Tag: United States

The newly appointed U.S. Secretary of of Defense is in Seoul and he has quite a full plate of issues to discuss with his ROK counterparts:

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper arrived in South Korea on Thursday for talks that are expected to focus on a series of requests Washington has been making to Seoul, including a greater financial contribution to the cost of stationing American troops here.

Also expected to be on the agenda for Esper’s talks with South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo are the U.S. initiative to secure the shipping routes in the Strait of Hormuz and Washington’s wish to get a military information-sharing pact between the South and Japan renewed.

Esper landed at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, from Mongolia for a two-day visit as part of his five-nation tour of the Asia-Pacific region, which includes stops in Australia, New Zealand and Japan, according to defense ministry officials. It is his first overseas trip since taking office last month.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but trying to get the ROK to pay significantly more for US troop upkeep will be extremely challenging. Also getting the ROK to contribute any serious naval commitment to the Strait of Hormuz will likely be challenging as well considering the relatively good relationship the ROK has with Iran. The ROK could look at this issue as that Iran is not messing with their energy shipments so why give them excuse to by supporting the U.S. on this issue?

Other issues to be discussed is the GSOMIA that South Korea has threatened to end with Japan over the current trade dispute and Seoul OPCON transfer. I would think the OPCON transfer should not be contentious considering Seoul wants the transfer, but the GSOMIA issue may be challenging.

Like I said the Secretary Esper has a full plate working these challenging issues with the ROK.

This is a good idea to not only discourage travel to North Korea, but also put a process in place to detect a intelligence collection threat that could be coming to the U.S.:

Any South Korean who visited North Korea after March 2011 will no longer be able to visit the United States visa-free, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The U.S. government said it is putting new restrictions on its Visa Waiver Program, or VWP, for citizens of 38 countries including South Korea who have visited Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia or North Korea. 

Under the VWP, South Korean citizens are eligible to visit the United States visa-free for up to 90 days as long as they register through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization at least three days in advance. 

This is no longer an option for South Koreans – or citizens of the other 37 countries – who have visited the North. While they will be allowed to visit the U.S., they will have to obtain a visa from a U.S. consular office.

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

This would seem to be in line with President Trump’s call for Japan to do more militarily in support of the US. However, this is not going to go over well in South Korea:

The defense ministry on Thursday voiced strong opposition to an alleged push by the U.S.-led United Nations Command (UNC) to include Japan as an official member, saying that, according to U.N. Security Council resolutions, Tokyo is not entitled to such status.

According to sources, the UNC is seeking to include Japan as one of the UNC’s “sending states,” a move likely to inflame public sentiment in South Korea amid renewed historical tensions with Tokyo.

Should Japan obtain the membership, it would pave the way for its military involvement in the event of an armed conflict on the peninsula — a scenario unthinkable for many Koreans who harbor grievances stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule.

Except for South Korea and the United States, the UNC currently has 16 sending states that are to provide combat troops, equipment and other forms of support in case of a contingency on the peninsula.

The sending states include Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy and New Zealand. They have posted contingents at the UNC to support its operations centering on the observance and enforcement of the armistice that halted the 1950-53 Korean War.

“Japan did not participate in the Korean War, so it cannot serve a role as a sending state,” Col. Roh Jae-cheon, the deputy ministry spokesman told a regular briefing, citing U.N. Resolutions 83 and 84.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It seems a bit premature from President Moon to declaring peace in our time:

 President Moon Jae-in said Tuesday that North Korea and the United States have effectively declared an end to their hostile relations with the symbolic weekend meeting between their leaders at the inter-Korean border.

Although they did not sign any document, their action was tantamount to a “de facto declaration of an end to hostile relations and the beginning of a full-fledged peace era,” Moon stressed, speaking at a Cabinet meeting.

He was referring to a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on Sunday.

Yonhap

President Moon might want to wait until next year to see if this is still the case because Kim Jong-un has previously said the regime is giving until next year for sanctions to be dropped. The Trump administration does not seem like it is going to drop sanctions without real denuclearization. I guess we will see what happens.

This news should not be a surprise to anyone:

Democratic lawmakers in the United States, including some running for the White House, say there’s little in President Donald Trump’s diplomatic track to convince them that his meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (gihm jung oon) may lead to a nuclear breakthrough.

Trump is coming under criticism for what Democrats see as his affinity for authoritarian leaders such as Kim and they are skeptical that the Trump-Kim sit-down at the Demilitarized Zone may amount to anything more than a photo opportunity.

Sen. Chuck Schumer says “dictators seem to get elevated and people who believe in democracy not.”

Former Obama Housing Secretary Julian Castro, a presidential candidate, wonders why Trump appears keen to raise Kim’s profile when, according to Castro, Kim hasn’t abided by past commitments about the North’s weapons programs.

And Sen. Bernie Sanders, also a 2020 candidate, says he’s not opposed to sitting down with America’s adversaries, but he tells ABC’s “This Week” that “we need real diplomacy” and he hasn’t seen that under Trump

Associated Press

This is coming from the people who supported President Obama when he flew to Cuba with his whole family to hang out with the dictators there. I doubt President Trump’s engagement with North Korea is going to get them to denuclearize, but the claims from his critics sound more like “since Trump is for it, I must be against it” instead of any reasoned policy position.

Here is an update on the military family that has been trying to adopt their Korean niece in order to give her citizenship in the United States:

That was when the former Army lieutenant colonel and his wife Soo Jin were informed by the Federal District Court of Kansas that their adopted daughter Hyebin will be deported back to South Korea due to U.S. immigration law that cuts off the age when foreign-born adopted children can become naturalized U.S. citizens at 16.
The Kansas court ruled that Hyebin must return to Korea after she finishes earning her chemical engineering degree at the University of Kansas, which she will do in December. Schreiber and his wife are appealing through the 10th District Court of Appeals, though they are not optimistic about their chances of winning.
“We have no delusions that everything’s going to come out like a flowing bed of roses,” Schreiber told the Military Times. “We’ve always planned for two courses of action. So it was never something that we thought, ‘Yeah, things are going to work out the way we wish they would come out.’”
The immigration policy that is forcing Hyebin to leave the U.S. is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A spokeswoman for USCIS told the Military Times via email that “it is USCIS policy not to comment on ongoing litigation, nor will we speak to individual cases due to privacy concerns.”

Army Times

You can read more at the link, but this is a really tough case because LTC Schreiber missed the cut off date because he deployed to Afghanistan. When he came back to do her citizenship he found out it was too late for Hyebin to receive citizenship.

I am a bit surprised she not able to get a work visa sponsored by an employer considering she is about to graduate with a chemical engineering degree.

What is amazing about this is if she was a child of illegal immigrants she would be allowed to stay, but since she is a daughter of American citizens she will likely get deported.

On This Day in 1942, US Authorities Began Locking Up Americans In Concentration Camps https://t.co/040fOgXKFO

— tomcoyner (@tomcoyner) February 10, 2019

It makes sense that the Chinese government is using the Confucius Institutes for intelligence gathering and promoting Chinese government propaganda:

As Chinese cybertheft increases and the numbers of Chinese exchange students and scholars rise, officials have stepped up pressure on administrators to take more precautions to guard against espionage and efforts to steal American technologies and research data.

Opponents of the Confucius Institutes argue that such programs give Beijing a toehold in prominent American academic communities to influence attitudes and censor discussions of subjects sensitive to China, such as the Dalai Lama, Taiwan and human rights.
Robert Daly, a China scholar at the Wilson Center who previously directed the University of Maryland’s initiatives on China, dismissed as “nonsensical” the suggestion that Confucius Institutes are hotbeds of espionage. But he and many other experts agree that they are clearly instruments of the Chinese government.

“You can ask why American universities are letting the Chinese Communist Party set up soft-power agencies on their campuses,” Daly said. “A lot of university presidents believed that having a Confucius Institute will somehow curry favor with China such that they will be able to raise development dollars in some way or another. What they find is that it doesn’t create leverage for them, but leverage for the Chinese Communist Party, that if the university does something that the Chinese Communist Party disapproves of, they may withdraw Confucius Institute funding.” (……..)

Scrutiny of China’s efforts on college campuses has increased on many fronts. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned universities in February not to be naive about Chinese spies in their midst and said the Confucius Institutes are on his radar. Vice President Mike Pence, in an October speech, accused Beijing of using organizations on campuses to monitor Chinese students for anti-China speech or activities.

LA Times

You can read more at the link.

Via a reader tip comes news that President Moon’s official aircraft was blacklisted by the US for traveling to North Korea: 

President Moon Jae-in’s official airplane has been blacklisted by the U.S. because it had flown him to North Korea, it emerged Wednesday. The official plane even had to be cleared for a visit to the U.S. in September after it was slapped with a 180-day ban. 
One diplomatic source said, “A blacklisted plane can only travel to the U.S. by special permission.” 
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September 2017 that bans all aircraft that traveled to North Korea from entering the U.S. for 180 days. But exceptions can be made. 
A U.S. government official confirmed that Moon’s plane had to receive authorization even when Moon went to New York on Sept. 24 to attend the UN General Assembly and meet Trump.

Chosun Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but by getting the rail and roads connected with North Korea like President Moon has been pushing hard to do, he can avoid the aircraft blacklisting problem.  

This report shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that regularly reads the ROK Drop:

China isn’t as committed to North Korea’s denuclearization as Washington or Seoul and aims to weaken the South Korea-U.S. alliance, according to an annual report on the U.S.-China economic and security relationship submitted to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday.

Beijing also appears to have already relaxed its enforcement of sanctions on North Korea, “undermining the U.S. ‘maximum pressure’ campaign,” according to the extensive report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The report, which also outlined China’s North Korea strategy, stressed that the “timeline for cutting sanctions is perhaps the most prominent process issue.” It added that “harmonizing the timeline and sequencing for implementing a comprehensive agreement” will be a priority for negotiators.

U.S. officials prefer “speedy steps toward ending North Korea’s nuclear and long-range missile programs, with the bulk of actions from Pyongyang coming up front before sanctions relief” and have some “potential for flexibility,” according to the report. In turn, China has pushed for a “phased and synchronous” approach, with reciprocal actions from each side.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but what this report has wrong is that I believe it is arguable whether South Korea is committed to North Korea’s denuclearization as well.  The fact that the Moon administration has been pushing for the dropping of sanctions for little to nothing in return from North Korea is evidence of this.