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(Source: ingopress.com) By the International Strategy Center | January 2017 Sitting in Gwanghwamun square, the screen rapidly dialed up to 10,000,000 as it added up the number of participants in the past ten candlelight protests. Every Saturday evening for the last two months of 2016, people had come out calling for impeachment in the streets. A few weeks before, the impeachment motion had passed the National Assembly in overwhelming numbers. We were saying goodbye to the year with a candlelight protest on New Year’s Eve complete with Christmas jingles about impeachment. The rally was followed by two separate marches, one to the presidential Blue House, the other to the constitutional court: a reminder that, whether villain or hero, the judges too were actors in this candlelight story. Yet, the protagonists resided not in the halls of power, but in the streets holding candles. Now, a month, and three candlelight protests later, as the special prosecutor gears up to question President Park and the constitutional court set a March deadline for its verdict, the candlelight protests are achieving what many thought impossible: impeachment of the president. In the process, the candlelight revolution is transforming Korean democracy and its people. It was the candlelight protests that pushed politicians past the safeguards of the status quo and emboldened/pressured them to represent the will and outrage of their constituents. The candlelight protests began with demands for President Park’s voluntary resignation. As evidence for abuse of power, leaked state secrets, and bribery mounted against her, and as it became clear that neither a million, nor two million people protest were enough for her to step down, the chants for resignation changed to impeachment and incarceration. However, elected representatives lagged behind public opinion and will. In fact, faced with the awesome task before them, the opposition parties grew timid, then wavered when politically expedient solutions presented themselves. The first instance was at the beginning as the scandal was unraveling. Park proposed that for the sake of returning the country to normal, she would allow the National Assembly to nominate a new prime minister with extensive powers in domestic affairs. The main opposition party – the Democratic party – wavered. Phone blitzes from the public later, they returned back to the popular demand of resignation. As it became clear that President Park would not step down no matter the political cost or size of the candlelight protests, calls for resignation turned into impeachment. As public outrage swelled to nearly 2 million, the opposition parties jumped on the impeachment bandwagon. Yet, just before the impeachment motion was to be introduced, the second carrot was dropped and dangled before them: President Park, in a public address, introduced the possibility of voluntary resignation by April.1 The anti-Park faction of the ruling party that had abandoned ship and had plotted a course towards cooperation with the opposition parties now was shifting towards the April voluntary resignation. Faced with the prospect of insufficient votes (without the anti-Park faction votes) for approval of the impeachment, the opposition wavered. The people mobilized: They blitzed the phones of individual Saenuri Party members and protested outside their offices. Even the opposition that had grown timid was dragged back to the front of the impeachment struggle. Then that Saturday, 2.3 million people came out insisting on either an immediate resignation or impeachment. By Monday, the politicians had changed: The opposition party members had grown bold in their pursuit of impeachment, even holding mini-rallies; the anti- Park faction was once again speaking about impeachment; and even the pro-Park faction made the crucial decision to allow members to vote at will. Thus, 234 assembly members voted for impeachment, far exceeding the necessary 200. Not only had the anti-Park faction voted for impeachment, so had many from the pro-Park faction. With the president stripped of her powers during the impeachment, the special prosecution2 no longer faced the daunting task of investigating a president will full powers. Kim Jong-min, chair of the Seoul branch of the Justice Party, notes, “The prosecutor has the power to search and to summon people for interrogation. Yet, until now they have always been careful of those in power. But this special prosecutor doesn’t have to do that. That’s because of the candlelight protests.” While the special prosecutor’s investigation is separate from that of the constitutional court, the former’s findings still impact the latter’s verdict. The Choi Soon-Sil scandal may have initiated the process, but the impeachment process has not just been about Park’s misdeeds with Choi Soon-sil. The candlelight protests created a space to revisit Park’s other misdeeds, in particular her deadliest: the Sewol ferry accident that killed 304. Not only was the rescue under her watch a perfect storm of incompetence and negligence, but the investigation that followed was also plagued by repression and cover-up by a Park administration unwilling to reveal the truth or learn its lessons. Despite its gravity, the Sewol ferry tragedy didn’t just naturally appear in the impeachment motion. Yoo Kyung-geun, a father of one of the high school victims and chair of the 4/16 Sewol Families for Truth and a Safer Society, relates how the families kept the Sewol issue afloat when the protests first broke out, “When the Choi Soon Sil scandal first broke out, we were afraid that it would simply drown out the issue of the Sewol. So, we took a very bold and desperate gamble. In the first candlelight protest, we gathered and chanted that President Park should be incarcerated and that they 7 hours after the Sewol ferry should be investigated. We were very nervous about a backlash, but we took the chance anyways because we were so desperate. While everyone was chanting that the President step down, we were the only ones chanting that she be imprisoned. On the next protest, it wasn’t just us that started protesting, it was also those around us. By the third candlelight protest, people on stage started calling out for her arrest.” Despite the growing calls for an investigation to the seven hours following the Sewol ferry accident, the opposition parties hesitated in placing it in the impeachment motion. “Three days before the motion was introduced a member of the opposition called me, ‘Isn’t the impeachment important? The anti-Park faction won’t vote for impeachment because of this provision, couldn’t you please understand our situation? Maybe we could pursue the investigation [to the Sewol tragedy] later,’” recalled Yoo. His answer was resolute. They would not accept an impeachment motion without the Sewol issue. In fact, they would actively protest any motion without it. The Sewol was included in a motion that passed amidst the flickering lights of 2.3 million. Having witnessed the candlelight protests first hand, it becomes clear that it is not just about impeaching President Park but also about transforming Korean democracy and people. People come out in the hundreds of thousands and millions and sit on the pavement in sub-zero temperature. They come out with their unions and organizations. Many simply come out with their families and friends. Students ranging from elementary to university come out wearing their school uniforms stirring the imagination about the collective education on democratic action for the next generation. The stage that facilitates this transformation are massive productions at the scale of outdoor rock festivals: multi-screens so that millions can see and hear the stage, chants prepared in advance, hundreds of thousands of candles, lists of performers and speakers, and the organization and logistics of the marches that follow. The productions are carried out by the People’s Emergency Action to Bring to Bring Down President Park, a coalition of 1,500 groups that comes up with the chants, line-up of performers, and sets the stage. Ahn Jin Geol, a standing member of the operations committee, explains that the chants come from the grassroots up through their network of 1,500 groups. Being at the protests, it’s clear that they are different in character from previous ones. While the chants are militant, the songs that play are not the same militant songs usually heard in protests. Rather, they are rock concerts, from reggae rock to ballads. They not only entertain, but they also move and touch. “The change started on Nov. 5 and 12 as the singers came out, as families came out with their toddlers, as students came out. The space became firmly established as a cultural night.” The second moment was when the organizers succeeded in marching peacefully to up to 100 meters of the Blue House. “The performances were moving, and we were going strictly by the law in the march and creating a peaceful atmosphere,” explains Ahn. The constitutional court has announced it will deliver a verdict before March 13. All signs and evidence point to an impeachment, which means that a presidential election would be held by May. Yet, a new president is not enough. “We can’t just demand a change in government, but we must call for deep fundamental reforms,” expresses Kim. How far this candlelight revolution goes will be determined by its protagonists. 1 An April resignation would have created a whole different set of conditions then the current one. The special prosecution would have had to carry out their investigation against an acting president with full powers, as opposed to one stripped of her powers. 2 The constitutional court and the special prosecutor are both part of two different processes. The constitutional court became involved after the impeachment motion was passed. The special prosecutor became involved after a special bill approving him on November 17. While the constitutional court determines whether the president violated the constitution in her role as president, the special prosecutor conducts a separate investigation. While both undoubtedly influence each other, they are part of two separate spheres. Special thanks to Kim Jong-min Chair of the Seoul Branch of the Justice Party, Ahn Jin-geol General Secretary of People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and an a standing member of the Operations Committee of the People’s Emergency Action to Bring Down President Park, Yoo Kyung-geun, chair of the 4/16 Sewol Families for Truth and a Safer Society, and Kim Sang-gyun (former producer at MBC). #parkgeunhye #SouthKorea

March 19, 1927 – December 30, 2016 North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs have hovered over successive U.S. administrations since the mid-1990s, becoming a palpable “threat” during the Obama administration and the first crisis of nuclear proportions to greet President Trump.  In all these years, however, few have sought to understand the prospects of war, invasion, and nuclear annihilation from the viewpoint of that country and its leaders.  The Korea Policy Institute was fortunate to have the guidance and support of perhaps the most insightful and engaged of the few – journalist, scholar, citizen diplomat, and KPI Advisor, Selig Harrison.  Informed by empathy for his subject Mr. Harrison’s research uncovered common ground in places altogether unseen by most.  Where others postulated an intractable enmity between the U.S. and North Korea, Harrison viewed hostility between the two as historical with the potential for peaceful resolution. Harrison was a featured speaker at KPI’s first conference, Reunification: Building Permanent Peace in Korea, at UC Berkeley, 2008, and he also shared his views on North Korea’s position on denuclearization as it was evolving in the aftermath of the failed six party talks in a KPI interview the following year.  At this time when a new chapter is about to be written in the saga of what amounts to an ongoing Korean War, let us turn back a few chapters to read how we have arrived at today’s dangerous impasse and find, perhaps, in Harrison’s insights, a way out. Please read “An Interview with Selig Harrison on North Korea’s Satellite Launch and U.S. – D.P.R.K Relations.” #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #SeligHarrison #Armistice #NorthKorea

Aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson participating in a replenishment-at-sea in the Pacific Ocean on February 3, 2017. (Via AFP) Pentagon Leads Over 300,000 Troops in a Rehearsal for an Invasion One Week after the White House Announces It’s Considering Military Action against North Korea By Stephen Gowans | March 13, 2017 | Originally published in What’s Left The United States and South Korea are conducting their largest-ever military exercises on the Korean peninsula [1], one week after the White House announced that it was considering military action against North Korea to bring about regime change. [2] The US-led exercises involve: 300,000 South Korea troops • 17,000 US troops • The supercarrier USS Carl Vinson • US F-35B and F-22 stealth fighters • US B-18 and B-52 bombers • South Korean F-15s and KF-16s jetfighters. [3] While the United States labels the drills as “purely defensive” [4] the nomenclature is misleading. The exercises are not defensive in the sense of practicing to repel a possible North Korean invasion and to push North Korean forces back across the 38th parallel in the event of a North Korean attack, but envisage an invasion of North Korea in order to incapacitate its nuclear weapons, destroy its military command, and assassinate its leader. The exercises can only be construed as “defensive” if undertaken as preparation for a response to an actual North Korean first-strike, or as a rehearsed pre-emptive response to an anticipated first strike. In either event, the exercises are invasion-related, and Pyongyang’s complaint that US and South Korean forces are practicing an invasion is valid. But the likelihood of a North Korean attack on South Korea is vanishingly small. Pyongyang is outspent militarily by Seoul by a factor of almost 4:1, [5] and South Korean forces can rely on more advanced weapons systems than can North Korea. Additionally, the South Korean military is not only backed up by, but is under the command of, the unprecedentedly powerful US military. A North Korean attack on South Korea would be suicidal, and therefore we can regard its possibility as virtually non-existent, especially in light of US nuclear doctrine which allows the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea. Indeed, US leaders have reminded North Korean leaders on numerous occasions that their country could be turned into “a charcoal briquette.” [6] That anyone of consequence in the US state truly believes that South Korea is under threat of an attack by the North is risible. The exercises are being carried out within the framework of Operation Plan 5015 which “aims to remove the North’s weapons of mass destruction and prepare … for a pre-emptive strike in the event of an imminent North Korean attack, as well a ‘decapitation’ raids targeting the leadership.” [7] In connection with decapitation raids, the exercises involve “US Special Missions Units responsible for the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, including SEAL Team Six.” [8] According to one newspaper report, the “participation of special forces in the drills…may be an indication the two sides are rehearsing the assassination of Kim Jong Un.” [9] A US official told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency that “A bigger number of and more diverse US special operation forces will take part in this year’s … exercises to practice missions to infiltrate the North, remove the North’s war command and demolish its key military facilities.” [10] Astonishingly, despite participating in the highly provocative exercises–which can have no other consequence than to rattle the North Koreans and place them under imminent threat—the South Korean ministry of national defense announced that “South Korea and the US were keenly monitoring the movements of North Korean soldiers in preparation for possible provocations.” [11] The notion that Washington and Seoul must be on the alert for North Korean ‘provocations’, at a time the Pentagon and its South Korean ally are rehearsing an invasion and ‘decapitation’ strike against North Korea, represents what East Asia specialist Tim Beal calls a “special sort of unreality.” [12] Adding to the unreality is the fact that the rehearsal for an invasion comes on the heels of the White House announcing urbi et orbi that it is considering military action against North Korea to bring about regime change. In 2015, the North Koreans proposed to suspend their nuclear weapons program in exchange for the United States suspending its military exercises on the peninsula. The US State Department peremptorily dismissed the offer, saying it inappropriately linked the United States’ “routine” military drills to what Washington demanded of Pyongyang, namely, denuclearization. [13] Instead, Washington “insisted the North give up its nuclear weapons program first before any negotiations” could take place. [14] In 2016, the North Koreans made the same proposal. Then US president Barack Obama replied that Pyongyang would “have to do better than that.” [15] At the same time, the high-profile Wall Street-directed Council on Foreign Relations released a task force report which advised Washington against striking a peace deal with North Korea on the grounds that Pyongyang would expect US troops to withdraw from the peninsula. Were the United States to quit the peninsula militarily, its strategic position relative to China and Russia, namely, its ability to threaten its two near-peer competitors, would be weakened, the report warned. Accordingly, Washington was adjured to refrain from promising Beijing that any help it provided in connection with North Korea would be rewarded by a reduction in the US troop presence on the peninsula. [16] Earlier this month, China resurrected Pyongyang’s perennial proposal. “To defuse the looming crisis on the peninsula, China [proposed] that, as a first step, [North Korea] suspend its missile and nuclear activities in exchange for a halt in the large scale US – [South Korea] exercises. This suspension-for-suspension,” the Chinese argued, “can help us break out of the security dilemma and bring the parties back to the negotiating table.” [17] Washington rejected the proposal immediately. So too did Japan. The Japanese ambassador to the UN reminded the world that the US goal is “not a freeze-for-freeze but to denuclearize North Korea.” [18] Implicit in this reminder was the addendum that the United States would take no steps to denuclearize its own approach to dealing with North Korea (Washington dangles a nuclear sword of Damocles over Pyongyang) and would continue to carry out annual rehearsals for an invasion. Refusal to negotiate, or to demand that the other side immediately grant what is being demanded as a precondition for talks, (give me what I want, then I’ll talk), is consistent with the approach to North Korea adopted by Washington as early as 2003. Urged by Pyongyang to negotiate a peace treaty, then US Secretary of State Colin Powell demurred. “We don’t do non-aggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature,” Powell explained. [19] As part of the special unreality constructed by the United States, Russia, or more specifically its president, Vladimir Putin, is routinely accused by Washington of committing “aggressions,” which are said to include military exercises along the Russian border with Ukraine. These exercises, hardly on the immense scale of the US-South Korean exercises, are labelled “highly provocative” [20] by US officials, while the Pentagon-led rehearsal for an invasion of North Korea is described as routine and “defensive in nature.” But imagine that Moscow had mobilized 300,000 Russian troops along the Ukraine border, under an operational plan to invade Ukraine, neutralize its military assets, destroy its military command, and assassinate its president, one week after the Kremlin declared that it was considering military action in Ukraine to bring about regime change. Who, except someone mired in a special sort of unreality, would construe this as “purely defensive in nature”? Stephen Gowans is a writer and political activist in Ottawa, Canada. Former columnist for Canadian Content and a frequent contributor to the Media Monitors Network, he posts on a blog this is reposted from,  What’s Left. “THAAD, ‘decapitation’ raid add to allies’ new drills,” The Korea Herald, March 13, 2017; Elizabeth Shim, “U.S., South Korean drills include bin Laden assassination team,” UPI, March 13, 2017. Jonathan Cheng and Alastair Gale, “North Korea missile test stirs ICBM fears,” The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2017. “S. Korea, US begins largest-ever joint military drills,” KBS World, March 5, 2017; Jun Ji-hye, “Drills to strike N. Korea taking place,” Korea Times, March 13, 2017. Jun Ji-hye, “Drills to strike N. Korea taking place,” Korea Times, March 13, 2017. Alastair Gale and Chieko Tsuneoka, “Japan to increase military spending for fifth year in a row,” The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2016. Bruce Cumings, “Latest North Korean provocations stem from missed US opportunities for demilitarization,” Democracy Now!, May 29, 2009. “THAAD, ‘decapitation’ raid add to allies’ new drills,” The Korea Herald, March 13, 2017. “U.S., South Korean drills include bin Laden assassination team,” UPI, March 13, 2017. Ibid. “U.S. Navy SEALs to take part in joint drills in S. Korea,” Yonhap, March 13, 2017. Jun Ji-hye, “Drills to strike N. Korea taking place,” Korea Times, March 13, 2017. Tim Beal, “Looking in the right direction: Establishing a framework for analyzing the situation on the Korean peninsula (and much more besides),” Korean Policy Institute, April 23, 2016. Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea offers U.S. deal to halt nuclear test,” The New York Times, January 10, 2015. Eric Talmadge, “Obama dismisses NKorea proposal on halting nuke tests,” Associated Press, April 24, 2016. Ibid. “A Sharper Choice on North Korea: Engaging China for a Stable Northeast Asia,” Independent Task Force Report No. 74, Council on Foreign Relations, 2016. “China limited in its self-appointed role as mediator for Korean peninsula affairs,” The Hankyoreh, March 9, 2017. Farnaz Fassihi, Jeremy Page and Chun Han Wong, “U.N. Security Council decries North Korea missile test,” The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2017. “Beijing to host North Korea talks,” The New York Times, August 14, 2003. Stephen Fidler, “NATO struggles to muster ‘spearhead’ force to counter Russia,” The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2014. #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #NorthKorea #USKoreaWarGames

A man watches on February 13, 2017, North Korea’s missile launch (AP Photo / Ahn Young-joon ) By Bruce Cumings | March 23, 2017 Originally published in The Nation Donald Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on February 11 when a message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: North Korea had just tested a new, solid-fuel, intermediate-range ballistic missile, fired from a mobile—and therefore hard-to-detect—launcher. The president pulled out his 1990s flip-phone and discussed this event in front of the various people sitting within earshot. One of these diners, Richard DeAgazio, was suitably agog at the import of this weighty scene, posting the following comment on his Facebook page: “HOLY MOLY!!! It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan.” Actually, this missile was aimed directly at Mar-a-Lago, figuratively speaking. It was a pointed nod to history that no American media outlet grasped: “Prime Minister Shinzo,” as Trump called him, is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a former Japanese prime minister whom Abe reveres. Nobusuke was deemed a “Class A” war criminal by the US occupation authorities after World War II, and he ran munitions manufacturing in Manchuria in the 1930s, when Gen. Hideki Tojo was provost marshal there. Kim Il-sung, whom grandson Kim Jong-un likewise reveres, was fighting the Japanese at the same time and in the same place. **The North wouldn’t have nukes if we’d kept our word in the past. As I wrote for this magazine in January 2016, the North Koreans must be astonished to discover that US leaders never seem to grasp the import of their history-related provocations. Even more infuriating is Washington’s implacable refusal ever to investigate our 72-year history of conflict with the North; all of our media appear to live in an eternal present, with each new crisis treated as sui generis. Visiting Seoul in March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted that North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another; in fact, President Bill Clinton got it to freeze its plutonium production for eight years (1994–2002) and, in October 2000, had indirectly worked out a deal to buy all of its medium- and long-range missiles. Clinton also signed an agreement with Gen. Jo Myong-rok stating that henceforth, neither country would bear “hostile intent” toward the other. The Bush administration promptly ignored both agreements and set out to destroy the 1994 freeze. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is rightly seen as a world-historical catastrophe, but next in line would be placing North Korea in his “axis of evil” and, in September 2002, announcing his “preemptive” doctrine directed at Iraq and North Korea, among others. The simple fact is that Pyongyang would have no nuclear weapons if Clinton’s agreements had been sustained. Now comes Donald Trump, blasting into a Beltway milieu where, in recent months, a bipartisan consensus has emerged based on the false assumption that all previous attempts to rein in the North’s nuclear program have failed, so it may be time to use force—to destroy its missiles or topple the regime. Last September, the centrist Council on Foreign Relations issued a report stating that “more assertive military and political actions” should be considered, “including those that directly threaten the existence of the [North Korean] regime.” Tillerson warned of preemptive action on his recent East Asia trip, and a former Obama-administration official, Antony Blinken, wrote in The New York Times that a “priority” for the Trump administration should be working with China and South Korea to “secure the North’s nuclear arsenal” in the event of “regime change.” But North Korea reportedly has some 15,000 underground facilities of a national-security nature. It is insane to imagine the Marines traipsing around the country in such a “search and secure” operation, and yet the Bush and Obama administrations had plans to do just that. Obama also ran a highly secret cyber-war against the North for years, seeking to infect and disrupt its missile program. If North Korea did that to us, it might well be considered an act of war. On November 8, 2016, nearly 66 million voters for Hillary Clinton received a lesson in Hegel’s “cunning of history.” A bigger lesson awaits Donald Trump, should he attack North Korea. It has the fourth-largest army in the world, as many as 200,000 highly trained special forces, 10,000 artillery pieces in the mountains north of Seoul, mobile missiles that can hit all American military bases in the region (there are hundreds), and nuclear weapons more than twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb (according to a new estimate in a highly detailed Times study by David Sanger and William Broad). Last October, I was at a forum in Seoul with Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state for Bill Clinton. Like everyone else, Talbott averred that North Korea might well be the top security problem for the next president. In my remarks, I mentioned Robert McNamara’s explanation, in Errol Morris’s excellent documentary The Fog of War, for our defeat in Vietnam: We never put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy and attempted to see the world as they did. Talbott then blurted, “It’s a grotesque regime!” There you have it: It’s our number-one problem, but so grotesque that there’s no point trying to understand Pyongyang’s point of view (or even that it might have some valid concerns). North Korea is the only country in the world to have been systematically blackmailed by US nuclear weapons going back to the 1950s, when hundreds of nukes were installed in South Korea. I have written much about this in these pages and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Why on earth would Pyongyang not seek a nuclear deterrent? But this crucial background doesn’t enter mainstream American discourse. History doesn’t matter, until it does—when it rears up and smacks you in the face. *Bruce Cumings teaches at the University of Chicago and is the author of numerous books on Korea and the Korean War.  He is an advisor to the Korea Policy Institute #BruceCumings #NorthKorea #Nuclearweapons

On April 4, the U.S.-based Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific , which the Korea Policy Institute is a part of, launched its national speaking tour on the South Korean people’s fight against the deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system. It is collaborating with dozens of local peace and justice organizations in cities across the United States to educate people about the dangers of U.S. missile defense. In the midst of political upheaval in South Korea, advances in North Korea’s nuclear program, and uncertainty about the Trump administration’s policy in Northeast Asia, citizens in Seongju, South Korea, are stepping up their eight-month opposition to the installation of a U.S. missile defense system (THAAD) in their city.  The U.S. and South Korea claim THAAD is necessary to defend against North Korea ballistic missiles but locals fear its environmental effects, claim its real target is China, and believe it makes them ground zero for counterattacks. The speaking tour lead speaker is Reverend Sounghey Kim, Co-chair of the Seongju Struggle Committee to Stop THAAD Deployment in South Korea. She has been at the forefront of the fight against the THAAD deployment since July 2016, when the U.S. and South Korean governments first announced the deployment plan. She has been a part of the daily candlelight protests in Seongju and the recent overnight prayer sit-in’s on Jinbat Bridge, which leads to the site selected for the THAAD deployment. The Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific seeks to use the upcoming speaking tour as an opportunity to build greater solidarity between anti-war/peace movements in the United States and South Korea. April 4 2017– Berkeley/Oakland University Lutheran Chapel, 2425 College Ave., Berkeley, CA April 6, 2017– Los Angeles LA Won Buddhist Temple, 401 Shatto Pl. #200, Los Angeles, CA April 8, 2017 – Huntsville Springhill Suites Hotel, 745 Constellation Place Dr, Huntsville, AL April 10, 2017– Boston Boston College, Devlin Hall 101, Chestnut Hill, MA April 11, 2017 – Philadelphia Calvary Church (Basement), 801 S 48th St, Philadelphia, PA April 12, 2017 (Wednesday), 7:00pm – Rutgers Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Frelinghuysen Hall Room B4, 611 George St, New Brunswick, NJ April 13 2017 – New York  New York University, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC), 53 Washington Square South, NYC April 15, 2017 – Washington DC Justice Center, 617 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC April 16, 2017 (Sunday), 6:00pm – Fairfax William Cho Peace Center, 3883 Plaza Dr., Fairfax, VA April 17, 2017 (Monday),  12:30pm – Washington DC United Methodist Building, 100 Maryland Ave NE Conference Rm 4, Washington, DC Hear Rev. Sounghey Kim at the April 8th Huntsville talk. Hear Korean American activist on the US/Korea geopolitical context of the THAAD issue The Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific consists of the following organizations: ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea Korea Policy Institute Philadelphia Committee for Peace and Justice in Asia Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space Veterans for Peace, National Office #AsiaPacificpivot #SouthKorea #THAAD

Past North Korean missile launch. Janine Jackson | April 11, 2017 Originally published on Counterspin / FAIR An Interview with Hyun Lee of Zoom in Korea. MP3 Link Janine Jackson: The Washington Post suggests that people in Seattle and San Francisco “should be worried” about being hit by a ballistic missile from North Korea, citing an analyst who described such an event, a bit cryptically, as “a looming threat but not a current threat.” If the concern is that the saber-rattling between Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump could indeed have dire consequences, it’s hard to see how such stories help, or maps that show ranges for North Korea’s missiles far greater than any actually tested missiles have gone, or the conflation of nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry. But we’re equally ill-served by a failure to interrogate US policy on the Korean peninsula, and corporate media’s reduction of North Korea to caricature in the time-honored method reserved for official enemies. As we record this show Trump is meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping, and we’re told North Korea is at the top of the agenda, Trump having declared, “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.” What does that mean, and how has it come to this? We’re joined now by writer and activist Hyun Lee of Zoom in Korea, a project of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea. She’s also a Fellow at the Korea Policy Institute. Welcome to CounterSpin, Hyun Lee. Hyun Lee: Hi. Thanks for having me. JJ: Well, the Chinese foreign minister just described the US and North Korea as like two accelerating trains coming toward each other with neither side willing to give way, and I think people may well wonder how we got to such a disturbing point. Let’s start with the US. What, historically, have been the US’s intentions or goals with regard to North Korea, and have those changed? HL: So, many people in the United States don’t realize that the US has maintained the threat of a nuclear attack against North Korea for decades. From 1958 to 1991, the US had hundreds of nuclear weapons in the southern half of the Korean peninsula, in South Korea. So at that time, North Korea’s countermeasure to deter a US nuclear attack was to forward deploy all of its conventional forces near the DMZ. In 2001, when George W. Bush came to power, many things changed. There were technological advancements, and he also made doctrinal changes, centered around very high-tech, precision-capable weapons that gave the US preemptive strike advantage. He named North Korea part of the “Axis of Evil.” He also listed North Korea as one of seven countries that were potential targets for a US preemptive strike in the US Nuclear Posture Review. So then, in response to that, North Korea had to develop a new kind of deterrent, and that’s when it seriously turned to developing nuclear weapons, and its first nuclear test was in 2006. Since that time, what the United States has tried to do is stall North Korea’s nuclear development, tying it up through negotiations that basically went nowhere, at the same time constantly threatening to bring about North Korea’s collapse, through sanctions that were crippling its economy, and also military exercises that were very provocative. They simulate war plans that now include the decapitation of the North Korean leadership, and include nuclear first strike. US/North Korean relations during the Obama administration was a contest between Obama’s policy of “strategic patience,” which is basically waiting and preparing for the eventual collapse of the North Korean regime, and then North Korea’s policy called byungjin, which was making parallel progress in economic development, and also developing its nuclear deterrence capability. Towards the end of Obama’s presidency, the consensus in Washington was that strategic patience had basically failed. North Korea obviously has not collapsed. On the contrary, many people who have been there recently come back and report that they’ve made progress in their economic development, and now experts are warning that North Korea will soon have, if it doesn’t already have, the capability of launching an ICBM with a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can strike the continental United States. Kim Jong-Un’s New Year’s speech earlier this year contained a message that basically they were ready to test-launch an ICBM. So that’s basically how we got to this situation. The US and South Korean militaries are now developing and also deploying missile defense capability. The aim of that is basically neutralizing North Korea’s nuclear weapons. So now, in response to that, what North Korea is doing is developing countermeasures that can evade the missile defense system, and that’s what the recent missile tests have been about. So it’s this basic back-and-forth, cat-and-mouse game of US developing nuclear first-strike capabilities, and then North Korea developing deterrence capabilities. And we’ve become very confused in the United States, because the mainstream media like to exaggerate the North Korean nuclear threat, but we never get news of what the US has been doing over the past decades. And we should be very clear that what this is all about is actually US nuclear first-strike advantage against North Korea, and North Korea reacting to that by developing its deterrence capability. JJ: Well, yes, reporting is this world where there’s just an unspoken acceptance of the legitimacy of the United States doing things that official enemies are not allowed to do. The very idea of strategic patience—we’re just going to wait until the regime collapses—we can understand why North Koreans might not want to co-sign that as a plan. But it also depends so much about where you start the clock. In the US media, as you’ve said, it’s always North Korea taking the provocative action and the United States responding, and that’s getting it backwards, you think. HL: You know, there is a double standard in US condemnation of North Korean missile tests, because the US also continuously tests ballistic missiles. In 2015 alone, the US flight-tested the Minuteman 3 ICBM from California, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, five times in 2015 alone. So, I mean, every country has a sovereign right to test its weapons capability. That’s how you know if it works or not, and that’s precisely what North Korea is doing. So we should also note that there is a double standard there. JJ: What concerns do you have specifically about what looks like being the Trump administration’s approach? We’ve seen both Trump and Nikki Haley say China has to deal with North Korea, and that’s supposedly the point, or one of the points, of this meeting with Xi Jinping. What do you make of that? HL: Many experts have noted that it is not a good idea for the United States to outsource its North Korea policy to China. First of all, we should be very clear that the two countries have very different strategic interests in the region. So it is not a good idea, from the US point of view, to rely on China so much to carry out its policy, because it doesn’t make sense. China has made very clear to the United States that if it wants cooperation in North Korea, it should first reverse its very controversial decision on the deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea, that is right now in the process of being deployed, and it is a very controversial issue. It probably will be on the agenda of the summit this weekend. China considers the THAAD system, if it’s based in South Korea, a threat to its security, because the radar that comes with the system can be used for surveillance activity on Chinese missiles. And so far, the Trump administration has been very aggressive in pushing THAAD deployment forward. Meanwhile, people in South Korea have been opposed to it, and are protesting every day outside the deployment site. If the US continues to push that forward it may make it very difficult to get Chinese cooperation on North Korea. Secondly, China does not want the collapse of the North Korean regime, because that would create a huge refugee crisis at its border, and that’s the last thing that China wants. China also does not want the prospect of a unified Korean peninsula that is led by a pro-US South Korean government right next door as its neighbor. So for all of these reasons, it’s probably not a good idea for the US to rely on China to carry out its policy, based on its strategic interest. It is more in US interest to negotiate directly with North Korea for North Korea to basically cap its nuclear and missile tests. JJ: That moves me to the final question, because I’d like to talk about other ways forward. We know media get into saber-rattling mode, and it gets very difficult to hear other voices—and people who seek peace, or an end to conflict, are almost in a parallel conversation. But what possible ways forward do you see for those who seek an end to the conflict? HL: The only sensible path at this point is dialogue: sitting down with North Korea and coming up with a fundamental solution to the crisis. We should note that last year in July, North Korea basically put out a statement that was not picked up or noticed by the Western media. But it laid out the terms for denuclearization, and all of the conditions that it laid out had to do with removing the threat to its sovereignty that’s posed by US nuclear weapons. That gives an indication that that’s what the North Koreans are fundamentally interested in resolving. US Navy ships participating in the annual simulation of war against North Korea. So a fundamental solution in my mind would be, first of all, ending the annual provocative war exercises that the United States military does every year in South Korea, abandoning the US nuclear first-strike prerogative, and then signing a peace treaty that will bring closure to the unended Korean War, eventually leading to the withdrawal of US troops from the Korean peninsula. And then, in exchange, North Korea should halt its nuclear weapons development—meaning no more tests, no more nuclear tests or no more missile tests, basically capping it—and a commitment to nonproliferation. In my mind, that is the only sensible path to resolve the current situation. JJ: We’ve been speaking with Hyun Lee of Zoom in Korea, online at ZoomInKorea.org. Thank you very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. HL: Thank you. Hyun Lee works with Zoom in Korea and is a Korea Policy Fellow. #DPRK #KoreanWar #THAAD #Nuclearweapons #Armistice #AsiaPacificpivot #HyunLee #NorthKorea

April 15, 2017 parade in Pyongyang honoring DPRK founder Kim Il Sung. Aaron Maté and Christine Hong | April 12, 2017 Originally published on therealnews.com AARON MATÉ: It’s The Real News. I’m Aaron Maté. Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea are rising. North Korea has warned the U.S. that sending a Navy strike group, including the aircraft carrier Karl Vincent to the Korean Peninsula, could lead to war. North Korea’s official newspaper said its, quote, “nuclear sight is focused on U.S. forces and the U.S. mainland.”A new ballistic missile test last week is said to have prompted the Trump administration’s move, sending a U.S. Navy force into the area. In a Twitter post President Trump said, quote, “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them. USA.” Joining us is Christine Hong, Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz. She is on the executive board of the Korea Policy Institute. Welcome, Professor Hong. CHRISTINE HONG: Thanks, Aaron. AARON MATÉ: This is not the first time that the U.S. has moved a Navy force into that peninsula, but the first time it’s done so under President Trump. Talk about what’s going on. CHRISTINE HONG: Well, I mean, you raise a very interesting point. You know, the question is to what degree is Trump’s hawkish, very aggressive, bellicose stance toward North Korea a continuation of the policies of his predecessors? And, in fact, it was Trump the candidate who struck a very different note. If you recall roughly a year ago Trump stated, when he was on the campaign trail, that he would be willing — and this is a very maverick statement — to actually sit down with Kim Jong-un and speak with him. And it was that that represented the possibility of something different. What’s happening right now, unfortunately, is business as usual. And, in point of fact, under President Barack Obama, the policy that was carried out, the U.S. policy that was carried out with regard to Asia and the Pacific, was what he called his “pivot policy.” Under that pivot policy, that was later called the rebalancing policy, the balance of U.S. naval forces went from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so that 60% are concentrated now in the Pacific. Whereas a lot of people are looking at Trump right now and rightly recognizing that his very aggressive language is bringing us to the brink of something very dangerous, we were on the brink during the past presidency, as well. AARON MATÉ: When North Korea launches a ballistic test, what should the U.S. do? CHRISTINE HONG: You know, unfortunately right now, we’re in this very lamentable situation in which North Korea’s launching of these tests is a kind of way of communicating with the United States. Much as Trump’s air strike was also meant, as his administration openly admitted, to be a form of communication with North Korea, as well. And so, we have this sort of very dangerous mode of communication where these kinds of bombs, bombs are substituting for actual dialogue. So, I would say that right now Trump is sort of walking a very tried and true regime change-oriented path that many of his predecessors have also walked along. But if there’s any way for Trump the maverick who is willing to sit down with Kim Jong-un, if there’s any possibility of that, I think that that is one of the only ways forward. AARON MATÉ: There have been talks between the U.S. and North Korea before. There was the agreement in the ’90s between Clinton and the North Korean regime to get North Korea to freeze its plutonium production. These agreements worked for a bit, but then they collapsed. Can you talk about the history of recent U.S.-North Korean engagement and how we got to where we are today? CHRISTINE HONG: You know, I think that we have to actually look at the long history, and then look at the more recent history. From its very inception as a state, North Korea has been subjected to a policy that we can just broadly call regime change on the part of the United States. You can understand the Korean War as an extensive campaign, an asymmetrical war, that was aimed at regime change. And you can understand more recent policy in that same light. But you’re very right. At the end of the Clinton administration there was the possibility of engagement. And when George W. Bush came into office he adopted what was known as the ABC policy, the All But Clinton policy. And as I’m sure your viewers recall, he nominated North Korea as part of the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’. And also, the other thing that happened during his administration is that, as part of the U.S. nuclear posture review, it listed North Korea among several other states as a likely and possible target of a pre-emptive U.S. nuclear strike. From mid-century onward, the United States has had a very aggressive nuclear policy toward North Korea. It contemplated using nuclear weapons against North Korea and China at mid-century. And, in fact, some of the U.S. strategic planners envisioned a kind of Cobalt Zone where no life could live for hundreds of years. Against the conditions of the Armistice Agreement, which was concluded in July of 1953, the U.S. stationed — and this was illegal — nuclear weapons on the southern part of the Korean Peninsula until the end of the Cold War. Over a dozen times the United States has threatened North Korea with nuclear annihilation. But if you look at this long history you can understand that, from North Korea’s perspective, it’s eminently rational to actually develop a nuclear weapons program as a self-defense measure. And I also do want to say that one thing that very few people in the United States have is a memory of ruin, in terms of its hot wars during the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War the United States waged really destructive hot wars in the Third World, most infamously on the Korean Peninsula and in Vietnam. And, you know, an estimated 4 million people — Koreans — were killed during that asymmetrical war in which the United States unleashed bombs with absolutely no regard for human life. 70% of those who were killed were civilians. Chinese statistics have North Korean casualties at one-third of the total population. And so, when you’re talking about North Korea’s memory, in terms of people who are alive today, there’s not a family that was untouched by the ruination of the Korean War. AARON MATÉ: Okay. So, you’re saying that this very devastating and long history fuels some of the antagonism that North Korea projects towards the U.S. today. Going back to the devastating Korean War. But what to do now? I mean, people look at the Korean regime and say, you know, this is the worst government in the world. How do we deal with them? What’s your response to that? CHRISTINE HONG: I just say that the primary ways that we know North Korea are through lenses of war. And so, you know, if there are other ways of engaging with North Korea, and this is the other thing, too, throughout the presidency of Barack Obama there was absolutely no engagement with North Korea. And I think that that is one of those options that, you know, supposedly, the Trump administration has stated that all options are on the table, and that’s meant very ominously. You know, I mean, we’re made to understand that a nuclear first strike is possible. But I hope that one of those options is also engagement. AARON MATÉ: And what would engagement look like? CHRISTINE HONG: Engagement would look, it would look like a much more humane policy toward North Korea. Right now, the United States, against the wishes of the South Korean people, is deploying what they call a missile defense system, the THAAD battery, to South Korea. And it accelerated that under Donald Trump. The people in the communities in which these systems will be located have actually really protested against this. And that was also part of the protests against the former South Korean president Park Geun-hye, that you saw those massive, millions of people who went to the streets in South Korea, that was one of the issues that was animating those protests. Another way in which engagement would appear would be — it would be actually North Korea has repeatedly stated that it’s willing to cap its nuclear program — not do away with, but cap its nuclear program — if the United States stops performing war exercises with South Korea. And these are the largest war exercises in the world. AARON MATÉ: Can there be direct talks now between the Trump administration and North Korea? CHRISTINE HONG: You know, I think the interesting thing about Trump is if his predecessor, Barack Obama, had a policy of strategic patience toward North Korea, Trump’s has been strategic unpredictability, and strategic opaqueness, with the threat of a nuclear first strike thrown in. I’m not sure what’s possible at this present juncture because things do seem so dire. But it was Trump the candidate who did speak in very unorthodox fashion about being willing to actually sit down with Kim Jong-un. And if that’s at all possible now, I’d say that that’s one of the only pathways forward. The other thing that’s happening is, although the Trump administration is speaking to its conservative counterpart in South Korea, as you well know, the South Korean president was ousted. And all signs suggest that the next administration in South Korea is going to be progressive. And so, that’s a wind of change that’s happening. And in actually, in planning its North Korea policy, the Trump administration can’t but deal with South Korea. And so, we do have change that’s happening there and that actually suggests another sort of possibility of engagement. AARON MATÉ: Professor Christine Hong of UC Santa Cruz, thanks so much for joining us. CHRISTINE HONG: Thank you very much. AARON MATÉ: And thank you for joining us on The Real News. To see the video or hear this interview. Christine Hong is on the Board of the Korea Policy Institute, and a professsor at UC Santa Cruz. #KimJongUn #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #Armistice #AsiaPacificpivot #ChristineHong #NorthKorea

A sign in Gwangju demands the immediate imprisonment of former president Park Geun-hye and her corporate supporters. (Tim Shorrock) Tim Shorrock | April 17, 2017 Originally published in the Nation.com Gwangju, South Korea—When I arrived at Incheon International Airport near Seoul on April 2 to start a two-month stay in South Korea, I was immediately struck by the sharp contrasts between America and this bustling country of 50 million. First was the airport itself. Incheon is one of the best-designed and most efficient airports in the world; it’s years ahead of the dilapidated structures that US air travelers are forced to endure. The lines for immigration and customs move briskly, and weary travelers are assisted by guides who speak English and politely lead you to the right gate. Upon entry, the government agents who stamp your passport (and demand your fingerprints on a fancy electronic device) have the same authoritarian air as in most countries. But they’re a far cry from the grim and determined Customs and Border Patrol agents who have become notorious under President Trump for their rude and insulting behavior toward foreign visitors and refugees. Then, as soon as you emerge into the terminal itself, you encounter South Korea’s fabulous and mostly public Wi-Fi system. Smartphones and computers are immediately connected to the Internet without charge or registration, making it easy to e-mail or text friends or family upon disembarking. High-speed Wi-Fi is prevalent throughout the country, and makes South Korea the most wired place on earth. And right across the street from the terminal is the beautiful, futuristic structure for KORAIL, South Korea’s high-speed train system, which connects Incheon with every major city in the country. As with Europe, Asia has invested heavily in rail—unlike the United States, where such systems are still pipe dreams. My 159-mile trip the next morning to Gwangju, a city of 1.5 million in the southwest that’s known as the cradle of Korea’s democratic revolution, took less than three hours. So far, however, my stay here has overlapped with the greatest contrast of all: the sharp difference between American and South Korean coverage of North Korea’s nuclear and missile program and the huge perception gap about the situation by US and South Korean citizens. Shortly before I flew from Washington, DC, to Seoul, a US Navy aircraft-carrier group led by the USS Carl Vinson was ordered to move toward Korean waters. Immediately, the US media started broadcasting dire reports about the possibility of US pre-emptive strikes from these ships on the North’s military facilities. With CNN available on most cable systems here, the alarming news spread far and wide. The reports were fueled by a steady flow of threatening tweets from President Trump and dire predictions and warnings from his cabinet (led by the oafish secretary of state, Rex Tillerson). Their pronouncements were reinforced by the hawkish and frequently unhinged Korea “experts” who dominate cable television. For the most part, the US media have been split between lurid speculation about what such a war might look like and gleeful guesswork about whether Trump will send SEAL Team 6 assassination squads to take out Kim Jong-un, the North’s boyish, 33-year-old dictator. Observers with deep understanding of Korean affairs, such as John Delury, a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University who recently mapped out a sensible plan for diplomacy with the North in The New York Times, are rarely consulted. And, as is usual with coverage of North Korea, most American reporting lacks any historical context, includes virtually no Korean voices, and is almost universally in favor of the confrontational approach adopted by both Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama. As the historian Bruce Cumings pointed out in The Nation last month, the American press assiduously avoids any mention of the horror inflicted on the North by US warplanes during the Korean War, as well as the long history of US military provocations on the peninsula. (His article should be required reading for anybody seeking to understand Kim’s motives; perhaps Chris Hayes, a Nation editor at large, would consider inviting Cumings on his MSNBC show, All In with Chris Hayes, to counter the inflammatory, one-sided discussions on his network.) Sadly, though, NBC has been the source for the most abysmal stories. On April 13, the network, citing “multiple senior US intelligence officials,” proclaimed that Trump was “prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test.” But the story was widely rebuked as reckless and without foundation. According to South Korea’s Hankyoreh, “reporters covering the South Korean Ministry of National Defense for other US news outlets unanimously dismissed the report as false. South Korean foreign affairs sources bluntly called the report ‘a canard.’” The story was so outlandish that the Trump administration itself was forced to repudiate it, with a National Security Council spokesperson telling ABC the story was “way wrong.” Pyongyang, of course, added its own hyperbole. “North Korea will immediately make its own kind of appropriate super-hardline response according to the kind and the intensity of the American provocation,” the Korean People’s Army declared in a statement on April 14, Hankyroreh reported. If attacked, the KPA said, it was prepared to strike, including with nuclear weapons, at “all of the bases of evil,” including the US military bases “in South Korea such as those at Osan, Gunsan and Pyeongtaek.” In a swat at Japan and the US bases there, the KPA reminded Trump “that all American bases throughout the Pacific region, including those on Guam, Okinawa and the Japanese main island, are within the sights of our strategic rocket forces.” The sensational US coverage and the North’s statements convinced many Americans that war was imminent. My 93-year-old father in California, who worked as a missionary in Korea for many years, was deeply frightened by the reports. All last week I received e-mails and Facebook messages from family and friends urging me to come home as soon as I could. My response was always: No worries, ordinary South Koreans are not concerned at all. With the exception of a tiny minority of fanatical anti-communists, South Koreans have largely been unfazed by the headlines. “I’m much more worried about anything President Trump might do than the threats of war and retaliation from North Korea,” a friend of mine who teaches engineering at a local university in Gwangju told me over dinner one night. His sentiment is widely echoed throughout South Korea. In Seoul, people are going about their regular business. “For many South Koreans, the concerns about the North can feel like a rite of spring, along with the rain showers or the cherry blossoms that crowds flock to see this time of year,” two Seoul-based reporters for The Wall Street Journal wrote last Friday. On Saturday, James Pearson, the Reuters correspondent in Seoul, took time out from his extensive coverage of North Korea’s missile tests to tweet that “South Koreans in general are not interested in the fireworks north of the DMZ.” As if to make his point, that day thousands of South Koreans turned out nationwide for an emotional issue close to home: observing the third anniversary of the Sewol ferry disaster. In 2014, more than 300 people, most of them high-school students, died when the ferry capsized just over a mile from shore. Many Koreans blame their recently deposed president, Park Geun-hye, for the government’s botched rescue of the ship. (She was indicted for bribery, abuse of power, and other corruption charges on Monday.) Park’s cold response to the victims—she was reportedly getting her hair done during the disaster and refused to meet with the bereaved families—was a key factor in the movement to impeach her. In fact, preventing a return to conservative, right-wing rule seems to be the dominant theme for Korean citizens. In Gwangju, which was the scene of a violent South Korean military crackdown and massacre in May 1980, the focus is the country’s future after Park’s forced resignation and recent arrest. The sentiment was best expressed by a large sign in Gwangju’s downtown last week (seen in my photograph at the top of this post). It demanded the immediate imprisonment of Park and the chiefs of Samsung, Lotte, and other conglomerates under investigation for bribing her while she was in office. To be sure, the escalating rhetoric between the United States and North Korea over the past few weeks, as well as Trump’s threats to “do it alone,” have greatly alarmed Korean politicians of all stripes. South Korea will choose its next president on May 9. The two leading candidates, the liberal Moon Jae-in and the more centrist Ahn Cheol-soo, have wide leads over the likely conservative candidate, Hong Jun-pyo. The United States has been closely following the election with growing trepidation. As I reported last year before Park was deposed, US military officials and analysts have expressed alarm that the left opposition could win this year. Moon was a top adviser to the late former president Roh Moo-hyun, who was a progressive labor lawyer before entering politics. Moon has staked out a position very different from Trump’s: He has called for direct dialogue and negotiations with North Korea and a reopening of the economic cooperation with the North championed by Roh and Kim Dae-jung, the beloved opposition leader who was president in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These ideas are very attractive to Koreans tired of the years-long dispute between Pyongyang and Washington. “We in South Korea can do this on our own initiative,” one of my colleagues at the Gwangju City Archives told me over lunch on Monday, referring to Kim’s “Sunshine” policies toward the North. A professor of European industrial history at a nearby university told me many Koreans are convinced that the United States wants to maintain the North as an enemy to “help your military industry.” He has a point. Moon has also said the United States should delay deployment of the controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system known as THAAD (built by Lockheed Martin) until the next government is in place, although he has wavered on that in recent days. But the THAAD antimissile batteries were hurriedly dispatched to South Korea last month by the Pentagon despite the concerns of Moon and others that it could destabilize relations with China. Ahn, who made his name as a software executive, has taken a more hard line, saying he agrees with the immediate deployment of THAAD. But like Moon, he has emphasized the importance of negotiations and China’s involvement in the process. Meanwhile, at their first group debate on April 13, both Moon and Ahn expressed strong opposition to a unilateral US pre-emptive strike and emphasized that South Korea must play a lead role in any dealings with North Korea or China. The candidates are now running neck and neck, and either one could win the presidency. That will likely force a change in Trump’s policy, away from confrontation and back to the combination of sanctions and military strength emphasized by the Obama administration. By week’s end, the Associated Press was reporting that a White House review of North Korean policy had, in fact, settled on “maximum pressure and engagement”—a shift away from the hard-line rhetoric of the past few weeks. “In the end, they settled on a policy that appears to represent continuity,” the AP concluded. And on Sunday, as Vice President Mike Pence was arriving in South Korea to consult with the acting government in Seoul, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national-security adviser, seemed to confirm the new policy. “It’s time for us to undertake all actions we can, short of a military option, to try to resolve this peacefully,” he said on ABC’s This Week program, according to Reuters. For the progressive forces here, however, the war talk coming from both Trump and Kim Jong-un is deep cause for concern. In a stinging editorial on Easter Sunday, the Hankyoreh newspaper, which was founded by journalists purged during the authoritarian 1970s and ’80s, blamed both sides for aggravating tensions. “A military clash on the Korean Peninsula would have disastrous consequences not only for North and South Korea but also for all neighboring countries,” the newspaper said. “That is why we will never agree with hardliners who are willing to go to war and who see war as inevitable. The brinkmanship of the U.S. and North Korea, which appear to be engaged in a battle of nerves, is tantamount to taking hostage the entire populations of North and South Korea.” Still, the feeling here in Gwangju and elsewhere seems to be that this, too, shall pass—until someone comes along with the courage and stamina to buck the United States and try serious engagement for a change. After all, this is their country. That’s a lesson too many Americans, in their obsession with North Korea as a strategic enemy, seem to forget. Tim Shorrock is spending April and May working at Gwangju’s 5.18 Archives to integrate his collection of declassified US-government documents on Korea into the archive’s collection of materials on the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. In 2015, he was named an honorary citizen of Gwangju for his reporting on the US role in Korea during the uprising.  A journalist, Shorrock is on the Korea Policy Institute advisory board. #KoreanWar #SouthKorea #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #parkgeunhye #NorthKorea

Vice President Mike Pence spoke from the demilitarized zone on the Korean peninsula on Monday. (Photo: Reuters) By Nika Knight | April 22, 2017 Originally published in Common Dreams Seemingly unabashed after North Korea’s warning last week of an imminent “thermonuclear war,” Vice President Mike Pence once again engaged in saber-rattling against the country on a surprise visit to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea on Monday. All options are on the table” when it comes to North Korea, Pence said as he stood alongside South Korea’s acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn, in Seoul, and promised “an overwhelming and effective response” if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon. “Just in the past two weeks we witnessed the strength of resolve of our new leader. North Korea would do well not to test his resolve,” Pence added, referring to President Donald Trump’s unilateral deployment of 59 cruise missiles to Syria and the U.S. military’s use of its largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan. Pence began a multi-country Asia tour with his planned visit to Seoul on Sunday, and surprised observers by also visiting the DMZ on Monday. Earlier Monday, when Pence spoke from the DMZ, the vice president vowed that the Obama administration’s “era of strategic patience is over.” While he spoke, North Korean soldiers stood mere feet away on the other side of the border, and snapped photos of the vice president. “President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the United States and our allies in this region has run out and we want to see change,” Pence said. “We want to see North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear weapons, and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable,” he continued. Foreign policy and North Korea experts were highly critical of the vice president’s comments. “I think what we’re witness to is a kind of revisionism both with Vice President Prence and Secretary of State [Rex] Tillerson. They’ve made comments that [former president Barack] Obama’s policy of strategic patience is a thing of the past, and I think that that fundamentally misconstrues what the nature of strategic patience was,” said Christine Hong, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, on Democracy Now! Monday. “Far from being a kinder, gentler, or even softer policy toward North Korea, Obama’s policy toward North Korea was in point of fact one of warfare,” Hong said, pointing out the Obama administration’s cyberwarfare campaign against the North Korean regime. “Even the possibility of military action against North Korea […] would be inconceivable if the Obama administration hadn’t made the militarization of the larger Asia Pacific region one of its topmost foreign policy objectives.” “The fact is that American nuclear intimidation of North Korea goes back to the Korean War,” added Bruce Cumings, author of North Korea: Another Country, who also spoke on Democracy Now! Monday. “After the Korean War in 1958 we installed hundreds of nuclear weapons in the south, [we were] the first country to bring nuclear weapons to the peninsula,” Cumings noted, adding that “President Obama threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons many times, by flying B-2 bombers over the South, dumping dummy bombs on islands, and so on. It’s natural that North Korea would seek a deterrent.” Hong further pointed out: The U.S. performs the largest war games in the world with its South Korean ally, twice annually. And in the course of performing these military exercises it actually rehearses a number of things. It rehearses a decapitation of the North Korean leadership, the invasion and occupation of North Korea, and it also performs a nuclear first strike against North Korea with dummy munitions. And so we have as one of the possibilities a preemptive nuclear strike against North Korea. That is the nature of the unhinged foreign policy that we’re seeing on the part of the Trump administration. Even though North Korea and Kim Jong-Un serves as a convenient foil, a kind of bad guy, for U.S. foreign policy within the larger Asia Pacific region, we have plenty of reason to be frightened of Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, which doesn’t serve Americans, much less anyone else around the world. “What’s so terrible about [the United States’ pre-emptive strike threat] is that you essentially get a stand off, with North Korea having nuclear weapons, the U.S. having nuclear weapons, but the North Korea not being able to use them anywhere without being turned into a charcoal briquette,” Cumings observed. “That was General Colin Powell’s reference to what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon in anger.” Urging diplomacy instead of military action, Cumings continued: I think the U.S. has quite purposefully ratcheted up the tension[…] I don’t think Vice President Pence is right that what President Trump has done has showed strength and resolve. It’s one of the easiest things to fling 59 cruise missiles into Syria; apparently the military has wanted to test this MOAB, “mother of all bombs,” for some time, and they went ahead and did it. It’s not clear what the outcome of either strike is. It seems that Mr. Trump, who ran on an anti-interventionist platform, is actually enjoying the toys that the military can provide to him, and perhaps using them in Korea, which would be a complete disaster. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also urged diplomacy on Monday, arguing that there is no military solution to the tensions on the Korean peninsula. In addition, Hong went on to argue that “we should all be mystified that successive U.S. presidents have tried to outsource their foreign policy in the Asia Pacific to China, as if they hold the same interests in the Asia Pacific region,” and speculated that the “real target” of Trump’s saber-rattling in the Korean peninsula is not North Korea, but China. “Every single amplified and ratcheted up war game was justified in the name of a dangerous and unpredictable North Korea, but China understood full well what was happening, which was the encirclement of China,” Hong said. “So North Korea has served as a very convenient ideological ruse for the United State’s military industrial complex, but the real target is China.” Nika Knight is a staff writer for Common Dreams. #BruceCumings #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #AsiaPacificpivot #ChristineHong #NorthKorea

The USS Carl Vinson is taking part in war exercises with Japanese ships in the Philippine Sea.(MC3 Matt Brown/U.S. Navy) By Christine Hong |  April 25, 2017 Originally published in The Progressive As the latest North Korea crisis unfolded, and Donald Trump swapped campaign plowshares for post-inauguration swords, Americans took to the streets demanding that the President release his tax returns and then marched for science. There were no mass protests for peace. Although the substance of Trump’s foreign policy remains opaque, he had campaigned on an “America First” critique of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s liberal interventionism in Libya and, to his own party’s mortification, blasted George W. Bush’s neoconservative adventurism in Iraq. Once in the White House, though, Trump announced he would boost the U.S. military budget by a staggering $54 billion, cut back on diplomacy, and push the United States to the brink of active conflict with North Korea. None of this provoked a major backlash. To the contrary, Trump’s surprise bombing of Syria, which, his administration declared, doubled as a warning for North Korea, garnered him across-the-aisle praise from hawks in both parties and his highest approval ratings so far. The American public’s quietism with regard to the prospect of renewed U.S. aggression against North Korea is remarkable. It stands in stark contrast to the broad anti-war galvanization in the post- 9/11 lead-up to the U.S. war in Iraq and the widespread protests against the Vietnam War in an earlier era. To some degree, it recalls the muted mid-twentieth century political terrain that led to the Korean War—a brutal, dirty, and unresolved conflict that set the model for subsequent U.S. intervention. One of the few voices of opposition, Paul Robeson, in a critique that resonates to this day, lambasted his fellow citizens’ “meek conformity with the policies of the war-minded, the racists, and the rich.” That “the maw of warmakers [was] insatiable” in Korea, as Robeson remarked in 1950, could be seen in the massive devastation of human life. It was an asymmetrical conflict in which the United States monopolized the skies, raining down ruin. Four million Koreans—the vast majority of them civilians—were killed. Chinese statistics indicate that North Korea lost thirty percent of its population. In North Korea where few families were left unscathed by the terroristic violence of the Korean War, anti-Americanism cannot be dismissed as state ideology alone. More than almost anyone in the world, North Koreans know intimately what it means to be in the crosshairs of the American war machine. In May 1951, writer and activist Monica Felton observed that in the course of her travels through North Korea as part of an international fact-finding delegation, “the same scenes of destruction repeated themselves over and over again . . . . The destruction, in fact, is so overwhelming that if the war is allowed to continue—even for another few months—there will be nothing left of Korea. Nothing at all.” It is no coincidence that the phoenix serves as one of North Korea’s national emblems. Then, as now, Korea rested in the hazy recesses of American consciousness, mostly out of sight, mostly out of mind. When recently asked to comment on the catastrophe that would ensue were Trump to authorize a preemptive strike against North Korea, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, responded with chilling candor: “Yes, it would be terrible, but the war would be over there. It wouldn’t be here. It would be bad for the Korean peninsula, it would be bad for China, it would be bad for Japan, it would be bad for South Korea, it would be the end of North Korea but what it would not do is hit America.” Although famously at odds with Trump on numerous other matters, Graham here captured the pyrrhic spirit of the President’s “America First” foreign policy, a self-privileging worldview that allows for untold ruin and suffering so long as they remain far from our shores. Graham’s statement is in keeping with the time-honored American tradition of envisioning apocalypse for North Korea—a tradition that survived the Cold War’s end and serves as through-line across successive U.S. presidencies. In recent days, we have been told that the United States must entertain all possible scenarios against North Korea as an interloper in the nuclear club, including a preemptive nuclear strike. It has been drilled into our heads that North Korea poses a clear and chronic danger, a threat not just to the United States and its allies in Asia and the Pacific, but also to all of humanity. Yet as Donald MacIntyre, Seoul bureau chief for Time magazine during the George W. Bush era, has observed, when it comes to North Korea, Western media has faithfully adhered to a “demonization script” and in so doing has helped to “lay the groundwork for war.” Conditioned by jingoistic portraits of the North Korean enemy—“axis of evil,” “outpost of tyranny,” “rogue state”—and complacent in our displacement of risk onto them, not us, we consent to North Korea’s extinction in advance. Instability in Korea has, for several decades, lined the pockets of those who profit from the business of war. Indeed, the Korean War rehabilitated a U.S. economy geared, as a result of World War II, toward total war. Seized as opportunity, the war enabled the Truman Administration to triple U.S. defense spending and furnished a rationale for the bilateral linking of Asian client states to the United States. General James Van Fleet, the commanding officer of UN forces in Korea, described the war as “a blessing” and remarked, “There had to be a Korea either here or some place in the world.” As Cumings writes: “[I]t was the Korean War, not Greece or Turkey or the Marshall Plan or Vietnam, that inaugurated big defense budgets and the national security state, that transformed a limited containment doctrine into a global crusade, that ignited McCarthyism just as it seemed to fizzle, and thereby gave the Cold War its long run.” Fast-forward to the present: the portrait of an unpredictable nuclear – armed North Korea greases the cogs of the U.S. war machine and fuels the military-industrial complex. Within Asia and the Pacific, this jingoistic portrait has justified the accelerated deployment of missile-defense systems in Guam and South Korea, the strategic positioning of nuclear aircraft carriers, the sales of military weapons, war exercises between the United States and its regional allies, and a forward-deployed U.S. military posture. Even as China is without question the main economic rival of the United States, an armed and dangerous North Korea furnishes the pretext for a heavily militarized U.S. presence in the region. Unsurprisingly, few media outlets have reported on North Korea’s overtures to the United States, even as these, if pursued, might result in meaningful de-escalation on both sides. To be clear: peaceful alternatives are at hand. Far from being an intractable foe, North Korea has repeatedly asked the United States to sign a peace treaty that would bring the unresolved Korean War to a long-overdue end. It has also proposed that the United States cease its annual war games with South Korea—games, we must recognize, that involve the simulated invasion and occupation of North Korea, the “decapitation” of its leadership, and rehearsals of a preemptive nuclear strike. In return, North Korea will cap its nuclear weapons testing. China has reiterated this proposal. The United States maintains that its joint war games with South Korea are simply business as usual and has not seen fit to respond. With the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism rearing their heads in our current moment, we have cause to be gravely concerned. During his recent anti-North Korea tour of Asia and the Pacific, Vice President Mike Pence grimly stated, “The sword stands ready,” with no sense that plowshares might be in the offing. The implication in the Trump administration’s words (“all options are on the table,” “rogue state,” “behaving very badly”) and deeds (the U.S. bombings of Syria and Afghanistan) is that force is the only lingua franca available, and that with North Korea, we must learn war over and over again. Almost seventy years ago, we entered into a war with North Korea that has never ended. At the time, only a handful of Americans raised their voices in opposition. Let’s not let the historical record reflect our silence now. Christine Hong is an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute. She has spent time in North Korea, including as part of a North American peace delegation. #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #ChristineHong #NorthKorea

As tensions have risen between the U.S. and North Korea, answering a call from WomenCrossDMZ, hundreds of women from forty countries, including both North and South Korea, urged President Trump to defuse military tensions and and start negotiating for peace to prevent war from erupting on the Korean peninsula. #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #ChristineAhn #WomenCrossDMZ #NorthKorea

Mainstream U.S. media depicts North Korean Kim Jong-Un as crazy and his country as an insane asylum, but there is logic in their fear of “regime change,” a fear that only negotiations can address, says ex-U.S. diplomat Ann Wright. By Ann Wright  |  May 9, 2017 Originally published in Consortiumnews.com Why are discussions for a peace treaty with North Korea not an option to resolve the extraordinarily dangerous tensions on the Korean peninsula? At long last, experts with long experience with the North Koreans are publicly calling for these negotiations. Many in Washington’s think tanks finally acknowledge that the Obama policy of “strategic patience,” which relied on sanctions and other pressures to frustrate North Korea, did not result in a slowdown in the nuclear weapon and missile programs, but instead provided room for the North Koreans to expand their research and testing of both nuclear weapon and missile technology. These experts now acknowledge that the U.S. government must deal with the reality that sanctions have not slowed North Korea’s programs and that negotiations are needed. William Perry, who was Secretary of Defense from 1994-1997 during talks with the North Koreans that led to an arms control framework, wrote in a Jan. 6 op-ed in the Washington Post that some Western perceptions of the North Koreans as crazy fanatics are false and meaningful negotiations are possible. Perry wrote: “During my discussions and negotiations with members of the North Korean government, I have found that they are not irrational, nor do they have the objective of achieving martyrdom. Their goals, in order of priority, are: preserving the Kim dynasty, gaining international respect and improving their economy. “I believe it is time to try diplomacy that would actually have a chance to succeed. We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before it had a nuclear arsenal. The most we can reasonably expect today is an agreement that lowers the dangers of that arsenal. “The goals would be an agreement with Pyongyang to not export nuclear technology, to conduct no further nuclear testing and to conduct no further ICBM testing. These goals are worth achieving and, if we succeed, could be the basis for a later discussion of a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula.” Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker — an expert on the North Korean nuclear program, emeritus director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (U.S. nuclear program), and the last U.S. citizen to see part of the North Korean nuclear program in 2010 — also called for talking with the North Korean government. A Trump Envoy? In a Jan. 12 op-ed in the New York Times, Hecker wrote: “Mr. Trump should send a presidential envoy to North Korea. Talking is not a reward or a concession to Pyongyang and should not be construed as signaling acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Mr. Trump has little to lose by talking. He can risk the domestic political downside of appearing to appease the North. He would most likely get China’s support, which is crucial because Beijing prefers talking to more sanctions. He would also probably get support for bilateral talks from Seoul, Tokyo and Moscow. “By talking, and especially by listening, the Trump administration may learn more about the North’s security concerns. It would allow Washington to signal the strength of its resolve to protect its allies and express its concerns about human rights abuses, as well as to demonstrate its openness to pragmatic, balanced progress. “Talking will help inform a better negotiating strategy that may eventually convince the young leader that his country and his regime are better off without nuclear weapons.” John Dulury, in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs in an article titled, “Trump and North Korea-Reviving the Art of the Deal,” said, “If the United States really hopes to achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula, it should stop looking for ways to stifle North Korea’s economy and undermine Kim Jong Un’s regime and start finding ways to make Pyongyang feel more secure. “This might sound counterintuitive, given North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and human rights record. But consider this: North Korea will start focusing on its prosperity instead of its self-preservation only once it no longer has to worry about its own destruction. And North Korea will consider surrendering its nuclear deterrent only once it feels secure and prosperous and is economically integrated into Northeast Asia. “With Kim now feeling far safer at home (because of economic progress despite international sanctions), the United States needs to help him find a nonnuclear way to feel secure along his borders. A comprehensive deal is the best way to accomplish this, but it will require direct dialogue with Pyongyang. “Trump should start by holding back-channel talks. If those make enough progress, he should then send an envoy to Pyongyang, who could negotiate a nuclear freeze (and, perhaps, as a goodwill gesture on the part of Pyongyang, secure the release of the two U.S. citizens imprisoned in North Korea). Trump could then initiate high-level talks that would culminate in a meeting between Kim and himself.” Seeking Talks The National Committee on American Foreign Policy is attempting to hold informal talks with the North Korean government in this month. Since 2003, the committee has sponsored other talks in Germany and Malaysia. The committee requested the Trump administration to allow the talks to be held on U.S. soil, however, as with the Obama administration, the Trump administration did not issue visas for a North Korean delegation to come to the U.S. due to the continuation of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the holding of two Americans in North Korea. Ultimately, a peace treaty is the key to having peace on the Korean Peninsula. Virtually unknown to the American public due to the media blackout on anything positive from North Korea is the North Korean annual request for negotiations for a peace treaty to replace the armistice that was signed to end the Korean War in 1953, sixty-four years ago. In January 2016, as in many previous years, the North Korean government specifically stated that it would end its nuclear testing if the U.S. and South Korea would end military exercises and sign a peace treaty. The U.S. responded that until North Korea ends its nuclear weapons program, the U.S. would not talk about a peace treaty. So there is a deadlock. Yet, it is not rational to think that the North Korean government will stop its nuclear weapons and missile testing until they are guaranteed that the United States will not attack them and has signed a peace treaty to that effect. The North Korean government feels its nuclear weapons program is what is keeping the U.S. from adding North Korea to its list of targeted attempts at violent regime change. Having seen what has happened to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen under the Bush and Obama administrations, the North Korean government will not give up what it perceives to be its major deterrent to an attack by the U.S. and South Korea — its small but growing nuclear weapons program. (On a personal note for North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un, all he has to recall is what happened to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi after they surrendered their arsenals of unconventional weapons.) And the U.S. is signaling that “regime change” is still its policy. The annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises practiced military operational plans with the mission of the overthrow of the North Korean government. The not-so-subtle title of the 2016 exercises was “Decapitation.” Dulury, the author of the Foreign Affairs article, suggests that to convince Kim to freeze the development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and the missile programs, as a first step, the Trump administration must design a package of security guarantees such as scaling back or suspending U.S.-South Korean military exercises and delaying the deployment of new U.S. military equipment such as the THAAD missile to South Korea. Ending the War Then, convening four-power talks among China, North Korea, South Korea, and the United States to negotiate and sign a treaty formally ending the Korean War, as Pyongyang has long demanded, would provide the basis for halting further development of its nuclear and long-range ballistic missile programs and allowing International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the country to verify compliance. Of course, other issues eventually would be raised such as improving North Korean human rights, relaxing restrictions on travel abroad, allowing foreign humanitarian organizations more freedom in North Korea, and closing political prison camps. But direct negotiation is the only way to determine what Kim may be ready to do. As President Trump said during the campaign, he would be willing to talk with Kim as long as there was “a ten percent or a 20 percent chance that [he could] talk him out of those damn nukes.” As Dulury wrote, “Wishful thinking about North Korea’s imminent collapse has compromised U.S. strategy for far too long. Obama’s strategic patience, envisioning a day when ‘the Korean people, at long last, will be whole and free,’ wasted the early years of Kim Jong Un’s reign in the mistaken belief that the regime would not survive long following Kim Jong Il’s death.” Dr. Hecker agreed: “Talking is a necessary step to re-establishing critical links of communication to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.” Former Defense Secretary Perry added, “We should deal with North Korea as it is, not as we wish it to be.” North Koreans are very smart and resilient. As well-documented by historians, their country was purposefully destroyed by the United States during the Korean War and they rebuilt it as best they could with minimal outside assistance. Yet, despite virtually no external help for the past 35 years ago – since the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s – and despite expanding international sanctions over the past ten years, North Korea has been able to develop its nuclear program and its missile program and put satellites into space — all, of course, at the expense of funding the level of social and economic programs it would like to have for its citizens. If the international community really wants to resolve the tensions on the Korean Peninsula and give the North Korean people a chance to rejoin the community of nations, a peace treaty that gives North Korea the assurances it needs for its survival is the first, not the last step. Ann Wright served 29 years in the U.S. Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned in 2003 in opposition to President Bush’s war on Iraq and in her letter of resignation mentioned the lack of effort of the Bush administration in resolving issues with North Korea. She went to North Korea in May 2015 as a part of the 30-woman delegation of Women Cross the DMZ that held a two day peace conference with 250 North Korean women. #NorthKorea #peacetreaty #WomenCrossDMZ