South Korean soldiers walk over the tracks of the Gyeongui railway blocked by a barbed wire fence inside the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas at the western section of the inter-Korean border in Paju, north of Seoul, on May 15, 2018. The leaders of South and North Korea agreed to link cross-border roads and railways on April 27 when they held the historic inter-Korean summit at the truce village of Panmunjom inside the DMZ, raising prospects for South Korea’s project to build a railway connection with North Korea and Eurasia. The Gyeongui railway links Seoul with Sinuiju, a city on the Korean Peninsula’s border with China. (Yonhap)

It appears these activists will not be happy until there are comfort women statues in every major city in the world:

Japanese diplomats in Germany are reportedly trying to obstruct a civic group’s plan to erect a “girl statue” representing wartime sex slavery victims inside a museum in Bonn.

The diplomats recently visited Marianne Pitzen, founder and chief of the Bonn Women’s Museum, following media reports that a girl statue would be installed inside, said Yi Eun-hi, an activist who is leading the project.

Over 200,000 South Korean women were abused as sex slaves by the Japanese army before and during World War II.

At the meeting with Pitzen, the Japanese diplomats insisted that the number of the so-called comfort women is difficult to calculate and that they “volunteered” to serve for Japanese soldiers.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Over at One Free Korea he has an interesting posting up that I recommend everyone read where he discusses whether US Forces Korea (USFK) should be withdrawn from the peninsula:

To save Korea’s democracy, withdraw its American security blanket

Most Korea-watchers will view the recent hints from both Seoul and Washington about a U.S. withdrawal with alarm, and as a grave risk to the security of both Korea and Japan. Indeed, it’s one more development that’s consistent with my hypothesis that Pyongyang means to coerce and cajole Seoul into submission, first by lowering the South’s defenses, and later by ruling it through an inter-Korean confederation that it will use to suppress dissent, neutralize it as a political and military threat, and loot its resources without the burdens of war, occupation, or cultural pollution. The Panmunjom agreement will fuel Pyongyang’s expectations of collaboration by a government in Seoul that prioritizes ethno-nationalism and appeasement over the protection (much less the propagation) of liberal democratic values.  […….]

If the arc of Korean history bends toward capitulation, the continuing presence of American forces is less likely to bend it back than soothe into passivity those Koreans who still can. Our presence would only create a false sense of security and quell any sense of alarm that the Blue House is consenting to a quiet capitulation of the freedom and prosperity their parents and grandparents won at such a terrible cost. Maybe the U.S. presence is contributing to the clearest and most present danger to Koreans’ security by obstructing the concentration of their minds, by retarding their development of a confident sense of nationhood, and by excusing them from the grim burdens of sisu.

Can America do anything to bend that arc back? One answer might be to present Koreans with a stark choice and a referendum. So let President Trump go to his summit with His Porcine Majesty, and soon. Let him hear Kim Jong-un’s offer. Then, let him — and John Kelly, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, and Mike Pompeo — explain to us why those terms are tantamount to surrender, why Moon was a fool or worse[10] for agreeing to them, and that while South Korea is free to surrender itself, we would rather retrench ourselves in Japan than subsidize frivolous policies that undermine our own security.  [One Free Korea]

I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link, but I have long believed that there has been peace in Northeast Asia since the end of the Korean War because of the balancing influence that the US military provides to the region.  However, that doesn’t mean we need all the troops currently in South Korea if real concessions are made by the North Koreans.

For example if the Kim regime removes the vast majority of their troops and artillery positions along the DMZ would USFK still need to have the 2nd Infantry Division forward deployed in Korea?  Would the Air Force need as many aircraft stationed there to take out those artillery positions?  That is why I think this argument needs to be influenced by real actions by North Korea not pretend ones, which is all we have seen so far from the Kim regime.

Remember the 12 North Korean restaurant workers that defected to South Korea that infuriated the Kim regime?  Well it appears the Moon administration may be laying the ground work to send them back:

South Korea says it will look closer into the circumstances surrounding the arrival of a dozen North Korean restaurant workers in 2016 after a television report suggested some of the women might have been brought to the South against their will.

Unification Ministry spokesman Baik Tae-hyun on Friday did not provide a clear answer on whether the women could be sent back to the North if it’s confirmed they didn’t want to come to South Korea.

Seoul had previously said it sufficiently confirmed the women’s free will in escaping from the North and resettling in the South.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but I am not sure what else there is to examine on this issue.  The 12 defectors have been resettled in South Korea and nothing is stopping them from going to a local television station and claim they were kidnapped.  The Kim regime has been using their leftist lawyer allies in South Korea, the group call Minbyun, to claim that the the 12 restaurant workers were kidnapped by the ROK National Intelligence Service (NIS).  Since their defection Minbyun has been making life very hard for the refugees anyway they can.

Now it appears that the Moon administration may be putting pressure on these 12 restaurant workers to return to North Korea as well.  I would not be surprised if the Moon administration is also putting pressure the other high profile defector Thae Yong-ho to keep silent during the Kim regime’s current charm offensive as well.

South Korea wants to build a $35 billion high-speed railway to connect North Korea with the world https://t.co/M8971oqLe4 via @businessinsider

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) May 10, 2018

Here is the statement put out after the trilateral summit in Tokyo:

Leaders from South Korea, Japan and China on Wednesday adopted a special statement in support of the Panmunjom Declaration, which was signed at the inter-Korean summit last month and confirmed the shared goal of the two Koreas of complete denuclearization.

The special statement was made following a trilateral meeting in Tokyo of President Moon Jae-in, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Premier Li Keqiang of China, the first of its kind in more than two years. The last such three-way summit was held in November 2015 in Seoul.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

Here is what was agreed upon that really matters during the trilateral summit:

At the Moon-Abe talks, the latter made it clear that sanctions imposed on the North should not be lifted unless Pyongyang demonstrates concrete denuclearization measures, emphasizing that the closing down of a nuclear testing site and a halt in the firing of ballistic missiles were not sufficient for sanctions relief.

“It is the timing that matters when it comes to easing or withdrawing sanctions altogether on North Korea,” the prime minister was quoted as saying by the Blue House during the bilateral summit talk with Moon in the afternoon.

“We should not reward the North for just shutting down the Punggye-ri nuclear site or stopping the test-firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles. We need additional and substantive actions from the North,” said Abe.

On the matter of easing sanctions, Moon stressed Seoul could not move to ease sanctions unilaterally, noting that sanctions were international agreements in which Seoul took part.

“There could be worries that South Korea could make a unilateral move to ease sanctions independent of the international consensus. There is no need for such worries,” he said. [Joong Ang Ilbo]

Basically Prime Minister Abe is making the case that North Korea was rewarded in past agreements for doing little to nothing in return.  This time they should not be rewarded until they take real measures to denuclearize.

This really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, the only thing surprising is how open this South Korean diplomat was about how pro-American diplomats have been marginalized in the Moon administration:

The Foreign Ministry Tuesday admonished the new ambassador to Vietnam, Kim Do-hyun, for his critical remarks about the United States during an interview with a vernacular Korean paper.

The remarks in question are as follows: “The reason why the inter-Korean summit was successful is because pro-United States diplomats were not put in charge. … a majority of Korean diplomats have thought they could get promoted if they were close to Americans and if not, they would have no future.”

A ministry spokesman said, “Ambassador Kim went to his post several days ago. Since he will have many chances to have interviews with media, we have internally taken necessary steps.”

He said that he didn’t reveal what steps were taken but didn’t object when asked whether it was tantamount to a “verbal warning.”  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but I infer from Kim’s remarks that the Moon administration has marginalized diplomats considered pro-US and are only using North Korean sympathizers to interact with the Kim regime.  This is not surprising considering the Moon administration has many left wing North Korean sympathizers.  For example President Moon’s Chief of Staff, Im Jeong-seok is a former supporter of North Korea’s juche philosophy.

How many people over the years have claimed that sanctions against North Korea won’t work?  Sanctions against North Korea work if everyone enforces them.  Now that the North Koreans are back to negotiate what we will see next is whether the ROK and the US will relieve the Kim regime of the economic pressure they are facing with some kind of nuclear agreement:

The economic pinch is almost certainly why Kim Jong Un is suddenly so eager to talk to the outside world, traveling to Beijing in March and then crossing the demilitarized zone to meet Moon.

“Why would he be doing this unless he was being constrained by sanctions,” said Stephan Haggard, professor of Korea-Pacific studies at the University of California at San Diego and a close monitor of sanctions. “I think he’s sweating.”  (….)

But analysts generally agree that the sanctions must be inflicting serious pain on North Korea, a desperately poor country with a highly inefficient economy.  (….)

The sanctions are probably putting a chill through both these economies. That has to be a huge concern for Kim, who once declared that North Korean people “would never have to tighten their belts again.”

“If I were Kim, I’d be much more worried about textile workers out of work, milling around doing nothing, than I would be about an American attack,” said William Brown, a former intelligence analyst focused on North Korea who now teaches at Georgetown University. Citing the kind of discontent that brought down communist regimes in Eastern Europe, he said, “The real dangers to the regime are internal.”

But Moon could pursue very little economic engagement without sanctions relief.

Not only has the U.N. Security Council imposed waves of sanctions on North Korea, but South Korea imposed its own direct punishment following two deadly North Korean attacks on South Korea in 2010.

Those measures are still in place, and conservative politicians are urging Moon to leave them there. Even if Moon overturned his predecessor’s order to close the Kaesong industrial park, an inter-Korean factory complex on the northern side of the border, transferring money or equipment to it would be almost impossible in the current sanctions environment.  [Washington Post]

This all goes back to why the Moon administration is buttering up Trump with promises of a Nobel Peace Prize by getting on the peace train and believing that North Korea is really going to denuclearize this time.

The national flags of South Korea (R) and North Korea (2nd from R) are raised next to each other at the medal ceremony of the World Team Table Tennis Championships in Halmstad, Sweden, on May 5, 2018, in this photo from the Korea Table Tennis Association. The two Koreas formed a unified team during the championships and won a bronze medal. It was the second time that they played as a single squad after the championships in Chiba, Japan, in 1991. (Yonhap)

North Korea using PR offensive to divide U.S. and South Korea: Top Republican https://t.co/pROdovXgzI

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) May 7, 2018