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By Bruce Cumings | May 12, 2017 Originally published in the London Review of Books More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: ‘A regional war between India and Pakistan, for instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change.’ How is it possible that we have come to this? How does a puffed-up, vainglorious narcissist, whose every other word may well be a lie (that applies to both of them, Trump and Kim Jong-un), come not only to hold the peace of the world in his hands but perhaps the future of the planet? We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history by the leaders of North Korea. North Korea celebrated the 85th anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army on 25 April, amid round-the-clock television coverage of parades in Pyongyang and enormous global tension. No journalist seemed interested in asking why it was the 85th anniversary when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was only founded in 1948. What was really being celebrated was the beginning of the Korean guerrilla struggle against the Japanese in north-east China, officially dated to 25 April 1932. After Japan annexed Korea in 1910, many Koreans fled across the border, among them the parents of Kim Il-sung, but it wasn’t until Japan established its puppet state of Manchukuo in March 1932 that the independence movement turned to armed resistance. Kim and his comrades launched a campaign that lasted 13 difficult years, until Japan finally relinquished control of Korea as part of the 1945 terms of surrender. This is the source of the North Korean leadership’s legitimacy in the eyes of its people: they are revolutionary nationalists who resisted their country’s coloniser; they resisted again when a massive onslaught by the US air force during the Korean War razed all their cities, driving the population to live, work and study in subterranean shelters; they have continued to resist the US ever since; and they even resisted the collapse of Western communism – as of this September, the DPRK will have been in existence for as long as the Soviet Union. But it is less a communist country than a garrison state, unlike any the world has seen. Drawn from a population of just 25 million, the North Korean army is the fourth largest in the world, with 1.3 million soldiers – just behind the third largest army, with 1.4 million soldiers, which happens to be the American one. Most of the adult Korean population, men and women, have spent many years in this army: its reserves are limited only by the size of the population. The story of Kim Il-sung’s resistance against the Japanese is surrounded by legend and exaggeration in the North, and general denial in the South. But he was recognisably a hero: he fought for a decade in the harshest winter environment imaginable, with temperatures sometimes falling to 50° below zero. Recent scholarship has shown that Koreans made up the vast majority of guerrillas in Manchukuo, even though many of them were commanded by Chinese officers (Kim was a member of the Chinese Communist Party). Other Korean guerrillas led detachments too – among them Choe Yong-gon, Kim Chaek and Choe Hyon – and when they returned to Pyongyang in 1945 they formed the core of the new regime. Their offspring now constitute a multitudinous elite – the number two man in the government today, Choe Ryong-hae, is Choe Hyon’s son. Kim’s reputation was inadvertently enhanced by the Japanese, whose newspapers made a splash of the battle between him and the Korean quislings whom the Japanese employed to track down and kill him, all operating under the command of General Nozoe Shotoku, who ran the Imperial Army’s ‘Special Kim Division’. In April 1940 Nozoe’s forces captured Kim Hye-sun, thought to be Kim’s first wife; the Japanese tried in vain to use her to lure Kim out of hiding, and then murdered her. Maeda Takashi headed another Japanese Special Police unit, with many Koreans in it; in March 1940 his forces came under attack from Kim’s guerrillas, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Maeda pursued Kim for nearly two weeks, before stumbling into a trap. Kim threw 250 guerrillas at 150 soldiers in Maeda’s unit, killing Maeda, 58 Japanese, 17 others attached to the force, and taking 13 prisoners and large quantities of weapons and ammunition. In September 1939, when Hitler was invading Poland, the Japanese mobilised what the scholar Dae-Sook Suh has described as a ‘massive punitive expedition’ consisting of six battalions of the Japanese Kwantung Army and twenty thousand men of the Manchurian Army and police force in a six-month suppression campaign against the guerrillas led by Kim and Ch’oe Hyon. In September 1940 an even larger force embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign against Chinese and Korean guerrillas: ‘The punitive operation was conducted for one year and eight months until the end of March 1941,’ Suh writes, ‘and the bandits, excluding those led by Kim Il-sung, were completely annihilated. The bandit leaders were shot to death or forced to submit.’ A vital figure in the long Japanese counterinsurgency effort was Kishi Nobusuke, who made a name for himself running munitions factories. Labelled a Class A war criminal during the US occupation, Kishi avoided incarceration and became one of the founding fathers of postwar Japan and its longtime ruling organ, the Liberal Democratic Party; he was prime minister twice between 1957 and 1960. The current Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is Kishi’s grandson and reveres him above all other Japanese leaders. Trump was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Abe on 11 February when a pointed message arrived mid-meal, courtesy of Pyongyang: it had just successfully tested a new, solid-fuel missile, fired from a mobile launcher. Kim Il-sung and Kishi are meeting again through their grandsons. Eight decades have passed, and the baleful, irreconcilable hostility between North Korea and Japan still hangs in the air. In the West, treatment of North Korea is one-sided and ahistorical. No one even gets the names straight. During Abe’s Florida visit, Trump referred to him as ‘Prime Minister Shinzo’. On 29 April, Ana Navarro, a prominent commentator on CNN, said: ‘Little boy Un is a maniac.’ The demonisation of North Korea transcends party lines, drawing on a host of subliminal racist and Orientalist imagery; no one is willing to accept that North Koreans may have valid reasons for not accepting the American definition of reality. Their rejection of the American worldview – generally perceived as indifference, even insolence in the face of overwhelming US power – makes North Korea appear irrational, impossible to control, and therefore fundamentally dangerous. But if American commentators and politicians are ignorant of Korea’s history, they ought at least to be aware of their own. US involvement in Korea began towards the end of the Second World War, when State Department planners feared that Soviet soldiers, who were entering the northern part of the peninsula, would bring with them as many as thirty thousand Korean guerrillas who had been fighting the Japanese in north-east China. They began to consider a full military occupation that would assure America had the strongest voice in postwar Korean affairs. It might be a short occupation or, as a briefing paper put it, it might be one of ‘considerable duration’; the main point was that no other power should have a role in Korea such that ‘the proportionate strength of the US’ would be reduced to ‘a point where its effectiveness would be weakened’. Congress and the American people knew nothing about this. Several of the planners were Japanophiles who had never challenged Japan’s colonial claims in Korea and now hoped to reconstruct a peaceable and amenable postwar Japan. They worried that a Soviet occupation of Korea would thwart that goal and harm the postwar security of the Pacific. Following this logic, on the day after Nagasaki was obliterated, John J. McCloy of the War Department asked Dean Rusk and a colleague to go into a spare office and think about how to divide Korea. They chose the 38th parallel, and three weeks later 25,000 American combat troops entered southern Korea to establish a military government. It lasted three years. To shore up their occupation, the Americans employed every last hireling of the Japanese they could find, including former officers in the Japanese military like Park Chung Hee and Kim Chae-gyu, both of whom graduated from the American military academy in Seoul in 1946. (After a military takeover in 1961 Park became president of South Korea, lasting a decade and a half until his ex-classmate Kim, by then head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot him dead over dinner one night.) After the Americans left in 1948 the border area around the 38th parallel was under the command of Kim Sok-won, another ex-officer of the Imperial Army, and it was no surprise that after a series of South Korean incursions into the North, full-scale civil war broke out on 25 June 1950. Inside the South itself – whose leaders felt insecure and conscious of the threat from what they called ‘the north wind’ – there was an orgy of state violence against anyone who might somehow be associated with the left or with communism. The historian Hun Joon Kim found that at least 300,000 people were detained and executed or simply disappeared by the South Korean government in the first few months after conventional war began. My own work and that of John Merrill indicates that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people died as a result of political violence before June 1950, at the hands either of the South Korean government or the US occupation forces. In her recent book Korea’s Grievous War, which combines archival research, records of mass graves and interviews with relatives of the dead and escapees who fled to Osaka, Su-kyoung Hwang documents the mass killings in villages around the southern coast.[*] In short, the Republic of Korea was one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the early Cold War period; many of the perpetrators of the massacres had served the Japanese in their dirty work – and were then put back into power by the Americans. Americans like to see themselves as mere bystanders in postwar Korean history. It’s always described in the passive voice: ‘Korea was divided in 1945,’ with no mention of the fact that McCloy and Rusk, two of the most influential men in postwar foreign policy, drew their line without consulting anyone. There were two military coups in the South while the US had operational control of the Korean army, in 1961 and 1980; the Americans stood idly by lest they be accused of interfering in Korean politics. South Korea’s stable democracy and vibrant economy from 1988 onwards seem to have overridden any need to acknowledge the previous forty years of history, during which the North could reasonably claim that its own autocracy was necessary to counter military rule in Seoul. It’s only in the present context that the North looks at best like a walking anachronism, at worst like a vicious tyranny. For 25 years now the world has been treated to scaremongering about North Korean nuclear weapons, but hardly anyone points out that it was the US that introduced nuclear weapons into the Korean peninsula, in 1958; hundreds were kept there until a worldwide pullback of tactical nukes occurred under George H.W. Bush. But every US administration since 1991 has challenged North Korea with frequent flights of nuclear-capable bombers in South Korean airspace, and any day of the week an Ohio-class submarine could demolish the North in a few hours. Today there are 28,000 US troops stationed in Korea, perpetuating an unwinnable stand-off with the nuclear-capable North. The occupation did indeed turn out to be one of ‘considerable duration’, but it’s also the result of a colossal strategic failure, now entering its eighth decade. It’s common for pundits to say that Washington just can’t take North Korea seriously, but North Korea has taken its measure more than once. And it doesn’t know how to respond. To hear Trump and his national security team tell it, the current crisis has come about because North Korea is on the verge of developing an ICBM that can hit the American heartland. Most experts think that it will take four or five years to become operational – but really, what difference does it make? North Korea tested its first long-range rocket in 1998, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the DPRK’s founding. The first medium-range missile was tested in 1992: it flew several hundred miles down range and banged the target right on the nose. North Korea now has more sophisticated mobile medium-range missiles that use solid fuel, making them hard to locate and easy to fire. Some two hundred million people in Korea and Japan are within range of these missiles, not to mention hundreds of millions of Chinese, not to mention the only US Marine division permanently stationed abroad, in Okinawa. It isn’t clear that North Korea can actually fit a nuclear warhead to any of its missiles – but if it happened, and if it was fired in anger, the country would immediately be turned into what Colin Powell memorably called ‘a charcoal briquette’. But then, as General Powell well knew, we had already turned North Korea into a charcoal briquette. The filmmaker Chris Marker visited the country in 1957, four years after US carpet-bombing ended, and wrote: ‘Extermination passed over this land. Who could count what burned with the houses? … When a country is split in two by an artificial border and irreconcilable propaganda is exercised on each side, it’s naive to ask where the war comes from: the border is the war.’ Having recognised the primary truth of that war, one still alien to the American telling of it (even though Americans drew the border), he remarked: ‘The idea that North Koreans generally have of Americans may be strange, but I must say, having lived in the USA around the end of the Korean War, that nothing can equal the stupidity and sadism of the combat imagery that went into circulation at the time. “The Reds burn, roast and toast.”’ Since the very beginning, American policy has cycled through a menu of options to try and control the DPRK: sanctions, in place since 1950, with no evidence of positive results; non-recognition, in place since 1948, again with no positive results; regime change, attempted late in 1950 when US forces invaded the North, only to end up in a war with China; and direct talks, the only method that has ever worked, which produced an eight-year freeze – between 1994 and 2002 – on all the North’s plutonium facilities, and nearly succeeded in retiring their missiles. On 1 May, Donald Trump told Bloomberg News: ‘If it would be appropriate for me to meet with [Kim Jong-un], I would absolutely; I would be honoured to do it.’ There’s no telling whether this was serious, or just another Trump attempt to grab headlines. But whatever else he might be, he is unquestionably a maverick, the first president since 1945 not beholden to the Beltway. Maybe he can sit down with Mr Kim and save the planet. *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 #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Armistice #Trumpforeignpolicy #NorthKorea

Nation writer Tim Shorrock interviews Moon Jae-in, Gwangju, South Korea, May 7, 2017. (Tim Shorrock) By Tim Shorrock | May 12, 2017 Originally published in The Nation Gwangju—Moon Jae-in, a human rights and labor lawyer who came of age protesting authoritarian military governments backed by the United States, assumed South Korea’s presidency Wednesday after a snap election that repudiated nearly a decade of right-wing conservative rule. Moon, 64, took office after securing about 41 percent of a total popular vote of 32.8 million, far ahead of his closest rival, the conservative Hong Joon-pyo, who ended up with 24 percent. It was the largest margin in Korean election history, the wire service Yonhap reported. “I will restore a government based on principle and justice,” Moon declared Tuesday night in a nationally broadcast speech from Seoul’s Gwanghwamun district, which is famous for its political protests. “I will be the proud president of a proud nation.” After being sworn in Wednesday, he startled the nation with a ringing declaration calling for a new foreign policy based on negotiations and dialogue. “I will do whatever it takes to help settle peace on the Korean Peninsula,” including visiting North Korea, Moon told the National Assembly. In a nod to Washington, he also declared he would “further strengthen the alliance between South Korea and the United States.” Moon’s election was the direct result of the impeachment of his predecessor, Park Geun-hye, who had embraced Washington’s hard-line policies toward Pyongyang. She was brought down after millions of citizens angry about corruption, economic mismanagement, abuse of power, and the uncertain future of Korean youth flooded the streets of Seoul and other major cities in a peaceful movement now known as the “candlelight revolution.” In an exclusive interview with The Nation after a Sunday-night rally in Gwangju, Moon said his election, and the movement that preceded it, was the culmination of his nation’s long march toward democracy. “We have had many remarkable achievements,” he said. “But all those events couldn’t complete the civil revolution. Now we’ve finally done it through the candlelight movement. This is a remarkable achievement, of which we should be proud.” Moon, a former human-rights lawyer, traced South Korea’s democratic history back to 1960, when its first president, Syngman Rhee, was overthrown. He ticked off the highlights of the past 30 years: the student-worker demonstrations in Pusan, his hometown, that preceded the assassination of the country’s first military dictator, Park Chung-hee, in October 1979; the bloody Gwangju Uprising in May 1980 against the martial-law regime imposed by another general, Chun Doo-hwan; and the Korean people’s final push for democracy and direct presidential elections in June 1987. “Whenever democracy has fallen into a crisis, the Korean people have sprung up in rage,” he told me. In fact, Moon played an integral part in that movement. As an activist, he was arrested twice in the 1970s and ’80s for protesting against Park (who was Park Geun-hye’s father) and Chun. He later became a labor lawyer, representing workers who had difficulty finding representation. Moon is best known as the chief of staff for South Korea’s last progressive president, Roh Moo-hyun. With Park in jail, Moon aimed his campaign at dismantling Park Geun-hye’s “old regime,” as he called it on Sunday. His platform and campaign statements challenged nearly every policy of the remnants of her Saenuri Party, which split in two after her impeachment. During his run, Moon called for reform of the country’s powerful conglomerates, or chaebol, which dominate the economy; a stronger focus on job creation for youth through new industries such as alternative energy; and increased wages and holiday time for workers. Jin Joo, a public employee in Gwangju active in the Green Party of South Korea, said Moon’s campaign also spoke to voters angry about “the extreme situation” in South Korea over the Park government’s attacks on freedom of expression and political rights. An opinion poll a few weeks before the election found that 27.5 percent of the people chose “justice” as their top priority, above national security or economic growth, The Korea Times noted. The public, said Joo, was particularly incensed by the Park government’s failure to rescue the hundreds of students and teachers who drowned in the tragic Sewol ferry accident in 2014, as well as its role in the death of Baek Nam-gi, an activist killed by a water cannon shot by police during a labor demonstration in 2015. Another factor was Park’s imprisonment of labor leader Han Sang-gyun, who was sentenced to several years in prison for organizing the demonstration where Baek received his fatal injury. “With Moon’s election, we got to have our next president much sooner than expected,” Joo told me. The political atmosphere created by the candlelight protests leading up to the impeachment, she added, has allowed people to raise issues that “previously no one talked about,” such as LGBT and disability rights. (That didn’t always work for Moon, however. A few weeks ago, a lesbian activist confronted Moon at a campaign rally after he said during a televised debate that he “opposed” homosexuality.) But as Moon indicated in his first speech, his election also represents the public’s desire for peace and reconciliation in their divided country. During the presidencies of Lee Myung-bak (2008-13) and Park, tensions escalated sharply with North Korea over its nuclear and missile-testing program. The situation intensified this spring, when the North tested several more missiles, leading to threats of pre-emptive strikes by the Trump administration. In April, the United States and the North appeared to be moving toward war. But as I reported, the situation caused far more concern in Washington than in South Korea. To alleviate the tensions, Moon has promised a more “open and humanitarian” approach that would be marked by a return to the “Sunshine Policy” of South Korea’s last two progressive presidents, Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08). During their years in office, they reached out to Pyongyang with economic projects and cultural and political exchanges. In 2007, when he was Roh’s chief of staff, Moon traveled to North Korea when Roh held a summit meeting with Kim Jong-il, the father of North Korea’s current dictator, Kim Jong-un. At his Gwangju rally on Sunday, Moon said he would “raise my voice loudly” to place South Korea in the lead in any dealings with North Korea. He also pledged to renegotiate a deal the Trump administration struck with Park Geun-hye to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system, known as THAAD, in South Korea. Last month, however, the Pentagon deployed the system without waiting for the election. This led Moon to criticize the move as a fait accompli and angered many South Koreans who oppose THAAD and continue to demonstrate against it. Because his policies on North Korea appear to be at odds with the more confrontational approach taken by the Trump administration, the US media framed Moon’s election as a major challenge to the United States. Moon’s election sets “up a potential rift with the United States over the North’s nuclear program,” David Sanger of The New York Times predicted Wednesday. Just after the election results were announced, Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist and CNN analyst, tweeted that “South Korea just elected an anti-American president.” In the weeks leading up to the vote, former and current US officials made it known they were unhappy with Moon’s potential policies. “We are headed for serious trouble,” a former US diplomat told Donald Kirk, a veteran reporter in Seoul, adding that a clash is “unavoidable.” In his interview with The Nation, Moon was adamant that his more conciliatory approach toward Pyongyang would benefit the United States. “To solve the North Korea nuclear problem is in both our common interests,” he said. “If South Korea takes an active role, that would be helpful to the United States and would relieve the US burden.” Rather than blame President Trump for the recent tensions, as many Koreans have, Moon pointed to the failures of the Park government. “The relationship between North Korea and the US has been getting worse and worse because South Korea hasn’t performed its role well,” he said. Asked about US critics who think his approach is problematic, Moon responded emphatically, “I don’t agree.” He expressed the belief that Trump “would also sympathize with my idea and understand me on this issue.” Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based military analyst who has been studying North Korea for decades, said Moon’s US critics should “take a deep breath and see what happens.” In a telephone interview, Pinkston said a US-South Korea clash was possible in part because Trump’s national security team is so disorganized, with top positions on Asia policy unfilled. “We don’t even have an ambassador here,” he said. “The Koreans need to understand that the Trump presidency is abnormal.” At the same time, Pinkston added, Moon’s government could be constrained by US- and UN-approved sanctions on North Korea aimed at forcing Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program. As an example, he pointed to a recent proposal from Moon for South Korea to trade its rice for rare earths from the North as a way of solving Pyongyang’s rice shortage and allowing South Korean companies to buy rare minerals at a discount. Some critics have said that could violate the UN sanctions, an issue that Moon would have to negotiate. The success of Moon’s policies will also depend on the willingness of North Korea to reciprocate on any offers from the South, said Pinkston. “Will there be a rift? It all depends on how it’s managed,” he said. Whatever the case, Moon is acutely aware of the pain from Korea’s division and America’s role in the war. In December 1950, his family fled the North during the initial phase of the Korean War with a group of 14,000 refugees who were brought to the South in a flotilla organized by the US Navy and its merchant marine. Moon, who was born in 1953, wrote favorably about the Americans who helped his family in his autobiography, From Destiny to Hope. Moon’s election comes after months of peaceful demonstrations for change known as the “candlelight revolution.” (People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy) These experiences make the right-wing attacks on Moon as a “North Korean sympathizer” sound as ludicrous as the accusations from US pundits that he is “anti-American.” But if he wanted to openly criticize the United States, he declined my offer when I asked him about his thoughts on the Gwangju Uprising. During his campaign stops here, I heard Moon say he would honor the spirit of the uprising when he became president. But in 1980, I reminded him, the United States refused to support the democratic aspirations of Gwangju and instead approved the deployment of Korean troops from the joint US-South Korean Command to put it down. Does he believe the US government should apologize? I was surprised by Moon’s response. First, he offered his “deep thanks” to me for my reporting on Gwangju, which he said “revealed the facts and truth to the world.” That was important, he added, because at that time, “South Korea was under dictatorship and the Korean press was controlled.” As for the United States, he added carefully, “We expected a more active US role [at the time of Gwangju]. But since then, we’ve won enough power to achieve democracy by ourselves. So I don’t think we need to be bound by the past or care about [an apology] for the US role. It doesn’t matter, because we have moved on, and established democracy for ourselves.” Not everyone here will agree with Moon on that issue. But it’s hard to think of a better way to tell the world that a new South Korea has emerged, and is ready take its rightful place in the sun. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC-based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. #elections #KoreaPeace #SouthKorea #MoonJaein #TimShorrock

The aftermath of an air raid by U.S. planes over Pyongyang, North Korea circa 1950 (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) By Bruce Cumings | August 14, 2017 Originally published in The Guardian As they always do on the anniversary of the armistice, North Koreans celebrated their “victory” in the Korean War on 27 July. A few days later, President Donald J Trump remarked that if the North Koreans made any more threats, they “will be met with fire and fury, and frankly, power the likes of which the world has never seen”. No American president has uttered words like this since Harry Truman warned the Japanese, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, either to surrender or face “a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth”. Trump’s nuclear bluster, made off-the-cuff between golf rounds, was widely condemned, but a few days later he doubled down on it. As a White House staffer told the New York Times, the president “believes he has a better feel for Mr Kim [Jong-un] than his advisers do. He thinks of Mr Kim as someone pushing people around, and Mr Trump thinks he needs to show that he cannot be pushed.” Trump is surrounded by people who echo his fantasies of ultimate power. Sebastian Gorka, a strange figure advising Trump (said to be a Trump “favorite” and a dead ringer for a Bela Lugosi flunky in a Dracula movie), told Fox News that Trump’s “fire and fury” line meant “don’t test America and don’t test Donald J Trump”. We are not just a superpower, Gorka went on, “we are now a hyper-power. Nobody in the world, especially not North Korea, comes close to challenging our military capabilities.” This has been a truism since the Soviet Union collapsed, but it doesn’t explain how the US has failed to win four of the five major wars it has fought since 1945. One of those wars was indd Korea, where rough peasant armies, North Korean and Chinese, fought the US to a standstill. It was 64 years ago that North Koreans emerged from this war into a living nightmare, after three years of “rain and ruin” by the US air force. Pyongyang had been razed to the ground, with the Air Force stating in official documents that the North’s cities suffered greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II. Just as the Japan scholar Richard Minear termed Truman’s atomic attacks “exterminationist”, the great French writer and film-maker Chris Marker wrote after a visit to the North in 1957: “Extermination crossed this land.” It was an indelible experience still drilled into the heads of every North Korean. On my first visit to Pyongyang in 1981, a guide quickly brought up the bombing and said it had killed several of his family members. Wall posters depicted a wizened old woman in the midst of the bombing, declaring “American imperialists – wolves”. The day after Trump’s bluster, the DPRK government stated: “The US once waged a tragic war that plunged this land into a sea of blood and fire, and has been leaving no stone unturned to obliterate the DPRK’s ideology and system century after century.” There are 25 million human beings living in North Korea. They bleed like we do, they live and die like we do, they love their kin like we do. Trump’s callous and cavalier threat was perhaps the most irresponsible thing he has said since becoming president (which is really saying something), but most Americans will not know this because they know nothing about the carpet-bombing of North Korea. What about the 50 million South Koreans, whose elders also suffered through this war? “Trump doesn’t seem to understand what an alliance is, and doesn’t seem to consider his ally when he says those things,” Lee Byong-chul, a senior fellow at an institute in Seoul, told the New York Times. “No American president has mentioned a military option so easily, so offhandedly as he has.” But here Trump has a precedent: Bill Clinton also didn’t bother to consult the former South Korean president Kim Young Sam when drawing up plans for a pre-emptive strike in June 1994. The next few weeks are critical to this deepening crisis, with annual “Ulchi-Freedom Guardian” war games set to start up on 21 August, involving tens of thousands of American and South Korean troops. North Korean generals have been preparing for moments like this for decades, gaming out war scenarios during several crises going back to January 1968 when they seized the US spy ship Pueblo and held the crew for 11 months. Thus the North’s statements in the current crisis (unlike Trump’s) have a concrete, predictable nature: lots of bluster and bombast combined with quite specific plans, namely four medium-range missiles to be launched into waters near Guam on 15 August, if Kim Jong Un gives the go ahead. Pyongyang always pursues tit-for-tat strategies: the US lifts B1-B nuclear-capable bombers from Guam for flyovers of South Korea – a constant not just under Trump but also during Obama’s tenure – and the North chooses a scenario that will call attention to the nuclear blackmail that the US has pursued going back to the Korean war, and particularly during the decades from 1958 to 1990, when the US stationed hundreds of nukes in South Korea with standard plans to use them in the early stages of a North Korean invasion. Pyongyang also likes to choose dates that have historical resonance: 15 August is the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945. Upon the news of his wife’s death, Shakespeare’s Macbeth said, “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” He famously added: “signifying nothing”. Trump signified this: yet another American venture in extermination. Bruce Cumings  teaches at the University of Chicago and is the author of The Korean War: A History. He is a Korea Policy Institute advisor. #Trump #KimJongUn #BruceCumings #KoreanWar #ICBM #NorthKorea

A U.S. aircraft carrier pulls into port at Guam. (Photo: U.S. Navy / Flickr) By Leilani Ganser | August 13, 2017 This article was originally published jointly by Foreign Policy In Focus and In These Times. This past Fourth of July, while I listened to the fireworks outside the Capitol building, my phone started buzzing with news alerts. North Korea, they said, had tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. Headlines emphasized that it could supposedly reach Alaska. But much closer than Alaska is the tiny island of Guam — a U.S. colonial possession in the Pacific long exploited as a military base. My grandmother was born there, and much of my family remains. At just 30 miles long and 8 miles wide, Guam is often called “the unsinkable aircraft carrier,” as a third of the island is covered in military bases. That’s long made it a strategic target for enemies of the United States. In fact, during the Cold War, it was said that the Soviets were the only ones who could point out Guam on a map. For as long as the West has been aware of Guam’s existence, it’s been a target. During World War II, while my grandmother still lived there, the Japanese occupied Guam and terrorized the indigenous Chamoru population, rounding them up and herding them into concentration camps. In the Manenggon camp, 18,000 Chamorus were interned and surrounded by machine guns set up by the Japanese soldiers for a planned massacre. Today, with the Japanese long gone and the Soviet Union dissolved, the island still faces a battery of live-fire military ammunition with no foreseeable end. But the immediate danger doesn’t come from North Korean missiles. It comes from the United States military, which freely uses the Pacific territory as its own private firing rage. While tourist ads depict the South Pacific as a tranquil safe haven, that tranquility is pierced by the roars of B-52 bombers and submarine water-to-shore artillery blasts. For as long as the United States has maintained Guam as a colony, it has been a simulated warzone. It’s not simply the military firing weapons that can make life difficult for locals, however. The issue is often the presence of the military itself. With military bases come extreme pollution, the occupation of sacred lands, and what some scholars describe as an invisible public health crisis. While the primary argument for these bases is national security, there are countless examples of these bases damaging the health and security of the local population. Over the years Guam has been home to nuclear weapons, mustard gas, and countless other carcinogens. In the 1980s, the Navy discharged radioactive water into a harbor my family has used for fishing. This increased exposure to radioactivity is linked to toxic goiters, a major contributor to thyroid issues which are now abundant in the local population. Multiple wells accessing the island’s one aquifer have had to be shut down due to chemical contamination from areas under or adjacent to these military bases. Indigenous groups have largely led the fight against military pollution. The largely Chamoru-led We Are Guahån — Guahån is the indigenous name for the island — has worked for years to engage and mobilize the local community to prevent further military buildup. Their efforts are fundamental to the mission of a sustainable Guam. In this, they’re drawing inspiration from activists on Puerto Rico — which, like Guam, is a U.S. imperial acquisition from the Spanish-American war whose strategic location has subjected it to exploitation from the U.S. military. There, residents of Vieques led protests in 1999 that ultimately resulted in the shutdown of the Navy’s base on the small island, which lies off the coast of Puerto Rico proper. Unfortunately, the lasting consequences of these bases, active or abandoned, are faced by locals daily. Vieques was a live fire training site for the Navy for over 60 years and has since become one of the single sickest populations in the Caribbean. Along with skyrocketing rates of cancer, the people living on Vieques have a seven times higher risk of diabetes and eight times higher risk of cardiovascular disease than the rest of Puerto Rico. The Navy has since admitted to the use of heavy metals and chemical agents on Vieques, including depleted uranium and Agent Orange, but denies any link between their use and the health of the residents. But Arturo Massol Deyá , a professor of microbiology and ecology at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüe — and the only independent scientist allowed to conduct research on Vieques — continues to find high concentrations of heavy metals in his samples of vegetation, crabs, lagoons, and other local food sources. In both Guam and Puerto Rico, such pollution is devastating to the ecology of the local areas — and to any argument that the bases encourage economic growth for the impoverished local populations. In fact, they restrict the indigenous populations’ ability to engage in traditional means of subsistence and poison the resources locals rely on for self-sustainability. In places like these, plans to expand U.S. military facilities — which could soon cover 40 percent of Guam, if plans initiated during the Obama administration go through — are a far greater threat than any missiles from Korea. These bases of empire are an affront to self-determination and a reminder of our families caught in the crossfire of Western wars for “rights” and “freedom” that my grandmother and my family should have, too. Leilani Ganser is an indigenous rights organizer and political science major at Reed College. She’s a Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies. #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #Guam #ICBM #NorthKorea

U.S., Japanese and Australian attack aircraft fly off the coast of Guam during a training exercise in February. (Staff Sgt. Aaron Richardson/U.S. Air Force) By Carlos Ballesteros | August 13, 2017 Originally published on JournoPortfolio. The prospect of war between the United States and North Korea has increased dramatically over the last 48 hours. On Tuesday, soon after President Donald J. Trump warned of “fire and fury the likes of which this world has never seen” against the heavily-sanctioned country if it didn’t cease threatening the United States, a North Korean military spokesperson was quoted by state media saying that the army was “carefully considering” launching medium-to-long range ballistic rockets near the island of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific home to 165,000 civilians, two military bases, around 6,000 troops, and tens of thousands more military personal and their dependents. Despite calls for calm and restraint from Gov. Eddie Calvo, many of the island’s residents are unsurprisingly worried about a potential nuclear shootout between the two countries. As one local stand-up comedian told the BBC, “There have been threats before but this time feels different. We’re really caught in the cross fire. President Trump seems as much of a sabre-rattler as Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang. And a lot of people here feel like Trump is the guy who might actually press the button.” But while media pundits endlessly debatewhether or not Trump will enforce his ‘red line,’ the decimation of Guam’s ecosystem and the displacement of its indigenous people at the hands of the United States military goes unmentioned. Guam’s strategic importance to the United States is well-documented. Located around 1,500 miles east of the Philippines (where ISIS militants are reportedly gaining traction) and roughly equidistant to the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea, the island is, as described by former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, “an important strategic hub for U.S. military in the Western Pacific.” Historically, the island has played an outsized role in U.S. military ventures in the Pacific, particularly during the Korean War in the 1950s and the Vietnam War a decade later. But Guam’s ecosystem and its indigenous people, the Chamorros, have paid a high price for the island’s strategic importance to the United States. Guam was attacked and invaded by Japan in 1941, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It took the United States nearly three years to recapture the island. During that time, the Japanese military subjected the indigenous people of Guam, the Chamorros, to torturous conditions. In all, historians estimate that violence resulting from World War II killed 10 percent of the island’s total population. After the war, the United States sought to militarily fortify Guam and its other Pacific territories. This led to the displacement of thousands of Chamorro families as the military seized thousands of acres of land for its own use. Soon after, the military bases became the main source of employment on the island, making it harder for traditional modes of subsistence living to continue. As a marker of the intense Americanization that took place in Guam after World War II, only 20 percent of Chamorros in Guam spoke the Chamorro language in 2010; in 1950, that figure was 100 percent. U.S. nuclear testing in the nearby Marshall Islands during the 1950s also bore devastating consequences for the Chamorros. According to a 2010 article in The Asia-Pacific Journal, The incidence of cancer in Guam is high and Chamorros have significantly higher rates than other ethnic groups. Cancer mortality rates for 2003-2007 showed that Chamorro incidence rates from cancer of the mouth and pharynx, nasopharynx, lung and bronchus, cervix, uterus, and liver were all higher than U.S. rates. Chamorros living on Guam also have the highest incidence of diabetes compared to other ethnic groups, and this is about five times the overall U.S. rate. The entire island was affected by toxic contamination following the “Bravo” hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands in 1954. Up to twenty years later, from 1968 to 1974, Guam had higher yearly rainfall measures of strontium 90 compared to Majuro (Marshall Islands). In the 1970s, Guam’s Cocos Island lagoon was used to wash down ships contaminated with radiation that had been in the Marshall Islands as part of an attempt to clean up the islands. In 2009, Madeleine Bordallo, Guam’s elected representative to Congress—who, in accordance with the Guam Organic Act of 1950, has no voting power—introduced an amendment the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) so that it includes Guam in its list of “downwinder” areas affected by atmospheric nuclear testing conducted in Micronesia. It got stuck in committee. A year later, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico introduced an amendment to RECA that would give Chamorros in Guam compensation for the hazardous effects of nuclear fallout. It, too, didn’t make it out of committee. Udall re-introduced the bill in 2011 and again in 2013 to no avail. As of today, Chamorros in Guam only qualify for compensation under the “onsite participants” category, which only covers victims who were present at “any designated location within a naval shipyard, air force base, or other official government installation where ships, aircraft or other equipment used in an atmospheric nuclear detonation were decontaminated,” leaving out many affected by nuclear fallout on the island. A view of a construction site at the Port of Guam Aug. 19, 2014, as seen from a bus carrying U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work during a tour of the port and area military bases. (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz, U.S. Air Force/Released) Today, the Department of Defense owns nearly a third of Guam’s total landmass. But as the Pentagon seeks to relocate Marines from its base in Okinawa—primarily due to continuous protests against the military base by Japanese citizens—that figure is only going to increase, resulting in dire environmental consequences. In 2006, the Navy proposed moving 8,600 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, as well as expand its operations in Apra Harbor, destroying 70 acres of coral reefs in the process. Outcry against the destruction of the reefs eventually forced the Navy to cancel its plans in Apra Harbor. Still, the U.S. military’s presence in Guam has wreaked havoc on the its ecosystem: According to the National Park Service, 85 percent of coral taxa in Guam and the Marianas Archipelago “showed signs of bleaching” in 2013—a result of higher sea surface temperatures. While the Apra Harbor was stopped (for now), the Navy still plans to relocate 5,000 Marines and 1,300 dependents beginning in 2022. In conjunction with the tens of thousands of construction workers that will be sent to work on military buildup projects on the island over the next decade, Guam’s water supply will come under great duress, as will it its transportation infrastructure, while also creating thousands of pounds of hazardous waste. Of course, the Pentagon argues that these projects boost Guam’s economy. But for many on the island, the benefits are outweighed by the costs—environmental, social, and political. The issue for many on the island is that there is no democratic process in place to settle these differences. As a non-self-governing territory (a.k.a. a colony), the people of Guam have no say in whether or not they want to live in proximity of four fast-attack nuclear submarines and an expeditionary helicopter squadron. Thankfully, the United Nations has advocated for Guam’s right of self-determination, and there’s a big chance high schoolers on the island will be introduced to decolonization classes and instructional material as early as next year. But until the people of Guam are allowed to decide their own destiny, they will remain in the crosshairs of the enemies of the United Stares, reaping none of the benefits from empire and taking on all the risk. Carlos Ballesteros is a freelance journalist in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Nation, In These Times, and South Side Weekly.  His blog is Journoportfolio. #Trump #DPRK #Nuclearweapons #Guam #ICBM #NorthKorea

By Dennis J Bernstein | August 18, 2017 Originally published in Consortiumnews.com Many Asia experts are concerned that the war of words between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un could turn Trump’s warning of “fire and fury, the likes of which the world has never seen” into a catastrophic reality. I spoke on August 10 with long-time Korea expert Tim Shorrock, a Washington-based journalist who spent a good deal of his youth in South Korea and has been writing about the Koreas for nearly 40 years. Shorrock has recently returned from a two-month stay in South Korea where he had an opportunity to interview the new president, Moon Jae-in. Dennis Bernstein: Why don’t you begin by giving us a sense of what is going on in the South now. Are people afraid of a World War III? Tim Shorrock: For most South Koreans, this is a confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea. The concern is that Donald Trump will follow up on the threat he made the other day and do something crazy. Of course, there is the fear that it could spill over into South Korea, but there is not any panic going on there. DB: The new government in South Korea is more inclined to have negotiations with the North. But the United States has not even appointed an ambassador to the South. The situation seems very confusing and dangerous. TS: The danger is miscalculation. You have Trump basically driving nuclear war with North Korea and you have North Korea saying that they will soon decide whether to send missiles toward Guam. It is a situation where someone could mistake an insignificant launch for something very significant. Or they could misinterpret something happening on the border and things could escalate out of control. A lot of people in Congress were very concerned about Trump’s remarks. That was true around the world, as well. Moon Jae-in won the election based on his policy of wanting to engage again with North Korea. The last two presidents had rejected engagement and the situation had become very tense because of their hard-line policies. Moon has not gotten much of a response yet from the North. He has proposed military-to-military talks but the North has not yet responded. Now with the latest missile test by the North, Moon has reversed himself on deployment of THAAD and has actually called for its expansion. However, he said today that the door is still open to dialogue. DB: What is the history of negotiations between the North and the South? TS: Moon Jae-in ran on what he called the “Sunshine Policy.” This policy was started by Kim Dae-jung, who was the president from the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s. He ran on a campaign to break down the barriers between the North and the South through cultural and economic outreach and political engagement. He had a summit in the 1990’s with Kim Jong-il and there was another summit with Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Noh Moo-hyun, in 2007. They made declarations about moving toward peace, demilitarizing the situation and reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons on the peninsula. During the Sunshine years, many South Koreans traveled to North Korea, and vice versa. So there was actually a lot of contact until about 2007, the first time it had happened for 45 years or so. And many South Koreans began to see the North less as an enemy. The enmity has been broken down between the South and the North. Now, this hasn’t improved relations between North Korea and America. Because of the death of this one American visitor who was imprisoned in North Korea and came back in a coma and died a few days later [Otto Warmbier], the US Congress moved to bar any travel from the US to North Korea. This is the first ban on Americans traveling to other countries in decades. DB: You had a chance recently to interview the new president, Moon Jae-in. What did you learn from that experience? TS: I met him two days before his election. He came up through the democratic movement. He was a labor rights and human rights lawyer for many years. He was very active in the opposition to the military dictator Park Chung-hee in the 1970’s. He was jailed twice for his anti-government activities. He was chief of staff under progressive president Noh Moo-hyun and was present when Noh met with Kim Jung-il in 2007. I asked him about the Sunshine Policy and whether he thought there might be opposition from the US. He was already getting criticism from analysts in Washington and some politicians that his policies were soft on North Korea. His response was that if he could do something to reduce the tensions, especially between North Korea and the United States, that should be welcomed by the US. I asked him about the 1980 massive uprising in Gwangju against martial law and the massacre that followed. The uprising was put down brutally by the South Korean military with help from the Americans. This is still a source of friction between South Koreans and the United States. While he said that the Americans could have done a lot more than they did at the time, he didn’t think it was necessary that the United States  apologize now, when the country has moved on and is now a democracy. Right now, Moon is treading a very fine line: He is trying to reach out to North Korea but he is under a lot of pressure from the United States to adopt a more military-first stance. Many South Koreans have been criticizing him for agreeing to extend the deployment of the missile system that the US installed last year. DB: If the United States tried to pull off a first strike, what might that look like? TS: It would be a catastrophe. North Korea is fully capable of launching a counterattack. With its conventional weapons it could wipe out Seoul. It could reach Japan. There would be untold numbers of casualties. South Korea does not want the US to launch a unilateral war without taking into consideration the huge casualties that would result in South Korea and without consulting the South Koreans. It would rupture the alliance between the United States and South Korea. I think a lot of what Trump has been saying is pure bluster. It is very dangerous bluster and can only escalate the situation. DB: Many people feel that this THAAD missile system is not in place to protect South Korea but is part of an offensive program known as the Pacific Pivot to control China and the region. TS: The Chinese claim that the radar component of the system is very strong and can penetrate China very easily. Many in South Korea believe that the missiles are there to protect US bases. But even proponents of THAAD concede that, while it is capable of shooting a few missiles down, in the case of a large-scale war, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. It is actually more of a psychological weapon than something that can prevent an attack or a war. As you said, it is part of a broader system that is in place. Over the past few years there has been a huge military build-up in the region and particularly in Korea. This is a major confrontation and for most South Koreans the only way out is to have engagement. DB: The American people have no knowledge of the violent history of US involvement in Korea which makes the North Koreans incredibly nervous and reluctant to give up what they see as a bargaining chip with nuclear weapons. TS: During the Korean War, the United States completely obliterated the North. Eventually there were literally no targets left. Three million people, most of them civilians, were killed by US planes. It was a complete scorched earth policy. Trump’s rhetoric reminds people of what happened in the Korean War. The North Koreans have a very real fear of the United States launching its military on them again. The American people have so little knowledge of this history. All they hear in the news are numbers: How far can the North Korean missiles go, how many people would be killed in a war? Nobody is talking about how we got into this situation and how we can get out. Again and again, US officials and the US media will say that North Korea refuses to negotiate on their nuclear weapons. What they leave out is that North Korea, in every one of their statements, has said that, until the United States drops its hostile policy, they will not negotiate. What would it mean to end our hostile policy? That is what happened under Clinton in the late 1990’s. The agreement was to end their nuclear program. At that time they didn’t have any nuclear weapons. That program was frozen for twelve years until the agreement was ripped up in 2003 by the Bush administration. After that they built a bomb and exploded it in 2006. Most importantly, the United States has never ended its hostile policy. That is the only way this is going to be resolved. As recently as 2015, the North Koreans offered to put another moratorium on weapons development if the United States would sign a peace agreement. Obama rejected that. Even more recently the North Koreans, together with the Chinese and the Russians, proposed that North Korea freeze their nuclear missile programs in exchange for a drawback of the US/South Korean military exercises. That has also been rejected so far by the United States. DB: Do you see it as a problem that the Trump administration doesn’t seem very interested in diplomacy? They seem to want to solve matters with B1 bombers. TS: Interestingly, Trump has had some negotiations with the North Korean government. Soon after he took office in January, the US ambassador to North Korea met with the North Korean foreign minister and that is when we reached an agreement to free some of the Americans in prison in North Korea. But those talks were aimed toward opening the door to broader negotiations. Less than a week ago, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at his first press conference that he would welcome direct talks with North Korea if they would put a moratorium on their missile tests. A couple days later, Trump makes this statement about nuclear war. I believe there is a split in the administration about this. There are definitely forces within the administration who are pushing for military action. DB: The Trump administration has taken to blaming the Chinese, saying they haven’t done enough to rein in North Korea. My understanding is that the Chinese are pretty upset about THAAD and in general about the role the US has been playing in its attempt to surround China with this military ring. What role could China be playing here? TS: The predominant line right now in Washington is to outsource policy to China, to have China put the screws on North Korea. That’s just not going to happen. They have a long relationship. After all, one million Chinese soldiers died in the Korean War trying to defend North Korea. China certainly does not want to have a situation in a unified Korea where suddenly they have US forces right on the border of the Yellow River. Neither is China going to put pressure on North Korea until it collapses. China has been quite accommodating to US demands for sanctions. The Chinese and the Russians both voted at the UN for a vast expansion of sanctions which will affect one-third of North Korea’s exports. But after the vote, both the Chinese and the Russian ambassadors made it very clear that they want the United States to negotiate with the North. They see sanctions as only one part of a larger strategy. They came up with a proposal they are calling “freeze for freeze,” which would freeze North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons if the US freezes its military exercises. Actually, I think the Chinese are playing an important role right now. Just today [August 10], they put out a statement warning Trump that his language is not helping. North Korea has always taken an independent course. They had a lot of disputes with the Soviet Union and they have had a lot of disputes with China. It has its own policies and doesn’t like to be pushed around by bigger powers. This is a conflict between North Korea and the United States. The North Korean foreign minister just said that the only country they are going to use nuclear weapons against, if they have to, is the United States. What American officials and media would like us to think is that the United States is just an innocent bystander in Korea: “For some strange reason we cannot understand, the North Koreans just hate us so.” Without understanding the history and the role of the United States in Korea, a lot of Americans are going along with this. We have had military forces in Korea since 1945. There are no Chinese troops, no Russian troops in North Korea. DB: We hear a lot about poverty in the North, about hunger. I imagine that their heavy military build-up takes a toll on their own people. TS: Absolutely. It has a huge military far out of proportion with their size and population. Of course, all this military spending deprives the civilian population of support. That was one of the factors that brought them to negotiate in the first place. In the late 1990’s there was a severe crisis when they experienced famine and floods and they lost their access to low-cost oil from the former Soviet Union. At that time, thousands and thousands of people did die from starvation. It is still a very poor country but, even under the stiff sanctions, in the last few years North Korea’s economy has grown substantially. People who go there note that there is lots of new construction and economic activity. But I am sure that achieving peace with the outside world would certainly do a lot to improve its economy, to be able to divert resources away from military spending. It is important to remember that, until the late 1970’s, North Korea’s industrial indices were actually higher than those in the South. They were doing well, especially by third-world standards. It is true that today the South Korean economy is miles ahead of the North. But a backward country could not be developing nuclear weapons. I believe that with years of peace and interchange with other countries, North Korea would be much better off. That should be the goal of everybody. DB: What do you think will be the impact of these latest sanctions? TS: Cutting one-third of exports and blocking remittances from workers abroad is surely going to hurt the people there. Any time you have sanctions it is the ordinary people who suffer. We saw this in Iraq. There could be some very tough years ahead for North Korea. DB: Maybe we can come back to the geopolitical angle. Many critics of US foreign policy in the region feel that this is not about North Korea or South Korea, it is about the United States drawing a ring around China in order to control the resources, the trade routes. This is about the uppity North getting in the way of US interests in controlling the region. TS: Certainly that conflict is there and the United States has moved very aggressively against China in many ways. But this particular conflict goes way back to the early days of the Cold War. The Korean War was one of the first hot battles of the Cold War. This is part of the legacy of the US intervention after World War II, of the choices the US made as to who would govern South Korea, consciously using those who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation. I don’t see the question of Korea as a side issue from the broader picture. It is very important to find some solution to the Korean standoff. By this point, the US and Vietnam are almost military allies. The United States has been able to get past the war in Vietnam. It is about time we were able to do the same with Korea. Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC-based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, and a Korea Policy Institute advisor. #KimJongUn #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #MoonJaein #TimShorrock #Sanctions #NorthKorea

By Zoom in Korea | August 5, 2017 “The people who were at the forefront of the candlelight revolution that ousted Park Geun-hye need to be the driving force of South Korean politics, and for that reason, we need a new party,” said Kim Jong-hoon, an independent South Korean National Assemblymember, in a recent interview with ZoominKorea. Kim is part of a new movement to re-consolidate progressive forces in South Korea to build a new progressive party tasked with following through on the demands for fundamental systemic change put forth by the candlelight revolution. The preparatory committee of the New People’s Party (Sae-minjung-jeong-dang)–a working title that may change after merging with other existing progressive parties–represents a broad united front of diverse sectors, most notably the Korean Peasants League and sections of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. It plans to launch the new party in late September. Formerly a member of the Democratic Labor Party and the Unified Progressive Party, Kim currently serves in the National Assembly as an independent and is the standing representative of the New People’s Party (tentative name). He represents the district of Ulsan, South Korea’s industrial powerhouse and home to the world’s largest automobile assembly plant operated by the Hyundai Motor Company and the world’s largest shipyard operated by Hyundai Heavy Industries. As a student activist, he participated in the series of militant labor strikes that later came to be known as the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987, a milestone in the fight for democratic labor unions in South Korea. ZoominKorea asked Kim to discuss the impetus behind the formation of the new progressive party, as well as the role of South Korean progressives vis a vis the liberal Moon Jae-in administration and the intensifying war threats on the Korean peninsula. The following is Part 1 of the interview: ZoominKorea: Congratulations on the formation of the New People’s Party (tentative name). Please tell us about the new party. What forces are coming together to form this party? Why form this party at this particular moment? Kim: The South Korean people have ousted the previous Park Geun-hye administration through people power and laid the groundwork for creating a new society. The people who were at the forefront of the candlelight revolution need to be the driving force of South Korean politics. For that to happen, we need a new party. All who share this belief–the Korean Peasants League (KPL), Korean Alliance of Progressive Movements (KAPM), and the Korean Youth Alliance, among others–came together on July 9 to launch the preparatory committee of the New People’s Party (tentative name). ZoominKorea: How does this new progressive party distinguish itself from not only the liberal democratic party (The Minjoo Party) but also other progressive parties already in existence? Kim: The existing political parties are solely focused on partisan politics based on their own party interests. The aim of the New People’s Party (tentative name) is to serve the broader interests of the people and create a new political force to fundamentally transform the political order of South Korean society. “Toward a society that respects workers” is our slogan, and as such, our goal is to liquidate inequality and fight for self-determination, peace and reunification of the Korean peninsula, the world’s only divided country under constant threat of war. We will demonstrate that the most competent political leaders are the people themselves. ZoominKorea: You had said in a previous interview elsewhere that you were deeply affected by the death of farmer Baek Nam-gi* as you identified with his life and struggle. Tell us about your personal background and how you became involved in politics. Kim: When Farmer Baek Nam-gi passed away, I went to his hospital bed every night even though it was in the middle of the national audit season. Baek was hit by a water cannon during a people power demonstration in 2015 and was in a coma for a year before finally passing. This seventy-year old man got up at the break of dawn and traveled all the way from Boseong, South Jeolla Province to Seoul to demand a raise in the price of rice. It broke my heart to think about what must have been going through his mind that day. A world where workers and farmers have to risk their lives just to survive — don’t you think it’s cruel? It’s been thirty-odd years since I first vowed to work for a better world for workers and farmers. I attended university in Ulsan and became a student activist. I was imprisoned for supporting the 128-day labor strike at Hyundai Heavy Industries in 1989. When a worker I met through that struggle said to me, “Won’t your politics change after you graduate and become successful?” I said, “No, I will always fight on the side of workers.” My current political work is part of my effort to honor that pledge. In 1990, I became the representative of a workers’ cultural organization in Ulsan Dong-gu. The following year, I became the cultural secretary of the Hyundai Group Labor Unions Alliance. In 2002 — after the formation of the Democratic Labor Party in 2000 — I was elected a member of the Ulsan City Council, and I became active in legislative politics for the first time. In 2011, I was elected the Commissioner of the Ulsan Dong-gu district, where I gained administrative experience. Then in the 2016 general election, I was elected into the National Assembly, where I currently fight for the rights of workers, the urban poor, and the socially-disenfranchised. ZoominKorea: You represent the district of Ulsan, where Hyundai Heavy Industries is based. Tell us about the history of labor and democracy movements in Ulsan. How is your personal story tied to this history? Kim: In 1987, from July to September, South Korean workers, demanding the right to organize democratic labor unions and improvements in wages and working conditions, carried out a militant mass struggle for democracy — now known as the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987. The first sparks of the Great Workers’ Struggle started at the Hyundai Group Labor Union Alliance, then spread like wildfire throughout Masan and the huge industrial plants in Changwon, as well as Busan and Geoje. On August 17-18, 30,000 workers of the Hyundai Group Labor Union Alliance in Ulsan took to the streets and turned the entire city into a liberated zone. My heart still pounds when I think back on the militant spirit of the workers, who chanted, “Let us live with dignity,” and the sight of endless rows of workers as they marched over Nammok Hill in Dong-gu and headed towards Ulsan City Hall. This year, on July 5, we held a commemoration to mark the 30th anniversary of the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987 in Ulsan. That was also the day that workers at Hyundai Engine formed their union thirty years ago. ZoominKorea: What are the living/working conditions of working-class people in your district today? Tell us about your efforts to improve their conditions. Kim: The primary demands of the workers during the Great Workers’ Struggle of 1987 were: an 8-hour work day, revision of unjust labor laws, guarantee of basic labor rights, right to freely organize labor unions, elimination of blacklists, and improvement of working conditions and wages. Thirty years later, these are still the basic demands of workers. We have a long way to go to achieve democratization of the economy and the workplace. I represent Ulsan Dong-gu, where workers are struggling due to the massive restructuring of the shipbuilding industry by the previous Park Geun-hye administration. Shifting the burden of poor corporate management by the primary contractor to workers has caused serious problems, such as mass layoffs and backwages. Therefore, I have called on the Ministry of Employment and Labor as well as the Fair Trade Commission to make systemic changes to root out unfair contracts and practices in the subcontracting system, and I continue to support the workers at Hyundai Heavy Industries in their struggle to defend their jobs. I am also fighting to increase the national minimum wage to 10,000 won, abolish unjust labor laws and make systemic changes to create a society that respects the dignity of workers. As a member of the Trade, Industry and Energy Committee of the National Assembly, I also advocate worker-centered industrial policies. ZoominKorea: The South Korean people recently ousted the former president through people power. What lessons do you draw from the mass candlelight protests and how will the new party build on that movement? Kim: The main lesson of the candlelight revolution is that people demand direct democracy. Through direct action, the people, who are the true sovereigns of this nation, challenged a system in which electoral democracy is actually distorting and constraining true democracy. The candlelight revolution demonstrated that Article 1 of the South Korean constitution, which states, ”All state authority shall emanate from the people,” should be reinterpreted as, “All state authority shall emanate from the struggling people.” The New People’s Party (tentative name) will carry forward the spirit of the candlelight revolution to advance direct and participatory democracy. Through people power, we can uproot corruption and follow through on the systemic change that was demanded by the candlelight revolution. And this will be the main task of the new party. ZoominKorea: It has been thirty years since the pro-democracy uprising of 1987, which marked the end of decades-old military dictatorship in South Korea and the entry of progressives in the political arena. The historic formation of the Democratic Labor Party in 2000 was a milestone that brought together progressives in a united front for political power. That era came to an end with the forced dissolution of the Unified Progressive Party by former President Park Geun-hye. What lessons do you draw from this experience, and how will this inform the politics/practice of the new party? Kim: The Democratic Labor Party stood for national sovereignty, democracy, peaceful reunification and a world based on equality determined by the people. The experience of the past thirty years of progressive participation in the political arena confirmed that workers, farmers, and the urban poor are the main forces for social progress and should be the main protagonists in South Korea’s politics. What we learned, more than anything, is that there can be no democracy without sovereignty, and the party cannot progress without progress in mass organization. The New People’s Party (tentative name) will be a party that advocates sovereignty and equality and is led by the people–workers, farmers, and the urban poor. Our aim is nothing less than the fundamental transformation of South Korean society. * Long time activist farmer Baek Nam-gi was struck by a police water cannon in November 2015 during a huge antigovernment demonstration.  In a coma for months, he passed away September 2016, becoming an icon for the movement against the brutal, anti-democratic and corrupt Park Geun-hye presidency. ZoominKorea is an online resource on Korean issues, a project of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea. #elections #SouthKorea #Labor #NewPeoplesParty #KimJonghoon #parkgeunhye

August 21st rally for talks and against war with North Korea at the U.N. By Tim Shorrock | August 27, 2017 Originally published in The Nation. On August 14, the Korean Central News Agency issued a surprising statement from North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator, Kim Jong-un. The “Respected Supreme Leader,” KCNA said, had decided to “watch a little more” the conduct of the United States before proceeding on a vow to fire missiles near the Pacific island of Guam to create “an enveloping fire.” A few hours later, The Wall Street Journal reported that North Korea “had pulled back its threat to attack a U.S. territory.” In response, President Trump triumphantly took to Twitter to praise Kim’s “very wise and well reasoned decision.” The exchange eased—temporarily, at least—a nuclear-war scare that began a week earlier, when Trump threatened to rain “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea if it didn’t mend its ways. So what’s next? Just days before Kim’s pullback, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis took to the pages of the Journal to lay out the terms of the “diplomacy” they have promised as a way to defuse the crisis. While the United States has no interest in regime change, they asserted, North Korea’s “long record” of “dishonesty” made it “incumbent upon the [Kim] regime to signal its desire to negotiate in good faith” by first ceasing its nuclear tests and missile launches. This was clearly a rejection of the recent Chinese and Russian “freeze-for-freeze” proposal, which would exchange a cessation of Pyongyang’s tests for a moratorium or scaling back of Washington’s massive war games with South Korea, including the Ulchi–Freedom Guardian exercises that began on August 21. Moreover, the Tillerson-Mattis assurances were undercut by comments from H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national-security adviser, that the United States is fully prepared for a “preventive war” to stop North Korea “from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.” As the North Koreans well know, those plans are highly advanced. Two days before Trump declared that US forces in South Korea were “locked and loaded,” NBC News broadcast a detailed report that the Pentagon had plans to strike some “two dozen North Korean missile-launch sites, testing grounds and support facilities” using B-1B heavy bombers stationed at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The NBC report added that the B-1s could fire their missiles from outside Korean airspace, thus making it possible to launch unilateral strikes—a major concern to South Korea. What happened next was hardly surprising. North Korea declared that it was “carefully examining” plans to launch missiles toward Guam. As historian Bruce Cumings noted in The Guardian, North Korea’s statements had “a concrete, predictable nature,” especially when compared with the Trump administration’s more general threats that North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could, in Mattis’s words, “lead to the end of the regime and destruction of its people.” Yet even as he backed down, Kim issued a warning: “In order to defuse the tensions” and prevent a war, the United States should stop its “arrogant provocations” and “unilateral demands” and “not provoke [us] any longer.” Over the weekend, Kim responded to McMaster’s new tack by declaring that the Korean People’s Army “will take resolute steps the moment even a slight sign of the preventive war is spotted.” As a wide range of American experts and former policy-makers have argued, if the United States is serious about negotiations, it must respond to Pyongyang’s fears by offering an “off-ramp” with something in return. The dual-freeze proposal “could lead to a breakthrough in the impasse, but this would require Washington to seriously consider its own responsibility for resolving the nuclear problem,” wrote John Merrill, the former chief of the Northeast Asia division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, in a recent op-ed for the Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asian Review. Specifically, that means addressing North Korea’s concerns, including its belief that nuclear weapons are its only defense against a United States that turned the country into ashes during the Korean War and is threatening to do so again. The North is also (understandably) worried about the war games, in which thousands of US and South Korean soldiers train for nuclear strikes as well as “decapitation” operations that would eliminate North Korea’s leadership. And therein lies the way out. North Korea says that it will not negotiate until the United States formally ends the state of enmity that exists between the two nations—steps that both sides agreed to take during the only successful round of US–North Korean negotiations, in the late 1990s. It restated that formula in August, when Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho told a forum of Asian diplomats that the North would not put its nukes and missiles on the bargaining table “unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the U.S. against the [North] are fundamentally 
eliminated.” Washington should see that as an opening and consider concrete steps to convince North Korea—as well as the South—that it wants to resolve this conflict without a war. Number one on that list should be an offer to curtail the military exercises that began in late August and will pick up again—with a far greater number of troops—next spring. But there’s only one way to know if this approach will work: Send Secretary Tillerson to Pyongyang, and start talking. Judging by his recent compliments to Kim’s “restraint,” that may be about to happen. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist, the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #KimJongUn #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #ICBM #NorthKorea

An emergency rally calling for peace, Washington DC, August 9, 2017 Dear President Trump: 트럼프대통령님, We at the Korea Policy Institute, aghast at the prospect of war in Korea, in the region, and reaching possibly over the Pacific to Guam and to the shores of the United States, call upon your administration to engage the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) in bilateral negotiations that would immediately halt military posturing by both sides which threaten to erupt in nuclear conflagration. 우리 한국정책연구소는 한반도, 동아시아를 비롯 괌과 심지어 미해안까지 번져가고 있는 군사적 긴장상황에 경악을 금치 못하며 귀하의 행정부가 속히 조선민주주의인민공화국과의 양자회담을 재개하여 핵대재난으로 귀결될 수 있는 군사위협에 종지부를 찍기를 촉구합니다. On the heels of highly inflammatory threats being hurled back and forth between your administration and North Korea, the Ulchi Freedom Guardian war game, starting August 21, 2017, is fraught with danger.  A miscalculation on either side could set us on an irreversible path to war, possibly nuclear war in which millions are projected to perish in the first hours of fighting, and which would turn much of the region into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland. 2017년 부터 시작된 을지 프리덤 한미 합동 군사훈련으로 인해  미국  정부와 북한사이에 오고가는 극한 전쟁 위협은 더 가중 되었습니다. 또한 사소한 계산 착오로도  두 진영사이에 돌이킬수 없는 전쟁,  특히 두 진영을 불과 몇시간 안에 초토화 하여  황무지로 까지 만들수 있는 핵전쟁의 길로 가는  아주 시급한 상황까지 놓여지게 됐습니다. The D.P.R.K. perceives the war games as a threat to its sovereignty and has thus offered to freeze development of its nuclear weapons and missiles if the United States and the Republic of Korea (R.O.K.) will stop their joint war exercises. It is thus within the reach of your administration to halt that country’s progress toward towards fitting its ICBMs with nuclear tipped warheads without relying on other countries to solve the problem, and without going to war. 북한은 한미군사 합동훈련을 주권에 대한 위협으로 인식하고 미국과 대한민국이 합동 군사훈련을 중단하면 핵무기와 미사일의 개발을 멈추겠다는 입장을 표명했습니다. 다시 말하자면, 북한의 ICBM 핵무장화는 군사작전이나 다른 나라들에 의존할 필요없이 현 행정부의 손에 달려있음을 의미합니다. The D.P.R.K.’s aforementioned offer of a freeze and the U.S. State Department’s recent offer to open dialog with the D.P.R.K., should it hold off on further testing of its nuclear weapons, indicates that there is will on both sides to pull back from the brink of war.  That is sufficient ground for diplomacy to take root. Indeed, where other U.S. presidents have failed, you have the rare opportunity to succeed in achieving a durable peace with North Korea. 북한의 핵무기개발동결 제안과 미 국무부의 북한과의 대화 제안은 추가 핵무기 실험을 멈추게 할 수 있다면 양측 모두 긴장고조 상황에서 한발짝 물러날수 있는 의지가 있음을 증명합니다. 이는 외교적 노력의 명분이 있음을 보여줍니다. 이야말로 전임 대통령이 해내지 못한 북한과의 견고한 평화를 이룩할 수 있는 기회가 귀하에게 주어졌을을 의미하기도 합니다. We support the goal of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.  However, it is increasingly clear, as in the case of Korea, if one country is to give up its nuclear weapons, all nuclear states, big and small, must do so.  Peace in Korea, secured by diplomacy and normalized relations, is necessary if the goal of denuclearization is ever to be realized. 우리는 한반도의 비핵화라는 목표를지지합니다. 그러나 한반도의 경우처럼, 한 국가가 핵무기를 포기해야한다면 크던 작던 모든 핵무기 보유국가 또한 핵무기를 포기해야한다는 점을 명확하게 집고 넘어가야합니다. 한반도 비핵화의 목표가 실현되기 위해서는 외교와  정상적인 관계가 보장되어야 합니다. In the interim, the D.P.R.K. regards its weapons programs as a deterrent to what it perceives as hostility from the United States stemming from the unresolved Korean War, exhibited by the U.S. – R.O.K. annual war games and most recently by the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea.  We therefore call upon your administration to: 북한은  현재 그들의 핵무기 프로그램은 정전상태인 한국전쟁을 빌미로 매년 치러지는 한미합동군사훈련 과 최근 THAAD의 한반도 배치 등에 대한 방어 정책이라고 주장하고 있습니다.  따라서 우리는 미국 정부에 다음 사항을 요구합니다 : Cancel all war games, including Ulchi Freedom Guardian and Key Resolve-Foal Eagle, Negotiate a freeze of the D.P.R.K.’s nuclear weapons and ICBM testing, Remove THAAD from the R.O.K. Normalize relations with the D.P.R.K. Ulchi Freedom Guardian 및 Key Resolve-Foal Eagle을 포함한 모든 한미합동군사훈련 취소 북한과 핵무기와  ICBM 실험 동결 협상, 남한의 THAAD 철거 북미 관계 정상화. The United States, as the most powerful of nuclear states, is uniquely positioned to provide the leadership needed to create a truly non-nuclear world.  We thus call upon your administration to negotiate an agreement with the D.P.R.K. whereby the United States and the D.P.R.K. will set an example for all nuclear states to follow by signing on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, ratified by the United Nations on July 7, 2017, and which calls for treaty members to eliminate their nuclear weapons. 미국은가장 강력한 핵보유국으로서 진정 핵무기없는 세상을 건설할 수 있는 리더십을 제공할 수 있는 위치에 있습니다. 따라서 우리는 귀하의 행정부가 북한과의 대화를 통해 2017년 7월 7일 유엔을 통과한 핵무기금지조약을 양 국가가 함께 조인함으로서 다른 핵보유국들의 본보기가 되기를 촉구합니다. Sincerely yours, Board of Directors, Korea Policy Institute Marty Hart-Landsberg, Christine Hong, Haeyoung Kim, Paul Liem, Juyeon Rhee, JT Takagi, Ji Yeon-Yuh 감사합니다. 한국 정책 연구원 이사회 마티 하트 – 랜스 버그, 크리스틴 홍, 김혜영, 폴 림, 이주연, 다카기 JT, 지연우 Translated by Misuk and Kwanwoo Nam 남미숙, 남관우 공동 번역 #DPRK #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #NorthKorea

By Mike Chinoy | September 3, 2017 Originally published in The Cipher Brief Amid continuing tension with North Korea- underscored by the firing on August 29 of a ballistic missile that flew over Japan before plunging into the Pacific Ocean- public understanding and discussion of this complex and increasingly dangerous situation is hampered by a one-dimensional narrative that has shaped much of the American press coverage of the crisis. The conventional wisdom is that North Korea is a serial cheater whose broken promises have for years sabotaged good-faith American efforts to end Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile program, with the string of missile launches in recent months only the latest sign of the North’s perfidy. The regime of Kim Jong-un unquestionably bears much responsibility for the ongoing crisis. But Pyongyang’s behavior has, to a significant degree, been influenced by the attitudes and actions of successive American administrations – especially the efforts of hardliners in the administration of George W. Bush to torpedo efforts to forge a meaningful rapprochement with North Korea. This vastly more complex background and context is often lost in the brief references to the history of U.S.-North Korea diplomacy contained in many press reports. One example is Russell Goldman’s Aug. 17, 2017 piece in the New York Times, “How Trump’s Predecessors Dealt with the North Korean Threat.”  Goldman’s description of the collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework in 2002 – a deal which froze a then-nascent North Korean nuclear program—is attributed largely to alleged North Korean cheating. He writes, “the United States spent millions in aid and only briefly delayed the North’s weapons program. President George W. Bush [then] confronted the North for secretly building a bomb and violating the terms of the agreement.” The actual history—which I researched at length for my book Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis—is considerably different. Just days after the Clinton administration signed the Agreed Framework, the Republicans took control of Congress. Promised aid was delayed, in some cases for years.  Proliferation-resistant light water nuclear reactors, which the North had been promised as part of the deal, were never built. Nonetheless, Pyongyang froze activity at its Yongbyon reactor, which remained shut until early 2003. Had that not happened, the North would likely have had enough fissile material for more than 100 plutonium-based nuclear bombs – a fact critics of the Agreed Framework often ignore. It was against this backdrop – Pyongyang’s growing conviction the U.S. was not living up to its commitments – that the North in 1998 began to explore the option of developing a uranium-based nuclear capability. When George W. Bush took office, he declined to reaffirm a communique the Clinton administration had signed with Pyongyang in late 2000 pledging “no hostile intent” towards North Korea.  Bush then included the North in his famous “Axis of Evil,” and, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, senior administration officials openly talked of regime change in North Korea. When U.S. intelligence confirmed in mid-2002 that Pyongyang was in the early stages of developing a uranium capability, the Bush administration spurned North Korean offers to negotiate the issue, and instead used it as pretext to pull out of the agreed framework. Then—and only then—did the North restart the frozen reactor at Yongbyon. Yet little of this background—crucial to understanding North Korean thinking and behavior – was noted in the Times story. Similar omissions can be found in the media portrayal of another watershed moment – the agreement reached between the U.S. and North Korea on Sept. 19, 2005 at the Six Party Talks in Beijing, consisting of representatives from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. On Aug. 25, 2017, for example, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, in a piece called “Making Kim Sweat,” referred to the deal as follows: “It [North Korea] committed in 2005 ‘to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.’ That was a year before it detonated its first nuke.” Cohen’s implication was that Pyongyang never intended to live up to its commitments. Russell Goldman had a similarly sceptical description: “The North Koreans successfully gamed the United States.” But both journalists ignored a crucial fact.  The same week as the signing of the deal, which set out principles for the eventual denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and included a pledge from both Pyongyang AND Washington “to respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together, and take steps to normalize their relations,” Washington hardliners imposed sweeping sanctions on a Macau bank where the North had dozens of accounts. The sanctions, which were opposed by the chief U.S. negotiator at the Six Party Talks, are often referred to as a success story—the one time the U.S. got really tough. Last year, for example, Emily Rauhala of the Washington Post, in a piece on U.S. efforts to push China to take stronger action against Pyongyang, wrote, “this approach has worked before. Nearly a decade ago, by sanctioning Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based institution that handled North Korean money, the United States cut off Pyongyang’s cash supply — and brought North Korea back to nuclear negotiations.” In fact, the evidence from the interviews I conducted for my book with key players in Washington, Seoul, and Beijing, as well as conversations I had with people who were in contact with the North Koreans, indicates the exact opposite. The move against BDA – which Pyongyang saw as contrary to the just-signed U.S. commitment to have better relations – prompted the North to boycott the Six Party Talks and make clear it would not return until the sanctions were lifted. Throughout the winter and spring of 2006, Pyongyang sent signal after signal that it was willing to negotiate on the BDA issue, and if the U.S. would agree to hold a bilateral meeting, the Six Party Talks could resume. The Bush administration rebuffed all of Pyongyang’s overtures. After more than a year with no movement on the diplomatic front, the North finally staged its first nuclear test in October 2006. This behavior fit Pyongyang’s longstanding “tit for tat” pattern of engaging when Washington was prepared to talk, and ratcheting up the pressure when the U.S. tried to get tough. It is a dynamic that is often ignored in much of the press coverage. Yet this same “tit for tat” pattern has been evident in the current crisis. When President Trump threatened “fire and fury” in early August, Pyongyang responded by threatened to launch missiles towards the waters near Guam. But when the U.S. did not deploy B-1 or B-52 bombers during this month’s joint military exercises with South Korea, the North backed off the threat to Guam. Pyongyang’s latest missile launch is unquestionably provocative, sending a signal that Japan would be a likely target in the event of military conflict between the U.S. and North Korea, while also seeking to exacerbate tensions between the U.S., South, Korea, and Japan on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. But the move seems carefully designed to achieve those goals without goading the U.S. into the more forceful U.S. response that targeting Guam would probably have required. Indeed, by his own rhetorical standards, President Trump’s immediate reaction – simply repeating the mantra that “all options are on the table”—appeared relatively restrained. Moreover, despite the provocative nature of the continuing missile tests, Kim Jong-un has so far held off taking the most provocative step—going ahead with a sixth nuclear test. This may well still happen. But it is reasonable to conclude that Kim is waiting for further clarity in the still-mixed signals from the Trump administration – to see if the support for resolving the crisis diplomatically articulated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis mean the administration is seriously open to talks. For journalists covering the story, the absence of a nuclear test so far – despite the missile tests – is like the dog that did not bark in the night in the famous Sherlock Holmes story – a crucial clue to North Korea’s thinking and possible future behavior. The broader point here is that North Korea’s leadership is not operating in a vacuum. While Kim Jong-un appears determined to bolster his nuclear and missile capability to deter the U.S. and ensure the survival of his regime, his decisions, like those of his father, are influenced by Washington’s behavior. Unfortunately, too many journalists – and therefore media consumers as well – are unfamiliar with, or ignore, the crucially important details of the actual historical record. Instead, all too often, this complex dynamic is reduced to the brief and often inaccurate summaries contained in so many media reports.  It is a pattern that does not contribute to the more nuanced understanding we urgently need of this complex and dangerous situation. Mike Chinoy is a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California and the creator of the Assignment China documentary film series on the history of American journalists in China.   He is the author of two book on North Korea: Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis #DPRK #KimJongUn #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons

China’s UN Ambassador Liu Jieyi insists “China’s efforts will not yield practical results” By Tim Shorrock | August 3, 2017 Originally published in Lobelog Foreign Policy. From President Trump to Capitol Hill, there is only way short of war to stop North Korea’s from becoming a nuclear-armed ICBM State: Let China Do It. Even after Pyongyang proved last week that its long-range rocketry skills are improving with each test, the Washington consensus seems to be that Beijing is the only power capable of turning the situation around. China “could easily solve this problem,” Trump pouted in a morning tweet on Saturday after North Korea’s second ICBM test in a month. Yet it does “NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk.” Nikki Haley, his UN ambassador, chimed in that “China is aware they must act.” Vice President Mike Pence added his voice during a trip to Estonia. “China has a unique ability to influence decisions by” North Korea, he said on Sunday. This came after a week in which North Korea and its close ties to China dominated the talk in Congress and the think-tank circuit in Washington. “The road to denuclearization [in North Korea] undoubtedly goes through Beijing,” declared Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), as he opened a July 25 hearing on North Korea before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A few days later, in response to Pyongyang’s latest ICBM test, Gardner introduced legislation to “punish” what he called the North’s “enablers.” “China is responsible for ninety percent of trade with North Korea and my legislation targets entities involved in these activities,” he said. At the Senate hearing, Susan Thornton, the acting secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, outlined the recent actions taken by the administration against the Bank of Dandong and other Chinese entities for acting as a “conduit” for North Korean money laundering. “We recognize the continued importance of Beijing doing more to exert pressure on North Korea,” she told the panel. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party-aligned Center for a New America Security last Friday released a fresh report calling on the US to use the threat of sanctions on China as a way to force Beijing into taking a more aggressive posture towards Pyongyang. “If China believes North Korea’s nuclear development will lead to US military action—which is not an outlandish idea—China may go along with greater economic pressure,” said Peter Harrell, a CNAS fellow who helped develop sanctions against Iran, Russia, and Syria as a State Department official during the Obama administration. But will this “let China do it” mentality accomplish anything? Scholarly Skepticism “Washington is preoccupied with getting Beijing to put more pressure on Pyongyang,” Leon V. Sigal, a former US diplomat who has met frequently with North Korean officials over the years, told the Senate hearing on Thursday. “We must not lose sight of the fact that it is North Korea that we need to persuade, not China.” In response to questions from Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Sigal said that policies of pressure and sanctions can only work “if nuclear diplomacy is soon resumed and the North’s security concerns are addressed” through direct US-North Korean talks. Sigal is the director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council. James F. Person, a historian who has specialized in North Korea’s diplomacy with China and the former Soviet Union, similarly argues that pressuring China to lean on North Korea will backfire. “Pyongyang will perceive any effort to get them to denuclearize as another overly intrusive move and lacking respect for North Korean sovereignty,” he told a July 10 press briefing organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a US government think tank in Washington. “We can’t afford to outsource our policy to China because that’s asking North Korea to do what they most resent,” Person added. “Ultimately, we will have to talk to the North.” He and Jane Harman, the former California congresswoman who runs the Wilson Center, elaborated on this idea last fall in The Washington Post. “Only the United States—the supposed existential threat that justifies [North Korea’s] nuclear and ballistic missile programs—can fully address Pyongyang’s security concerns,” they wrote. Now that Pyongyang has the capability to launch ICBMs that can travel great distances, Person added at the July forum, North Korea will continue to test to give it the best possible leverage when the door opens for talks with Washington. “They want to make sure when they get to the negotiating table that they’ve pushed their program as far as they can,” he said. The idea of direct talks has also been promoted by several former high-ranking officials, such as William Perry, who negotiated with North Korea on its missile program as secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. On the eve of South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s visit to Washington in June, Perry was one of several retired senior officials who signed a letter to Trump urging him to begin direct negotiations without any preconditions with the North. Last week, in an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders, Perry explained his position. “North Korea is not a crazy nation,” he told Sanders. “They are reckless, ruthless, but they are not crazy. They are open to logic and reason. Their main objective is to sustain their regime. If we can find a way of dealing with them that they can see gives them an opportunity to stay in the regime, we can get results.” Direct Negotiations Most analysts believe that direct negotiations would have to begin with the North offering to freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the US and South Korea scaling down their annual military exercises. At the Wilson briefing, New York Times reporter David Sanger suggested that the US has a “window of opportunity” to offer such a deal soon because the main US-ROK exercises take place in the spring. “Between now and next spring, we wouldn’t lose much” if the US temporarily halted the exercises, he said. In an interview, Sigal cautioned that, for any deal to be accepted in Washington, a North Korean moratorium would have to go beyond the freeze of current programs as suggested by China and Russia. He said that would involve North Korea stopping its uranium enrichment and plutonium production as well as its nuclear and missile testing. That, in turn, would require the United States to pledge to end its “hostile policy,” as demanded for decades by North Korea. “You’ve got to suspend the production of fissionable material too,” Sigal told me. He said the US would “have to pay for that, not in money terms but in terms of moving away from the hostile policy” that North Korea would like to end. “Some of that’s going to involve military exercises, some of that’s going to involve [lifting] sanctions, some of that’s going to involve starting the peace process. But that’s what’s got to be worked out. That’s the first stage agreement that may be possible.” On Monday, China urged the US to open direct talks with Pyongyang. The US and North Korea “hold the primary responsibility to keep things moving, to start moving in the right direction, not China,” UN Ambassador Liu Jieyi declared, according to Al Jazeera. “No matter how capable China is, China’s efforts will not yield practical results because it depends on the two principal parties.” Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based journalist who writes about US national security and foreign policy for many publications at home and abroad. He is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, and is a Korea Policy Instiute Advisor. #DPRK #China #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

Medea with villagers protesting deployment of THAAD in South Korea July 2017. By Paul Liem | September 3, 2017 This is the first in a series of interviews with the five member U.S. Solidarity Peace Delegation to South Korea from July 23 to July 28, 2017, of whom the delegation coordinator, Juyeon Rhee, was denied entry to South Korea under a travel ban imposed by the Park Geun-hye administration, a ban that remained in force under the new administration of President Moon Jae-in. The delegates met with South Korean peace and labor activists, the Chair of the National Assembly Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee Shim Jae Kwon, and villagers of Seongju, Gimcheon, and Soseong-ri who are waging a struggle against the deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system in their communities. The delegation was sponsored by the Taskforce to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific as well as the Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation. It was hosted in South Korea by the National People’s Action to Stop the Deployment of THAAD in South Korea (NPA), a coalition of 100 civil society organizations. Delegates Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, Reece Chenault of U.S. Labor Against the War, Will Griffin of Veterans for Peace, delegation coordinator Juyeon Rhee, Jill Stein of Green Party USA, have since spearheaded an international petition campaign calling upon presidents Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump to pull back from the brink of war in Korea by halting the war games and negotiating a freeze on missile and nuclear weapons testing with North Korea. Following the delegate’s return to the United States, Paul Liem, KPI Board Chairperson, interviewed the delegates about their experiences in Korea and their reflections on how to strengthen solidarity between peace activists there and in the United States.    His interview with Medea Benjamin follows. _____________________________________________________ PL:  I think our readers would be interested in knowing how you arrived at your present calling. What started you on the path towards peace activism and how did you get interested in Korea? MB:  My path around peace activism came from being in high school during the days of the Vietnam War and seeing our friends, boyfriends, and brothers drafted to go fight in Vietnam. These young men were sent thousands of miles away to be killed or to kill people they didn’t know, for reasons they didn’t understand. And it set me on a lifelong journey of questioning my government and its policies, especially when they lead to such death and destruction. In terms of Korea, it took me a long time to get involved. I spent many years working on issues related to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and not really focusing on Korea or the Asian continent except for the work I did against sweatshops in China, Indonesia and Vietnam. My first trip to South Korea was in 2006. I was on a delegation to learn about the expansion of the U.S. bases there. It was such an eye opener to go to Pyongtaek, where the villagers had been fighting day in and day out for the right to keep their rice farms and the beautiful homes they had built with so much hard work. The U.S. base expansion, which included creating a golf course for the American officers, was going to destroy this lovely village. The South Korean military was working hand in glove with the U.S. Army, including putting up barbed wire to keep the villagers from their fields so they would be deprived of an income and forced to leave. To meet the farmers and see firsthand how my government was stealing their land and destroying their livelihoods was very distressing. It was the first time I learned how strong the U.S. military is in South Korea. I had no idea that there were 83 bases, a massive presence. On the positive side, I have rarely seen a resistance movement that is so determined and persistent. I was in awe of the way it was organized by local people with the support of progressive Koreans around the country. Even when the villagers and their supporters understood that they were not going to win, they continued with tremendous zeal. That is something I haven’t seen in many places around the world. PL:  Having been introduced to Korea back in 2006, I think you were probably ahead of the pack in terms of American peace activists learning about Korea. What’s your general perception of how the movement in this country understands Korea, the U.S. relationship to Korea, and the significance Korea has in terms of advocacy for a more peaceful foreign policy? Where does Korea sit in that picture? MB:  During my lifetime, the peace movement focused on Vietnam, then Central American and the African liberation movements during the 1970s and 1980s, then the Middle East during the post-9 11 days. There was a strong anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s as well, but it never really turned into a strong solidarity movement with Korea. We also have to understand that the broad and vibrant anti-war movement that existed during the Bush administration against the Iraq war dissipated when Obama became president. Today it’s hard to really even talk of a peace movement in terms of being able to mobilize large numbers of people around the wars that are happening in the Middle East. There are even fewer people concerned about the issues on the Korean Peninsula, except every now and then when tensions flair up. There are certainly individuals, NGOs and think tanks that work on Korea, many of them spearheaded by the Korean-American community or community working against nuclear weapons. But in terms of a broad-based movement of solidarity with Korea, it really doesn’t exist. This is very troubling given the potential for such a catastrophic war. PL:  You just returned from Korea on a delegation for Stop THAAD in Korea. What did you and your delegates see as the goal of your trip? MB:  I want to mention one other trip I made to Korea, which was in 2015 with a group called Women Cross the DMZ. This was a group of 30 women from around the world who got together to call for an end to the Korean War and the reunification of families. We started in North Korea and crossed over to South Korea. It was quite a unique opportunity to travel to North Korea and meet with women’s groups there, and then meet with women in South Korea. It gave me a taste of the complexity of the politics on the peninsula, but also a taste of the way that women could lead the way to peace. When I got the opportunity to join this peace delegation in July to show solidarity with South Koreans opposing the THAAD anti-missile system, I jumped at the chance. I must confess that I always found issues related to THAAD confusing, starting with the name itself, which is a complicated acronym. It is also hard to understand why people are opposed to a system portrayed as defensive in nature, a system aimed at trying to stop missiles entering from the north and blow them up before they land. So I thought it was important to learn more about why there was so much opposition within South Korea itself, particularly in the village where THAAD was being deployed. It’s one thing to read about the opposition and it’s another to actually visit the village of Seongju. It was so moving to talk to villagers about how their lives have been changed by the presence of this billion-dollar Lockheed Martin boondoggle, and I say boondoggle because it’s doubtful that THAAD is even capable of stopping North Korean missiles. PL:  Can you share with us any particular meetings or encounters on your visit last July that resonated with you in particular? MJ:   The situation in Seongju reminds me of Pyongtaek in the sense that it might not be a struggle that is winnable but there is still tremendous determination among the villagers. I found it particularly interesting to learn that most of the Seongju villagers were quite conservative and were farmers who were not previously active in any kind of resistance movement. It was so impressive to see women in their 80s, to see people who had never protested before, building such an incredible community that was able to carry on protests every single day and night. They had a 24/7 encampment on the road leading up to the place where the system was housed. Every evening they had a candlelight vigil against THAAD, and every week they would hold a daytime protest that attracted people from around the country. I also feel like the local people really evolved in their thinking. At first it was largely a protest against the U.S. military taking land that was sacred to the local Buddhist community and against the U.S. military inserting their tranquil community into the crosshairs of a possible military confrontation. Then the villagers realized there were lots of other issues. They felt entitled to a significant study by the Korean government to understand the potential harm of the radiation from the THAAD radar system. They also questioned the legality of putting this system in place without the National Assembly ever having a chance to discuss and vote on the issue. They began to question the effectiveness of the system itself, whether it was really capable of protecting them, and started realizing that the “anti-missile system” was part of the vicious cycle of militarism that only benefited the weapons makers. What started out as “not in our backyard” protest turned into something much more significant, something like “not in our country”, we don’t want the U.S. government to drag us into its conflicts, conflicts not only with North Korea but also potentially with China. PL:  What questions did they have of you as someone coming from the U.S., a country that is posing so many problems for them in their view? What did they call out for you to do? MB:  There was a lot of support that we had come all this way to show our solidarity and opposition to our government’s policies. When we first got there we heard people saying “Take THAAD back to the United States.” After hearing us speak, the same people came up to us saying, “We’re sorry we said that. THAAD should not go back to the United States. We don’t want U.S. communities to be a target we way we are here. Instead of returning THAAD, we should dismantle it.” I think that reflects a very quick learn on the part of some local people, an understanding of the concept of international solidarity, a recognition that there are people in the United States who are supporting their struggle and that Americans, too, are victims of an imperial system that puts us in the crosshairs and doesn’t represent the interests of the majority of Americans either. Talking to the villagers of Seongju, we explained that the only people to benefit from endless war are the weapons makers. We asked several women to send a message, on camera, to the CEO of Lockheed Martin, which is the manufacturer of the THAAD system. We prefaced it by saying that she is one of the few woman to ever run a weapons company, she is a mother who prides herself on civic engagement and she earns over $20 million a year. The response from villagers was beautiful. For example, one young woman said to the CEO: “I understand that you are a lot wealthier than I am, I don’t make nearly the kind of money you make, but my life is much richer because I don’t produce anything that would harm anyone.” PL:  Are there any plans to send those videos to Lockheed? MB:  Yes. We’re making videos of them, putting them out on social media, and airing them on Free Speech TV. We are also transcribing some of them and, together with a petition, taking them over to the home of the CEO. PL:  You’re literally going to take them to the house and knock on the door? MB:  Yes, yes. We will. PL:  Well, we’ll have to do another interview to see how that goes. What kinds of thoughts do you have about things we can do in the U.S. with and in solidarity with people in Seongju to achieve these goals, this common vision? MB:  It’s important to put the fight against THAAD in the larger context of provocations against North Korea that lead North Korea to respond militarily, and how under Trump this could spin out of control. We learned about how provocative the US-South Korean war games are to North Korea, how they are perceived as practice for a real invasion. We need to do a better job educating people in this country about how we can bring down the tensions. We have to oppose the weapons systems like THAAD that antagonize not only North Korea but also China and fuel further militarism. We have to oppose the war games. And we have to push for negotiations. Today’s headlines in The Washington Post said that North Korea refuses to talk. We have to unpack that to show that it’s not true that North Korea refuses to talk. We have many examples over the years when North Korea was involved in negotiations, like during the Clinton years when progress was made in terms of stopping their development of nuclear weapons. We also have to unpack the common narrative that the North Korean government is irrational. This doesn’t mean justifying the human rights abuses of the North Korean government or denying that it is an extremely repressive regime. It just means making it clear that in stark geopolitical terms, it is a rational actor in a global system where a superpower wants to overthrow it. North Korea is refusing to give up its weapons for a very rational reason—it wants to stay in power. The North Korean government is reacting to not only decades of aggression and the lack of a peace treaty since 1953, but also just a result of looking at the world and seeing what has happened to governments on the US enemy list that have, under tremendous pressure, agreed to give up their sophisticated weapons systems. Just look at the examples of Iraq and Libya, where both governments have been overthrown, the leaders killed, and the country thrown into a state of chaos that remains to this day. PL:  What kind of steps would you like to see the United States and North Korea take to dial back or resolve hostilities? MB:  One of the issues that kept coming up while we were on this trip was this idea of a freeze for a freeze, a freeze on the war games for a freeze on the testing of missiles and nuclear weapons. And we learned that this is something that has been proposed many times, including by North Korea itself. I think that’s the only rational way to proceed at this moment, to call for a freeze, which gives time for negotiations to move forward. Putting aside Donald Trump’s bombast and rhetoric, the situation is really ripe for negotiations. I was very pleased to hear Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sending a message to North Korea saying we don’t want to overthrow your government, we are not your enemy and we want dialogue. I found that extraordinary coming from somebody in the Trump administration because Tillerson would not have said that without clearing the message with other people in the administration. And so I think perhaps there is a good cop, bad cop situation going on within the administration. One would hope that it’s coordinated and that it is laying the groundwork for possible talks. Of course I think we can’t just assume that’s going to happen. We have to assume the worst, which is a nuclear confrontation, and work from there, recognizing that the situation is extremely dangerous. We have to get more people in the United States, in the peace movement and outside the peace movement, to be clamoring for negotiations, to be pushing this idea of a freeze for a freeze, and not to be complacent. A catastrophic war is less likely to happen if we are more vocal, more active, more engaged and have made more connections in solidarity with the Korean American community here. PL:  CODEPINK has been at the forefront of virtually all key issues when it comes to advocating for peace. Can you tell us a little bit about CODEPINK and what kind of activities it might engage in with regard to Korean issues at this point? MB:  CODEPINK started in the aftermath of 9/11 as an organization trying to stop the invasion of Iraq. We obviously weren’t successful in stopping the war but we did build up a global movement that helped push for negotiations with Iran and against direct US military involvement in Syria. That kind of global movement needs to be rebuilt now, under Trump. We are at a time when a very dangerous person is in the White House and two possible nuclear confrontations, one in Korea and one in Iran, and we better build up movements that are able to try to stop our government from exacerbating these crises. At CODEPINK we want to focus on the weapons industries that make so much money from these wars and are really the only ones that profit from these confrontations. We are launching a campaign starting October to call for divestment from the weapons industry. And we will be using examples like THAAD to show how weapons that are portrayed as protection are really creating more instability, as in the case of Korea. We’re looking forward to being part of new campaigns that are created and launched by the already existing groups, mostly headed by Korean Americans. We look forward to having closer relationships with people inside South Korea itself and doing joint campaigns, from joint petitions and press conferences to joint actions against weapons manufacturers. At CODEPINK, we are in the process of educating our community. We have a mailing list of about 250,000 people. We are going to be sending out more information about the Korean issues, educating our members and getting them more active. That’s part of the groundwork we need to do. PL:  Let’s say the work has been done and Korea is now in a better place. Let’s say that there is a process of reconciliation happening on the peninsula. As someone who has actually visited and spoken with people in North and South Korea, how would you imagine a meeting of villagers from Seongju and their counterparts in North Korea sitting down and starting to talk with each other? How would that go? After a country that’s been divided for so many years, two different social systems, how do you see that playing out on a human level? MB:  At a very basic level Koreans are brothers and sisters, no matter where they live and in spite of the different social systems. When you get people together, especially villagers to villagers, I think you would see a lot of bonding and a lot of solidarity. I have seen that in other places around the world where people have been told that they are enemies. And when they get together they find out that the enemies might be at the top levels of their governments, but it’s certainly not the people. In fact, the only ways that hostilities are maintained is keeping up a myth that people are enemies and that they are different from us. When you break down that myth by real human contact, the results are usually quite beautiful. And I know from seeing some of the videos of Korean family reunions and of reunification efforts when they’ve been allowed over the years, the reunions are incredibly moving, incredibly beautiful. Those kind of people-to-people ties are key to a reconciliation process. PL:  Thank you for sharing with us today Medea. MB:  Thank you and have a wonderful day. I look forward to working together for a peaceful Korea and a more peaceful world. _______________________________ *Medea Benjamin is a co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK, a co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange, and an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. She was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize and is the author of nine books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection, and is a frequent contributor to outlets *Paul Liem is the Chair of the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors. #MedeaBenjamin #CODEPINK #SouthKorea #THAAD #MoonJaein #NorthKorea