out of Korea and a peace treaty with little to nothing in return from North Korea is one path towards doing that. 

The real question is if the Biden administration is going to take the bait on this or not? With all the bad headlines they may be eager for something that looks like a foreign policy victory by pursuing such a declaration. I guess we will see what happens.

This is called keeping up with the Jones. The ROK Navy recently test fired an SLBM so the Kim regime likely told their weapons experts to hurry up and put together an SLBM test as well. Additionally the ROK has a space launch this week that North Korea is likely trying to steal headlines from as well:

 North Korea fired what appears to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) toward the East Sea on Tuesday, South Korea’s military said, in yet another setback to Seoul’s drive for peace with Pyongyang.

The short-range missile was launched from waters east of Sinpo, a city on the North’s east coast, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The launch was detected at 10:17 a.m., it said.

The missile traveled about 590 kilometers at a top altitude of around 60 km, an informed source said, noting the possibility that the North might have used a submarine as a launch platform this time.

The North previously conducted an SLBM test in 2015 and 2019. The South’s military believes that it used a barge rather than a submarine during the past tests.

Officials said that Tuesday’s launch came after South Korean and U.S. intelligence authorities had detected signs of a possible weapons test near Sinpo, where the North has been pushing to build a 3,200-ton submarine capable of SLBM operations.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.