North Korean leader Kim Jong Un provides guidance on a nuclear weapons program in an undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency) By Tim Shorrock | September 26, 2017 Originally published in the Nation.com August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction. The tensions peaked on September 3 with Pyongyang’s stunning announcement that it had conducted its sixth, and largest, nuclear test—this time of a powerful hydrogen bomb—and had the capability to place the bomb onto an intercontinental ballistic missile. With the crisis spinning out of control, the opportunity for the diplomacy and negotiations promised by Trump’s foreign-policy team in recent months seemed to fade with each passing day. Ironically, the spiral of events began with a hopeful sign on August 15, when Kim uncharacteristically backed down from a highly publicized plan to launch ballistic missiles toward the United States garrison island of Guam. His surprise decision drew approving comments from Trump as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has been at the forefront of US proposals for diplomacy. He offered that Kim’s “restraint” might be enough to meet the US conditions for talks—a halt to nuclear and missile tests—that he recently laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with Defense Secretary James Mattis. But Kim, who has said he will negotiate only if the United States ends its “hostile policy and nuclear threats,” had warned that he would reconsider his missile tests “if the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions.” He was speaking of the US–South Korean military exercises launched on August 21 that, according to press reports, included training runs for a preemptive strike against the North as well as a computerized nuclear war game. To counter this show of force, Pyongyang test-fired three short-range rockets and followed up with a medium-range missile shot over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. Predictably, Kim’s moves sparked a US counter-action—a practice bombing run over Korean skies by Guam-based supersonic B1-B Lancer bombers, aided by four stealth F-35B advanced fighter jets flown from the US Marine base in Iwakuni, Japan. Days later, the North announced that it had developed a hydrogen bomb that could be placed on an ICBM—and, as mentioned, promptly tested the device in a massive underground explosion. Trump responded with a tweet denouncing the North as a “rogue” nation. He then insulted South Korea by calling President Moon Jae-in’s preference for engagement “appeasement,” apparently ruling out the diplomacy sought by his top advisers. Mattis, who had told reporters the week before that “we’re never out of diplomatic solutions,” quickly assured the public that the administration was in lockstep on Korea. After an emergency meeting at the White House on Sunday, he went on camera to say that Trump would meet more threats with a “massive military response” that would be both “effective and overwhelming.” The United States, he added ominously, is “not looking for the total annihilation” of North Korea but only to end its nuclear program. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley followed up on Monday, telling the UN Security Council that North Korea was “begging for war” and should be met with the “strongest possible sanctions.” But she left the door open for talks, saying “the time has come for us to exhaust all of our diplomatic means before it’s too late.” As the gravity of the situation dawned on Washington, the thin reeds of reassurance from Mattis and Haley seemed to suggest that the path of diplomacy and negotiation remains open—barely. “I don’t think that this administration is ideologically opposed to negotiations,” Victor Cha, a former Bush administration official who is about to be named US ambassador to Seoul, told The Nation on Tuesday. But therein lies a major dilemma. Talking to North Korea is a hard sell in Washington. The predominant view is that direct negotiations are a bad idea because, in the opinion of many officials and pundits, Pyongyang can’t be trusted. Exhibit One for these naysayers is the much-maligned “Agreed Framework” between President Bill Clinton and Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, which ended the first nuclear crisis with Pyongyang in 1994 and was cited by 64 Democrats in a recent letter to Tillerson as a model for future talks. “The Clinton administration negotiated that deal, and the North Korean government immediately violated it,” CNN’s John King confidently informed his viewers on July 5, just after the North test-fired an ICBM that could hit the United States. King’s view, which he repeated several times that day without providing a single shred of evidence, became the standard line on CNN and the rest of network television, which consistently blocks voices saying that engagement has worked in the past. This take has also become a mantra for advocates of tough sanctions and regime change. “Engagement? I’ve been there, done that, and got the T-shirts—all of them failed,” Bruce Klinger, a former CIA official and senior research fellow for northeast Asia at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, told a Washington forum last month of his brief contacts with North Korean officials. Even Christopher Hill, a former US ambassador to Seoul who negotiated the “Six-Party Talks” in 2007 and 2008 for the Bush administration, has jumped into the no-talks camp, proclaiming that further negotiations would only “strengthen a rogue regime’s hand.” Similar arguments were made by three former US officials in interviews with The New York Times last week. But what if these calculations aren’t true, and the official story is wrong? What exactly did the Agreed Framework do, and how and why did it come apart? Did President Clinton’s agreement really give North Korea the bomb, as many Republicans now claim? What did those 64 Democrats mean when they urged Tillerson to “make a good faith effort to replicate” its successes? A careful review of the 1994 agreement and interviews with former US officials with extensive experience negotiating with Pyongyang reveals that blame for its demise should be equally shared by the United States and North Korea. Because that’s not a popular view, and the risks are so high, it’s important to get the story straight. The 1994 agreement was the United States’ response to a regional political crisis that began that year when North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires non-nuclear states to agree never to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. Although it had no nuclear weapon, North Korea was producing plutonium, an action that almost led the United States to launch a preemptive strike against its plutonium facility. That war was averted when Jimmy Carter made a surprise trip to Pyongyang and met with North Korea’s founder and leader at the time, Kim Il-sung (he died a few months later, and his power was inherited by his son, Kim Jong-il). The framework was signed in October 1994, ending “three years of on and off vilification, stalemates, brinkmanship, saber-rattling, threats of force, and intense negotiations,” Park Kun-young, a professor of international relations at Korea Catholic University, wrote in a 2009 history of the negotiations. In addition to shutting its one operating reactor, Yongbyon, the North also stopped construction of two large reactors “that together were capable of generating 30 bombs’ worth of plutonium a year,” according to Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official who helped negotiate the 1994 framework and directs a Northeast Asia security project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. Most important for the United States, it remained in the NPT. In exchange for North Korea’s concessions, the United States agreed to provide 500,000 tons a year of heavy fuel oil to North Korea as well two commercial light-water reactors considered more “proliferation resistant” than the Soviet-era heavy-water facility the North was using. The new reactors were to be built in 2003 by a US/Japanese/South Korean consortium called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO. (The reactors, however, were never completed). For Pyongyang, which had been in the economic wilderness since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the biggest prize was the US promise to stop treating the North like an enemy state. Specifically, the two sides agreed to move as rapidly as possible to full diplomatic and economic normalization. Here’s how it played out. First, the Agreed Framework led North Korea to halt its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program for over a decade, forgoing enough enrichment to make over 100 nuclear bombs. “What people don’t know is that North Korea made no fissible material whatsoever from 1991 to 2003,” says Sigal. (The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in 1994 that the North had ceased production of plutonium three years earlier.) “A lot of this history” about North Korea, Sigal adds with a sigh, “is in the land of make-believe.” Second, the framework remained in effect well into the Bush administration. In 1998, the State Department’s Rust Deming testified to Congress that  “there is no fundamental violation of any aspect of the framework agreement”; four years later, a similar pledge was made by Bush’s then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. “I get really aggravated when I hear people in Congress say the agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on,” says James Pierce, who was on the State Department team led by Robert Gallucci that negotiated the framework. “The bottom line is, there was a lot in the 1994 agreement that worked and continued for quite some years. The assertion, now gospel, that the North Koreans broke it right away is simply not true.” “There was a lot in the 1994 agreement that worked and continued for quite some years. The assertion, now gospel, that the North Koreans broke it right away is simply not true.” — James Pierce Third, the framework and the ongoing engagement that resulted allowed the Clinton administration, led by Secretary of Defense William Perry, to launch a remarkable set of talks that nearly led to a final breakthrough with Pyongyang. As the negotiations unfolded, Kim Jong-il made a startling offer: In return for an end to enmity, Pyongyang was prepared to shut down its development, testing, and deployment of all medium- and long-range missiles. But the agreement was never completed. (Wendy Sherman, the top deputy to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, later wrote that the two sides were “tantalizingly close.”) “In effect, they were willing to trade their missile program for a better relationship” with Washington, Sigal told me. “And this was before they had the nukes!” Fourth, the United States itself may have violated the framework by delaying the most important part of the agreement for Pyongyang—US oil shipments and the full normalization of political and economic relations. By 1997, Sigal recalls, the North Koreans were complaining bitterly that the United States was slow to deliver its promised oil and stalling on its pledge to end its hostile policies—the very reason Kim Jong-il had signed in the first place. In a House hearing in 1998, Gallucci warned of failure unless the US government did “what it said it would do, which is to take responsibility” for delivery of the oil. “It was against this backdrop—Pyongyang’s growing conviction the US was not living up to its commitments—that the North in 1998 began to explore” other military options, Mike Chinoy, a former CNN reporter and the author of Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, wrote recently in an incisive article in The Cipher Brief. Finally, the framework collapsed in 2003 after the Bush administration—which had come to office with grave doubts about the agreement—dredged up US intelligence from the 1990s to accuse the North of starting a highly enriched uranium program as a second avenue to the bomb. (It hadn’t yet, though it was scouting the world for enrichment machinery to use later.) Bush tore up the framework agreement, exacerbating the deterioration in relations he had sparked a year earlier when he named North Korea part of his “axis of evil” in January 2002. In response, the North kicked out the IAEA inspectors and began building what would become its first bomb, in 2006, triggering a second nuclear crisis that continues to this day. “I think they were [cheating] to hedge their bets because we were cheating too,” Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Colin Powell in 2002, recently told The Real News. In other words, the full story is complicated, and blame can easily be cast on both sides. But the results were disastrous, as Sigal summarized in his masterful history of US–North Korean negotiations published last year by the Korean Institute for National Unification and Columbia Law School. “When President Bush took office, North Korea, thanks to diplomacy, had stopped testing longer-range missiles,” he wrote. “It had less than a bomb’s worth of plutonium and was verifiably not making more. Six years later, as a result of Washington’s broken promises and financial sanctions, it had seven to nine bombs’ worth [of plutonium], had resumed longer-range test launches, and felt free to test nuclear weapons.” Since then, he noted in a recent commentary, “any achievements have been temporary” because “neither side kept its commitments or sustained negotiations.” In fact, the situation worsened during the Obama administration, which never got negotiations back on track despite Obama’s promises during his 2008 campaign that he would talk to North Korea’s leaders. Trump is dealing with the residue of these failed policies, and seemed to grasp that when he reluctantly endorsed the idea of direct talks on August 9. “They’ve been negotiating now for 25 years,” he told reporters. “Look at Clinton. He folded on the negotiations. He was weak and ineffective. You look what happened with Bush, you look what happened with Obama. Obama, he didn’t even want to talk about it. But I talk. It’s about time. Somebody has to do it.” Trump’s facts, as usual, are off the mark—but his conclusion that talks are necessary is sound. To conduct them, however, his administration will have to deal with the same political attacks that helped sink the Agreed Framework. And then, as now, the opposition is likely to come from foreign policy hardliners who don’t believe that diplomacy has ever worked with North Korea. Most histories of the Agreed Framework overlook a critical fact: one month after it was signed, the GOP captured Congress for the first time in four decades. “No sooner had the agreement been concluded than the Republicans took control of the House and Senate, putting it in jeopardy,” Sigal wrote in his history. Even before the ink was dry, Newt Gingrich and other party leaders, notably Senator John McCain, were attacking the framework as a sellout that would essentially bribe North Korea to follow international law on nuclear proliferation and put the United States at further risk. “We’re going back to the days of President Carter, of appeasement,” McCain told The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in October 1994. Over the course of the agreement, the GOP delayed critical funding for KEDO and the fuel oil, forcing the Clinton administration to seek funds elsewhere and significantly delaying shipments—“in some cases for years,” says Chinoy. That created difficulties for the US diplomats who were directly involved with the North Koreans in implementing its terms, recalls Pierce, who spent many days in Pyongyang working with North Korean officials to monitor where the fuel oil was flowing after it reached the North. “We scraped [the funds] together, because we knew we weren’t going to get any more money from Congress,” he says. “But we had to deliver on our side.” The North Korean government, well aware that Congress and the executive had equal power, viewed these delays as an abrogation of the agreements made in 1994. Yet despite its anger, the government of Kim Jong-il, who consolidated power shortly after his father’s death, made no attempt to reprocess the spent fuel that was stored under IAEA inspection at Yongbyon or to restart the reactor. But as a defensive measure, Pyongyang started to build medium- and long-range missiles, which had never been part of the negotiations. By 1997 it had tested two of them, causing shivers of fear at the Pentagon. In 1998, in a desperate attempt to persuade the United States to end its hostile policy, North Korea offered to put its missile program on the table for negotiations. When Clinton demurred, Pyongyang launched a three-stage rocket called the Taepodong in a botched attempt to put a satellite into space. This led Clinton to appoint Defense Secretary Perry his envoy to Pyongyang to begin the missile negotiations that came close to ending the standoff. A key factor in Kim Jong-il’s decision to re-enter negotiations was the progress he had made in lowering tensions with South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung. Since winning office in 1996, the South’s former opposition leader had championed a new “Sunshine Policy” toward the North that sought to end the country’s division through economic, political, and cultural engagement. In 2000, in an extraordinary scene that gave hope to millions of Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the two Kims met for the first intra-Korea summit meeting in history and declared that their peninsula would be nuclear-free. Those developments gave impetus to the US–North Korean talks. Not long after the North-South summit, Marshal Jo Myong-rok, a high-ranking North Korean who was Kim’s second-in-command, visited Washington, DC, and met President Clinton and other top US officials at the White House. They signed a joint communiqué designed to end US–North Korean tensions once and for all, and pledged to begin talks to “formally improve” bilateral relations, including replacing the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War with “permanent peace arrangements,” according to Sigal. Soon after, Albright flew to Pyongyang to meet with Kim. The missile deal—including Kim’s commitment to end all production and testing—was to be capped with a visit to Pyongyang by Clinton himself. But he never made the trip, largely because his advisers kept him in Washington during the legal imbroglio that shook America over the disputed 2000 election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. The agreement was never signed, although North Korea’s missile moratorium lasted until 2007. “That was the moment when everything could have gone differently,” Perry told The New York Times in a recent podcast about the 1999 talks. Then came the neocons, and talks went out the window. “Under President Bush, the clock was turned back, the [Agreed Framework] became a Clinton mistake, something to be voided and then abolished,” wrote Park, the professor of international relations at Korea Catholic University. Chief among the framework opponents was Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary. During the Clinton years, he had chaired a national commission on missile defense that identified North Korea and Iran as dangerous “rogue states” that necessitated tough policies and, of course, a robust missile-defense system. Meanwhile, at the State Department, John Bolton, also a die-hard opponent, sharply criticized the terms of the framework as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. (Today he says that the United States can only eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program by “eliminating North Korea.”) Early on in his administration, Bush signaled his displeasure with Clinton’s Korea diplomacy when he met at the White House with Kim Dae-jung. Kim, still basking in the glow of his 2000 summit with Kim Jong-il, hoped to convince Bush that negotiations should continue. But he was humiliated when the president told him, on live television, that he did not trust North Korea and would not endorse Kim’s “Sunshine Policy.” A few months later, when pragmatists at State under Colin Powell decided after a review to restart talks with Pyongyang, the hard-liners—led by Bolton—seized on the uranium “discovery” from 1998 to scuttle the framework. “I wanted a decisive conclusion that the Agreed Framework was dead,” Bolton later explained. In October 2002, Bush sent James Kelly, a deputy assistant secretary of state, to Pyongyang to deliver an ultimatum to North Korea. He had strict orders from Vice President Dick Cheney and Bolton not to negotiate in any way—a dictate he followed even after his North Korean interlocutors denied that they had a uranium program in place but offered to discuss the accusations. “Kelly had minders from both the VP’s office and John Bolton’s staff,” recalls John Merrill, the former chief of the northeast Asia division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. “He had absolutely no room too explore the issue. Instead, he took what they said as an admission that they had a program and went home.” According to this account, the North Koreans told Kelly that the country had a “right” to a uranium program but was willing to discuss the issue as part of the broader negotiations over missiles. But the hard-liners in the administration rejected the offer and decided to terminate the framework. Within months, Pyongyang had thrown out the IAEA inspectors, withdrawn from the NPT, restarted Yongbyon, and was on its way to its first bomb. Condoleezza Rice, in her memoirs about her experience in Bush’s government, described the US refusal to talk to the North Koreans about the highly enriched uranium program, or HEU, as a huge mistake. “Because [Kelly’s] instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the [nuclear] program on the table,” she wrote. Later, when she ran for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton picked up on this theme, blasting the Bush administration for using the HEU program as an excuse to abrogate the Agreed Framework. “There is no debate that, once the [framework] was torn up, the North Koreans began to process plutonium with a vengeance because all bets were off,” she told The Washington Post. Since then, many analysts have cast doubt on whether North Korea actually had a full-fledged uranium-based nuclear weapons program in 2002, suggesting instead that what it really had was a pilot program for uranium enrichment that “thus posed no serious and imminent threat to the security of the United States,” according to Park, the international-relations scholar. In 2007, a senior US intelligence official seemed to confirm that when he told Congress that the CIA only had “mid-confidence” that a uranium program existed. (The North eventually developed one, and displayed its facilities in 2010 to US scientists.) Still, Pyongyang hung on: In October 2003, it offered to abandon its nuclear-weapons program if the United States would sign a non-aggression pact similar to the language worked out with Clinton and Perry. But this was a bridge too far for Bush. “We will not have a treaty,” he said. “That’s off the table.” By 2006, North Korea had processed enough plutonium to make a bomb, and it exploded its first nuclear device that same year. (For a detailed timeline of US–North Korean talks, see this chronology published by the Arms Control Association.) Yet despite the enormous influence of the neocons under Bush, talks continued between Washington and the North, as well with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, under the Six-Party Talks. Amazingly, in 2006, three weeks after North Korea tested its bomb—the “red line” that the United States had been trying to head off since the 1980s—Bush agreed to open direct talks with Pyongyang as part of the Six-Party process. These talks were a result of North Korea’s declaration in 2005 that it would be willing, if certain conditions were met, to abandon its nuclear weapons and return to the NPT. In February 2007, after the stalemate and crisis that led to the 2006 test, the North suspended its nuclear testing and shut down its reactor; a few months later, it agreed to disable its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon. In return, the United States promised to ease sanctions and take North Korea off the list of countries sponsoring terrorism. But the agreement soon fell apart over the issue of verification of Pyongyang’s enrichment and plutonium activities. As with Clinton’s 2000 agreement, Bush’s negotiations were eased by developments inside Korea, including the second North-South summit in October 2007. But soon after that meeting, South Korea’s progressive president Roh Moo-hyun was succeeded by Lee Myung-bak, a right-winger dead set against the Sunshine Policy. Backed by a new conservative government in Japan, which also rejected engagement, Lee demanded a system of written verification that Bush quickly agreed to. North Korea, however, bitterly opposed the demand as a violation of the 2005 accords signed by the Roh government. In response, both South Korea and Japan cut off their energy assistance to the North, leaving the Six-Party Talks in limbo. (Lee’s hard-line policies, which were also adopted by his successor, Park Geun-hye, greatly heightened tensions with the North and helped bring on the current crisis, current President Moon Jae-in told me in an interview with The Nation in May.) The Six-Party Talks, however, didn’t fall apart until the first months of the Obama administration. According to Sigal’s detailed history, President Obama and Jeff Bader, his top adviser on Asia, decided in 2009 to adopt President Lee’s proposals to use the suspension of energy aid as pressure to force North Korea to accept the verification plans they were now demanding. Lee also had the advantage of a close, friendly relationship with President Obama, which The New York Times characterized as “a presidential man-crush.” The idea of direct talks with the North, championed during Obama’s 2008 campaign, was abandoned. Washington’s policy, according to Sigal, became “pure pressure without negotiations.” Officially, the doctrine was known as “strategic patience,” but behind it was an assumption that North Korea was headed for collapse. The Obama-Lee pressure tactics only increased tensions, leading to further North Korean nuclear and missile tests, as well as a shelling incident in 2010 that almost caused a military confrontation. As the situation deteriorated, Obama embarked on a series of military exercises with South Korea that increased in size and tempo over the course of his administration and are now at the heart of the tension with Kim Jong-un. Still, dialogue continued sporadically, particularly through a channel of former US officials that has included Sigal. At some point, the United States is going to have to sit down with Kim’s representatives and seek to hammer something out that will put the North on the path to denuclearization—or accept it as a nuclear power and seek to temper its program. In 2010, the North proposed through this channel to ship out its nuclear fuel rods, the key ingredient for producing weapons-grade plutonium, to a third country in exchange for a US commitment to pledge that it had “no hostile intent” toward the North. But the Obama administration “didn’t even listen,” according to Joel Wit, a former negotiator who participated in the meeting. In 2015, Pyongyang made a sweeping proposal for a peace treaty that would end the enmity; this, too, was rejected out of hand. By the end of 2016, as David Sanger chronicled in the Times, Obama had decided on an aggressive cyber strategy that used electronic attacks to “sabotage” North Korea’s missiles and its supply chains. As Obama left the scene and Trump arrived at the White House, relations were frayed almost beyond repair. In April of this year, following a series of missile tests, Trump turned up the heat, and tensions since then have gone through the roof. Yet, as I reported in The Nation, North Korea clings to the idea that negotiations will be possible only if the United States ends the “hostile policy” that Pyongyang thought Washington had jettisoned with the Agreed Framework 1994. Today the Trump administration is trying to combine sanctions against Pyongyang with pressure on China to bring the North to the table. That may have worked to a certain degree: Kim Jong-un’s pullback on August 14 came hours after Beijing said it would immediately ban imports of North Korean coal, iron, and seafood. This decision followed China’s extraordinary August vote in favor of the tough sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council. But at some point, the United States is going to have to sit down with Kim’s representatives and seek to hammer something out that will put the North on the path to denuclearization—or accept it as a nuclear power and seek to temper its program, as James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, and other former US officials have proposed. (Some past negotiators disagree.) Last week, CNN’s Will Ripley reported, Pyongyang told him that a US acknowledgement of its nuclear program would clear the way for diplomacy. At the UN this week, China and Russia argued again that the best way to start those talks is a “freeze for freeze,” in which the North suspends its nuclear and missile testing in exchange for a moratorium or scaling back of the massive US-South Korean military exercises that have so inflamed the North. While this exchange has been rejected by the Trump administration (Haley called it “insulting”), a former US negotiator recently reminded a group of Korea watchers in a confidential conference call that Clinton’s suspension of the US “Team Spirit” exercises in South Korea were “critical” to getting the Agreed Framework passed. Meanwhile, a recent poll suggests that 60 percent of Americans favor a negotiated settlement with North Korea. As in 1994, the trade-off will have to come between ending the enmity and finding the peace. Somewhere in the history of those negotiations, Tillerson and his president may find the key to resolving a conflict that dates back to 1945 and the dawn of the Cold War. But they will have to do it with the full cooperation of South Korea, as President Moon has frequently reminded Trump. “No one should be allowed to decide on a military action on the Korean Peninsula without South Korean agreement,” Moon declared in an unusually blunt statement on August 15. The purpose of sanctions and pressure, he added, “is to bring North Korea to the negotiating table, not to raise military tensions.” Yoon Young-kwan, who worked with President Moon as South Korea’s foreign minister in the Roh Moo-hyun administration, reinforced those comments on September 5 at a Washington conference on US-South Korean relations. During these tense times, he said, “we must keep our diplomatic channels open and explore what is possible.” He pointed to the clause in the 1994 framework on normalizing US-North Korean political and economic relations. “North Korea had high expectations of that,” he said. “We must provide them with some kind of incentive” to negotiate. As the historian Bruce Cumings reminded us a few weeks back, another war of “fire and fury,” as Trump famously threatened on August 9, is out of the question. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He is a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Trump #AgreedFramework #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

In loving memory of Jo Young Sam By Jo Young Sam |  September 24, 2017 Korea peace and reunification activist, and ardent supporter of President Moon Jae In,  Jo Young Sam died early Wednesday morning, September 20, 2017, after setting himself on fire on Tuesday to protest the deployment of THAAD in South Korea. In a four page letter to President Moon Jae-in Jo wrote: “I am a person who genuinely, honestly hoped for the success of the Moon Jae-In administration. Through the success of the Moon Jae-In administration, we could have seen a future for North-South Korean economic partnerships, peace & reunification,  work done to achieve balance in Northeast Asia, and a future for us [Corean] descendants.” The English language translation of his letter to President Moon Jae In follows.* __________________________ Our country only has a future via the success of the Moon Jae-In Administration President Moon Jae-In, long ago, when I was in Germany, I was the one who has always supported and respected you. President Moon Jae-In, Let me get to the point right away. THAAD cannot happen. Mr. President, you also know that THAAD will not bring peace, but the tension and the dangers of war. I have tried to think that you were taking one step back to go two steps forward or you might have a bigger picture planned in your mind. However, by all means, this is not the way to go. Playing hard to get with the all mighty U.S. can never be easy. I understand that. But if you get pushed back from the beginning like this, how will you be able to get back on your feet later? I am a person who genuinely and honestly hoped for the success of the Moon Jae-In administration. Through the success of the Moon Jae-In administration, we could have seen the future for North-South Korean economic partnerships, peace & reunification, the balance in Northeast Asia, and the future for our [Corean] descendants. THAAD, for all intents and purposes, will not be a war deterrent nor a protective arm for peace. Having the lowest rate to “match bullet for bullet”, with the THAAD installation, it is more significant that North Korea and China will be placed under the X-Band security radar as an effect of THAAD installation. It is therefore so obvious that the location of THAAD and the neighboring area will be the prime target of China and North Korea from the moment of its installation. North Korea’s ICBMs’ potential for destruction is not limited to the Korean Peninsula but exceeds the continent with its long-distance capabilities. Specifically, this ICBM is targeting for the United States. Mr. President, you too know this well. Regardless that you used the term, “temporary installation,” you still proceeded with the installation of THAAD because you knew that you have hit the wall of reality in the current international politics. Of course, North Korea has the primary responsibility for this immediate installation by practicing nuclear experiments in response to your suggestion to communicate. Whether you truly meant it or not, the hostile relation between North Korea and the U.S. has escalated as a result of the installation of THAAD, casting dark clouds over our future. This childish game like “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” can result in the devastative destruction of both north and south Korea. The ever vigilant Japan (with one eye always open) also comes into my vision. For those who are responsible in the North, I ask you for a favor.  Once, I used to work for Lee In Mo who had been a war correspondent for the People’s Army, (Lee, In Mo, at the time, wasn’t able to walk on his own and was under my care due to post traumatic stress disorder after the separation of Korea). To the Party, in accordance with the “by the people” rhetoric you often use, don’t simply say “people”, “people”, but truly lay everything down in front of the people. The destiny of the people is to work together, with a mindset of carrying on and sharing. So, therefore, before the U.S. and its divisionary “coveted interest” rhetoric comes into play, let’s set out to take an action on forming the next chapter of North and South Korean relations. After saying “By the people” rhetorically, but in fact bypassing South Korea is not acceptable. Currently, Korea is not under Lee, Myung Bak’s administration, nor Park, Geun Hye’s. The current administration is the outcome of the candle light movement which left the greatest mark in the world history. We must succeed. We have a proverb that says, “Lifting together is always better, even when it’s just a blank sheet of paper”. You never know that we might come up with an idea that can stop the U.S. as a result of communication between North and South Korea. I think I have the right to ask you for this as a person who had assisted Lee, In Mo, the highly respected person in North Korea. President Moon Jae-In, I have respected and loved you. Even after I finish this journey of my life I will continue to believe in you. I feel honored if my death brings the hope of a THAAD withdrawal, and if through this moment of difficult breathing, negotiations with the US lead to a good result, this will be remembered as a glorious moment. I, as an unknown pacifist who has desired  to live as a man of the wind unfettered by the net, would like to wish for the peace on this land and say not to underestimate Korea as the last leaf of my life falls into the ground. I want to be remembered as a person among the million participating in the candlelight revolution that our Korean government was born out of. Mr. President, I pray and hope that you stand strong and state sternly to the U.S. that your administration is the product of the candlelight revolution and, as it initially was, push ahead with the strength that comes with success and set a path for the world to remember. I hope for your health. Sincerely, A single field flower, Jo Young Sam P.S. My actions will be argued about and understood in many ways. I do not care. I said I lived as “the free person of the wind unfettered by the net”, so what more words are necessary for those that couldn’t experience that life? For those for whom the trip of life is not yet over, I please ask that you give my regards to my wife and my young son. _____________________________ *Initial English translation courtesy of William Rhee, final translation courtesy of Misuk Nam. #SouthKorea #THAAD #MoonJaein #JoYoungSam #ICBM #NorthKorea

Donald Trump shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during the United Nations General Assembly, September 21, 2017. (AP Photo / Evan Vucci) By Tim Shorrock | September 29, 2017 Published originally in The Nation.com In a speech that will long be remembered for its ugly belligerence, President Trump told the UN General Assembly last week that “if it is forced to defend itself,” the United States was prepared to “totally destroy” North Korea: not just its military, or its leaders, but the entire population. To many heads of state, a threat evoking the destruction of both World War II and the Korean War violated the very idea of the UN as a body dedicated to resolving global tensions with peaceful means. “This was a bombastic, nationalist speech,” declared Margot Wallstrom, the foreign minister of Sweden, who grimly watched Trump’s outburst with folded arms. “I must say that we consider any type of military solution absolutely inappropriate,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a German newspaper. Experts on North Korea, meanwhile, argued that the speech played right into Kim Jong-un’s hands by proving his claim that the United States is North Korea’s mortal enemy. “President Trump has handed the North Koreans the sound bite of the century,” wrote Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who is well-known for his critical analyses of North Korea. “That footage will be used time and time and time again on North Korea’s state television channel.” Sure enough, Kim followed Trump’s speech with what might be called the insult of the century. In an unprecedented move that sent the Internet into a miasma of laughter and shock, he responded personally to Trump’s threat by calling him a “dotard” and a “frightened dog” that “has rendered the world restless through threats and blackmail against all countries in the world.” “I will make the man holding the prerogative of the supreme command in the U.S. pay dearly for his speech.” —North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “On behalf of the dignity and honor of my state and people and on my own,” Kim said, “I will make the man holding the prerogative of the supreme command in the U.S. pay dearly for his speech.” He told Trump to expect “the highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.” Later, his foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, suggested that might include a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean—and then upped the ante by accusing Trump of making a unilateral “declaration of war” against North Korea. Clearly, Trump’s threat to obliterate a country with 25 million people, many of them with family and relatives in South Korea, had struck a chord. Trump, naturally, struck back on Twitter by calling Kim a “madman,” and announced at the UN that the United States, South Korea, and Japan had agreed on a new set of US sanctions aimed at punishing any company or country that does business with the North Korean regime. Then, as if tensions weren’t high enough, on the night of September 23 the Pentagon sent B-1B Lancer bombers, nicknamed “the swan of death,” to fly over international airspace just off the coast of North Korea—“the first time since the Korean War that a U.S. bomber flew over North Korea’s east coast,” according to the Kyunghyang Shinmun, a major daily in Seoul. Two days later, after Trump tweeted that if Ri and Kim kept up their threats, they “may not be around much longer,” the foreign minister called his bluff. Standing before television cameras in front of his New York hotel, Foreign Minister Ri said that if a state of war existed, North Korea reserved the right to “make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.” That worried longtime US negotiators with North Korea. “That’s not the Ri Yong-ho I know,” Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA proliferation expert who met with Ri many times as a special envoy to the Six-Party Talks, told The Nation on Monday. But the escalating rhetoric did not meet the approval of the US public: That afternoon, CBS News put out a new poll showing that 53 percent of Americans were concerned that Trump might act too quickly “and start an unneeded war in Korea.” This week, as pundits debated what the next step would be in this global spectacle, few were asking how the standoff got to this point. Nor was it clear why the Trump administration abandoned the path of diplomacy that its top officials, led by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have defined for months as their objective, one strongly embraced by South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Amazingly, on Monday the administration continued to insist this was the case, with a State Department spokesperson telling reporters (despite the president’s words at the UN) that the “United States has not ‘declared war’ on North Korea,” and that “We continue to seek a peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” But a review of recent events and US government statements shows, in fact, that the “military option” against North Korea has eclipsed negotiations as the strategy of choice and become almost conventional thinking in Washington. More darkly, it suggests that the key influence on US policy during this period may have been Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, one of the most obsequious, pro-American leaders in modern Asian history. Just a month ago, things seemed to be looking up in Korea. In mid-August, Kim—derisively dubbed “Rocket Man” in Trump’s UN speech—canceled plans to shoot missiles toward the US military base on Guam, where the B1-Bs that would lead a military attack on North Korea are based. Possibly in response, the Pentagon quietly reduced the number of US troops involved in the upcoming US-South Korean “Ulchi Freedom Guardian” war games, from 25,000 in 2016 to 17,500 this year. They lasted from August 21 to 31. But the key elements of the exercises so feared by the North, including training in nuclear warfare and “decapitation strikes,” remained. That apparently triggered its decisions to go ahead with another series of missile tests, including two shots fired over the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Then, on September 3, Pyongyang tested its sixth—and largest—nuclear bomb. Even before that, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, had signaled a shift in US policy by speaking openly of a “preventive war” aimed at stopping North Korea’s weapons programs. In the weeks that followed Pyongyang’s early September test, Trump and his advisers launched a campaign to convince the American public that such a war might succeed. From Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to UN ambassador Nikki Haley, the idea of a “military option” that could “annihilate” the North became a mantra. Mattis even suggested that the Pentagon was seriously considering an option that could avoid damage to South Korea and other US allies—a claim scoffed at by many analysts, who believe that any US attack on the North would be met with catastrophic retaliation by the North. For Trump personally, Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test appeared to be the final straw. A few hours after he learned of the explosion, he insulted President Moon by tweeting that South Korea’s “talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work,” and declaring that “talking is not the answer!” Mattis escalated the rhetoric by saying that any “aggression” from North Korea would end with its “total annihilation.” Although the United States is “not looking” for that, he added, “we have many options to do so.” But North Korea’s actions alone don’t account for this new hard-line posture. Rather, it appears to be the result of the influence of Japan’s Abe, who has become Trump’s most faithful fan and ally on the world stage. Two years ago in this magazine, I chronicled Abe’s imperialist heritage and his attempts to “transform Japan—with its surprisingly large, tech-driven military-industrial complex—into America’s new proxy army.” Since Trump took office, Abe has become his closest confidant on North Korea and the man he inevitably calls first during every crisis. Their alliance has deepened since the North Korean missile shots over Japan. Frightened by the possibility of a strike on their island nation, Abe and his supporters have rallied behind Trump’s militant policy toward Pyongyang. On September 17, right before Trump’s UN speech, Abe published an unusual op-ed in The New York Times endorsing the idea of a military attack if sanctions fail to dissuade North Korea. “I firmly support the United States position that all options are on the table,” he wrote. As Abe well knows, a key element in any US attack, along with the B1 bombers in Guam, would be the advanced stealth F-35 fighter jets stationed at the US Marine base in Iwakuni, Japan. Japanese speakers made similar assertions the following day at a forum in Washington on “past diplomacy with North Korea.” Although it took place at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it was conceived and sponsored by the US-Japan Research Institute, a Tokyo think tank sponsored by several major universities and financed by Nissan, Toyota, Sony, and other large Japanese multinationals. The basic message was that Japan’s interests must be front and center in any US negotiations with Pyongyang. Mitoji Yabunaka, the former Japanese negotiator at the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, noted that he has heard many Americans argue that it’s “not realistic” to think North Korea will denuclearize, and that Washington should thus concentrate on managing Pyongyang’s arsenal. That “might suffice US interests,” but it is unacceptable to Japan, he said. “We are already being [threatened], so that doesn’t work for Japan.” The objective of any negotiations “must be clear—denuclearization,” Yabunaka said. “In that sense, I’m encouraged that Trump is sticking to that.” On September 20, Abe followed Trump’s speech with an aggressive call for a naval blockade on North Korea that would block its access to “the goods, funds, people and technology” necessary for its military programs. Abe also repeated arguments that past negotiations with the North had failed because they had allowed Pyongyang to “deceive” the global community, and said the time for diplomacy was over. What’s needed to force North Korea’s denuclearization is “not dialogue, but pressure,” he said. On September 22, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force joined the US Navy in drills designed to counter the North Korean threat. Finally, on Monday the 25th, Abe made his intentions clear: He was dissolving Japan’s powerful lower house and calling for a snap election in late October. “By holding an election at a time like this, I would like to test our public mandate on actions against North Korea,” he said. To many South Koreans, Abe’s intervention has effectively sidelined President Moon. While he tacitly endorsed Trump’s rhetoric in a meeting with the US delegation during the UN session, Moon laid out a very different approach in his address to the General Assembly. “We do not desire the collapse of North Korea,” he said. “If North Korea makes a decision even now to stand on the right side of history, we are ready to assist North Korea together with the international community.” Korean media have also reported that Abe’s government opposed Moon’s recent decision to provide $8 million in humanitarian aid to the North despite its missile and weapons tests. Japan’s growing influence on Trump was noted last week by Choe Sang-hun, The New York Times’s Seoul bureau chief. The day of Moon’s speech, he reported that the South Korean president is viewed by Koreans as “the odd man out,” and quoted Lee Won-deog, an academic expert on Korean-Japan relations. “There is a suspicion that Prime Minister Abe is using his close personal chemistry with President Trump to help shape the American leader’s views on South Korea.” Abe’s loyalty to Trump was also noted last month by The Wall Street Journal. “The Japanese leader’s refusal to let any daylight come between him and Mr. Trump contrasts with other leaders who have hinted at unease with Mr. Trump’s language, including his [recent] threat to bring ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea,” it reported from Tokyo. Moon himself has downplayed the idea of any splits, telling reporters on his plane back to Seoul, “I do not think the international community has any other option but to pressure North Korea with one voice.” But the tension between the Abe government and Moon’s was palpable upon the latter’s return from New York. In an unusual public display of anger reported by The Hankyoreh, senior South Korea officials complained bitterly to the White House that Japanese reporters, apparently with the support of their government, had “repeatedly printed distorted reports about South Korea-US-Japan summit remarks” last week as a way to weaken Moon’s position with Trump. Outside of the obvious attempt to sideline Moon, one of the problems with the Abe-Trump alliance, according to some peace activists, is that Japan and the United States are by far the largest financial contributors to the UN and could use that clout to pressure other nations into supporting military action against North Korea. In any case, peace groups hope to persuade the UN to intervene and press for a stronger diplomatic approach. Last Friday, Women Cross DMZ, a coalition of dozens of women’s organizations that made a peace vigil to North and South Korea in 2015, in a letter signed by nearly 300 women and over 40 major women’s organizations, wrote to UN Secretary General António Guterres urging him to “immediately appoint a Special Envoy” to de-escalate the conflict and “encourage dialogue, compromise and the peaceful resolution of tensions.” And after Trump’s appearance at the UN, three US peace organizations—CREDO Action, Win Without War, and MoveOn—condemned his threats and issued an urgent call for action. “We need to stop this slow roll toward a catastrophic war, and work towards defusing the North Korean crisis diplomatically,” they asserted. But there might be light at the end of the tunnel. At some point during the tumultuous week, a reporter asked Trump if negotiations were still an option. “Why not?” he shot back. That’s a good sign, said DeTrani, the former intelligence officer. “Negotiations are the only way out.” Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He is a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Trump #KimJongUn #SouthKorea #Japanmilitary #MoonJaein #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

By Tim Shorrock | October 10, 2017 Originally published in 38North. Recently declassified information on the responses of the South Korean and US governments to the uprising in the southwestern city of Gwangju in 1980 and North Korea’s reaction to those events underscore two critical lessons that the Trump administration is hopefully learning during the nuclear standoff with Kim Jong Un. First, when it comes to its internal affairs, the DPRK’s animosity to Chinese influence can be intense, and goes back decades. That’s especially important to remember at a time when the Trump administration is trying to persuade China to exert economic, political and even military pressure on Kim to force him to stop his weapons testing and move towards disarmament. And it underscores why so many experts scoff at the idea of outsourcing US policy to China and instead urge direct talks and negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. Second, as a result of this information, a spotlight is now shining on the Carter administration’s decision in 1980 to support the ROK Army’s decision to end the Gwangju Uprising with troops from the US-South Korean Joint Command. This was a giant setback to US-South Korean relations and stirred up a deep sense of betrayal and anti-Americanism in the South that could easily resurface if the Trump administration is seen by the Korean public as bullying the Moon government into accepting its approach to dealing with the North Korean crisis. ******* On May 28, 1980, American and North Korean military officials met at the Panmunjom Truce Village on the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The timing was propitious: just 24 hours earlier, the ROK Army, with full US approval, had rolled into Gwangju to end the first violent rebellion in South Korea since 1953. Dozens of citizens who had taken up arms against the martial law forces of Lt. General Chun Doo-hwan had been killed in the assault, adding to a death toll of several hundred. Because of the intense press controls imposed by Chun’s martial law command at the time, few in South Korea had any inkling about what had happened. But the North Koreans knew, and they had plenty to say about it, according to a declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) summary of the meeting that was sent to Secretary of State Edmund Muskie and other senior US officials. “Don’t you think it is about time for the US government to reevaluate its aid policy to South Korea?” the North Koreans asked their American counterparts. The United States, they insisted, “should have prohibited” Chun from using troops in Gwangju “so as to prevent needless bloodshed.” Apparently taken aback, one of the US officials asked if they “were aware” of recent comments made by Chinese Prime Minister Hua Guofeng about the situation in South Korea. The initial response is blacked out in the cable, one of several thousand documents I obtained about the US role in Gwangju under the Freedom of Information Act. But the rest of his answer is clear. Talking in “an irritated manner,” the North Korean officer seemed to spit out his words. “Hua can say whatever he likes to say, but it does not matter to us (KN),” he said. “We do not care one iota for his or any other foreigner’s personal opinions about our Republic.” Discussion over. The CIA cable, along with several other documents that analyze North Korean policy and actions in the crucial year of 1980, is now relevant because Gwangju has suddenly been thrust back into South Korean consciousness in a major way. The most popular movie today in South Korea is “A Taxi Driver,” the true story of Jurgen Hinzpeter, the late German photo-journalist who captured the first images of Chun’s attack on the citizens of Gwangju with help from a Seoul taxi driver. The film has been seen by over 12 million people, making it the nation’s 10th most popular film, and got a major boost on August 13 after a public showing for President Moon Jae-in and Edeltraut Brahmstaedt, Hinzpeter’s widow (he died in 2016). It will be South Korea’s nomination for best foreign film at next year’s Oscars and has brought the story of Gwangju to a global audience. With the film’s recounting of the massacre seared into the public’s mind, Moon recently ordered a government investigation into who ordered Chun’s martial law army to shoot protesters in Gwangju. His announcement had been expected since May 18, when the president spoke movingly at the national commemorations of the uprising at Gwangju’s cemetery in the hilly outskirts of the city (I was in the audience as a guest of the city). “The truth of Gwangju is a rage I cannot ignore,” he declared. As he did in his early campaign stops in the city, Moon joined local citizens in singing the “March of the Beloved,” the famous tribute to the fallen democratic fighters of Gwangju. Under the probe he ordered, the Ministry of Defense said this week it will investigate reports that soldiers were ordered to fire on protestors from helicopters and that Chun and the martial law command had readied fighter jets to Gwangju to support their crackdown. The North Korean connection to Gwangju is crucial because, under the conservative administrations of Moon’s predecessors, Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, right-wingers have attempted to diminish the uprising’s significance. These groups, and Chun himself, charge that the rebellion was secretly organized by North Korean military officers and was therefore a communist-backed uprising that deserved to be put down with force. This theory is spread by rightist groups who claim to have photographic evidence of North Korean military officers who infiltrated the citizen’s army that fought Chun’s martial law forces (this claim has been debunked by reporters and researchers who have identified the “North Koreans” as locals). Another ludicrous claim is that the Anthem, which is sung with such gusto in Gwangju, is a pro-North Korean tribute to Kim Il Sung (by embracing the song, President Moon has effectively put that one to rest). Even though these smears have largely been debunked, they remain a painful reminder to Gwangju of the divisions that wracked the country in 1980. In this context, the US documents of this period are important—and may even help resolve some of the issues being raised in the government’s investigation of one of the great tragedies of Korean history. One of the more intriguing documents in my FOIA collection is a CIA report about a “secret meeting” chaired by North Korean leader Kim Il Sung at his presidential mansion in Pyongyang on May 19, 1980, the second day of the uprising in Gwangju. Its purpose, according to the CIA, was to discuss “KN actions” in connection with the rebellion—in other words, to debate whether the Korean People’s Army should intervene or not. Unless the CIA had a human source within Kim’s inner circle (unlikely), the intelligence was probably obtained from electronic intercepts. That conclusion is strengthened by notations on the cable showing it was sent by the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command—which operated many of the National Security Agency’s listening posts around the world—and received by INSCOM’s famous Arlington Hill Station in northern Virginia. At the meeting, which was said to include the “KN Minister of [the] People’s Armed Forces Chin-U and other KN leaders,” Kim and his advisers allegedly decided “not to refrain from invading KS, if the Kwangju riot developed into a nationwide popular revolt.” That is, they would enter the fight if South Korea was engulfed in revolution, but otherwise would remain neutral. “However,” the cable adds, “no unusual, significant activities indicating KN readiness to attack KS have been noted by KS.” These claims would seem to repudiate any notion that the uprising was “organized” by North Korea, as claimed today by Chun and his right-wing allies; but if true, they indicate an intent by the DPRK to intervene later if the Gwangju rebellion turned into a full-fledged insurrection of national proportions (which it decidedly did not). The fact that US officials understood that Gwangju was an indigenous uprising is strengthened by the notes of a high-level meeting held at CIA headquarters on May 23, 1980, and described in a declassified report the agency included in its “CREST” database of intelligence reports brought on line earlier this year. The meeting was chaired by Frank Carlucci, the CIA’s deputy director, and begins with an analysis of North Korean intentions from Richard Lehman, who was famous inside the CIA for developing and delivering daily intelligence briefings to presidents from JFK to Reagan. Undoubtedly aware of the SIGINT (signals intelligence) on Kim Il Sung and his “secret meeting” in Pyongyang, Lehman reminded Carlucci that he had advised CIA in the fall of 1979 that, if the ROK government lost control, “chances are better than even that North Korea will intervene.” But regarding the current situation, he insisted: “there are no signs of anything untoward underway in North Korea” while noting that the CIA is “remaining alert to the situation.” (I cited this document in an interview last April for a South Korean documentary produced by the Seoul Broadcasting System on the North Korean connection). Other cables further repudiate Chun’s claims of North Korean involvement. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report dated June 5, 1980, and based on unnamed sources within the South Korean military, made the startling claim that some 2,000 people in the Gwangju area had “secured arms and made their way into the wilds” after the uprising was put down on May 27. While participants in the rebellion have denied any such movement in Gwangju’s nearby mountains, which were heavily patrolled by the ROK Army, they point with pride to the DIA’s observations that “the motivation to go into the hills was not communist inspired,” and that “the rebels…are truly representatives of the people of Cholla Namdo.” Moreover, US military intelligence openly scoffed at Chun’s claims of North Korean involvement. That can be seen in a secret DIA cable (dated June 2, 1980) about an official ROK Ministry of Defense report claiming that a North Korean agent had been captured in Seoul after “agitating demonstrators” in Gwangju. “The data is one-sided and somewhat distorts” the picture, DIA concluded about what it called the “alleged communist infiltration.” The analyst added, somewhat sarcastically: “The ROKG would have it believed that because of these aggitations (sic)…extended ML [martial law] was the will of the people.” It is also notable that the detailed reports sent to Washington from US Ambassador William Gleysteen during and after the uprising mention nothing of North Korean involvement except in the context of US determination to prevent it. A famous cable he sent at the height of the rebellion, for example, states that General John Wickham, the commander of US Forces Korea at the time, had “agreed to a high internal alert status against infiltration.” Wickham, Gleysteen added, might consider additional US forces “if we become increasingly concerned about the potential for North Korean exploitation.” But this was only speculation: the cable also calls the “massive insurrection” in Gwangju an “internal threat” to the Chun group within the ROK military, which he noted “obviously feel threatened by the whole affair.” Gleysteen was well-briefed: the Korea country team he headed with Wickham also included the CIA Station Chief, whose reports (which are heavily redacted) don’t include any references to North Korean involvement in the “insurrection.” As I’ve told audiences in South Korea, the Korean peninsula was, and is, one of the most surveilled spots on earth. If the combination of US SIGINT and human intelligence had picked up any evidence whatsoever of North Korea infiltration into Gwangju or the Cholla area where the rebellion took place, Gleysteen’s team would have made this information immediately known to the US government and most likely made it public. But sadly, despite the lack of North Korean involvement, the Carter administration agreed to support the ROK Army’s decision to end the Gwangju Uprising with troops from the US-South Korean Joint Command. This decision was made for national security reasons at a high-level meeting at the White House on May 22, 1980, one day after the ROK army’s massacre of civilians on May 21 that was captured by Hitzpeter and shown in graphic detail in “A Taxi Driver.” As I reported in my story on the FOIA documents in 1996, the minutes state that, after a full discussion,” there was general agreement that the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later.” As we know, the Carter administration’s decision was a giant setback to US-South Korean relations, and stirred up a deep sense of betrayal and anti-Americanism in the South. The new film about Gwangju and the Moon government’s investigation into the massacre and uprising could open the door for greater scrutiny into the US role in South Korea in the crucial year of 1980. That might complicate bilateral relations at a time of severe tension with North Korea, yet could also help heal wounds that in the 1980s came close to tearing the US-South Korean alliance apart. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He is a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Gwangju #NorthKorea #SouthKorea #TimShorrock

Jill Stein with Rev. Sounghey Kim in Seongju village By Paul Liem, August 26, 2017 | October 12, 2017 This is the fourth in a series of interviews with the five member U.S. Solidarity Peace Delegation, to South Korea, July 23 – July 28, 2017, of whom delegation coordinator, Juyeon Rhee, was denied entry to South Korea under a travel ban imposed by the Park Geun Hye administration, and remaining in force under the new administration of President Moon Jae In. The delegates met with South Korean peace and labor activists, with Shim Jae Kwon, Chair of the National Assembly Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, and with villagers of Seongju, Gimcheon and Soseongri 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 and the Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation, and 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 Code Pink, 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 spear headed 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 delegates’ 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 Jill Stein follows. ___________________________________________ PL:  Since we don’t often interview presidential candidates, I thought our readers might like to know how you came to be the Green Party candidate in 2016.  How was it that you made your transition from medicine to social justice activism, and eventually to the Green Party and your candidacy? JS: I grew up in the sixties, the era of civil rights, the movement against the war in Vietnam and the women’s movement. I was an activist but not predominantly an activist. I was part of the weekly vigils against the war in Vietnam when I was in high school before it became a major issue embraced by our generation. It made sense to me that the world should run according to justice, not according to who’s most powerful. I’d say that realization was brought home to my generation by Martin Luther King.  King really framed my life as an activist. I became a full-time activist in roughly 2006. At that time, I transitioned from clinical medicine to political medicine, to address the “mother of all illnesses,” our sick political system.  I stopped my clinical practice at that point because activism became a full-time proposition. That is the short story. PL:  Did you go directly into the Green Party at that point or were you doing other things? JS:  While I was still practicing medicine, I became very involved in fighting environmental racism, helping communities shut down polluting incinerators and coal plants. I had been recruited as a doctor who was sympathetic to those issues. I was the go-to doc who would come out to help explain the health impacts of these facilities and the impacts on local communities and broader regional and global impacts of incineration and coal and air pollution and toxic chemicals moving their way up the food chain and so on. I began that work on behalf of communities that were on the frontlines of those struggles. At that point, I began to realize that the power really lay in the community, not in talking to elected officials who are on the payroll of the powers-that-be. I’d say it’s next to impossible to make change through the current system. We could waste ten years working on a bill and the legislators would change one sentence as it was being passed, then there went ten years of work. I began to realize that the real power and the real commitment and the real justice lay in the communities that were struggling.  At that point, I got recruited to run for office for the Green Party. I didn’t go looking for it. I worked my fingers to the bone, as so many of us do, thinking that we can work within the current system. I was part of a campaign finance reform movement here in my home state in Massachusetts. We were successful. We passed public financing for political campaigns. We passed it by a 2-to-1 margin as a referendum. And then the legislature here in my home state of Massachusetts, in all of its wisdom, repealed this referendum that the people had supported for clean politics. It was a Democratic legislature. It could have passed any bill and overridden any veto. They repealed it on a voice vote, no less. That convinced me that if real work was going to get done we would have to do it outside of the political system. That was back in the year 2000. PL:  Of all the candidates in the last election, only the Green Party took the position that the United States should talk to North Korea. Everybody else’s position was that China should talk to North Korea which is still resonating today. How did you get interested in Korean issues and how did you form your views about them? JS:  I started to pay a lot of attention to Korea during the 2016 campaign. It was clearly a hot spot. The whole pivot to Asia was creating a serious question about where U.S. foreign policy was going. A foreign policy dominated by militarism was proving itself, without any qualification, to be an unmitigated disaster in the Middle East. And now we are in the process of pivoting that policy to Asia, a foreign policy based on economic and military domination. Given what a disaster it’s been in the Middle East, now add nuclear weapons to the picture, add China and add Russia, and you have, I think, a microcosm of what’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy. And on the Korean peninsula, our foreign policy is undergoing a reality check. We’re up against the limits of… PL:  [Technical glitch in recording] Please go back a few sentences because I lost you. JS:  The point I was making was that during the campaign, I was forced to develop positions about major issues in U.S. foreign policy and this demanded that our campaign have a clear position on the pivot to Asia. Looking at the Middle East, the problems with a foreign policy based on military domination were catastrophic everywhere that we’ve practiced it starting with Iran, going back to the 1950s. It led to the overthrow and the installation of the Islamic regime in Iran and with all the outfall from that. More recently our practice of regime change in Iraq and in Libya—unbelievable disasters. It’s become clear that regime change is part of the pivot to Asia. There is a real intention to inflict regime change in Asia, with North Korea in the cross-hairs. You can see the regime change playbook being rolled out right now. So it became very important to develop a positive set of solutions during the campaign. The conflict on the Korean peninsula is begging for a solution based on the principles of democracy, justice, and peace. I had the opportunity to meet the Korean Green Party last spring.  It was at the global Greens meeting in Liverpool. It turned out that the U.S. Green Party had been in touch with the Korean Green Party and they had put out joint statements and developed joint policies. It was clear when I met the Korean Greens that the solutions they have for South Korea are those we need right here. All we need to do in the U.S. is allow democracy to take its course. Let’s allow South Korea to guide the U.S. forward on how this should be done. Koreans have been thinking about this for 60 or 70 years. Korea has a very mature and principled approach to how to deal with North Korea. And a lot of that entails the U.S. getting out of the way because we have been fanning the flames of conflict on that peninsula for 70 or so years, ever since the Second World War. PL:  Is the Green Party gaining momentum in South Korean politics? We don’t often hear about the Greens in South Korea. JS:  The Greens are new in South Korea. They were founded in 2014 so they are a very new party. They’re gaining ground, as I understand. They have several candidates. They face the typical issues of an independent third party. It’s difficult to get on the ballot. It’s very expensive. So they’re fighting a steep uphill battle just like we are in the U.S. But they are gaining recognition. I was introduced as a former Green Party presidential candidate during our visit with the villagers in Gimcheon and Seongju. I was astonished at how interested people were in the Green Party presidential campaign and then even more so when the village activists began introducing themselves saying they were already members of the Korean Green Party. The South Koreans have discovered Green Party’s principles of demilitarization, of a nuclear-free world, of conflict resolution based on dialogue, of democracy and sovereignty, and of getting rid of U.S. bases around the world, including in South Korea.  Korea has paid the price for decades for being in the cross-hairs of U.S. militarism. So it’s no surprise that the people of Korea are very much in tune with the Green Party agenda. PL:  The communities in Seongju and Gimcheon were traditionally conservative. How did the villagers make the transition to political activism, calling for the removal of THAAD? JS:  As I understand it, for the villagers, it was a matter of becoming a victim of this system of occupation and militarization, and that it was the movement of the THAAD missile system into their communities that alarmed and alerted people. The people of Seongju and Gimcheon are well aware that that THAAD radar system is provoking China. It is the THAAD radar system which can detect China’s missiles that is believed to be the actual mission of the THAAD anti-missile system. THAAD is not strategically located order to protect Seoul, the major population area. And there are serious questions about the ability of these missiles to find targets under actual battlefield conditions. The villagers are well aware that they are caught in the cross-hairs of North Korea and China and the U.S. by having this radar system in their backyard. They don’t want any part of it. They are not afraid of North Korea. They’ve dealt with North Korea’s leaders for some time. They understand how North Korea has been provoked into taking this, you know, offensive position, because the best defense is an offense. Korea has been threatened with nuclear attack for decades. The U.S. has been rehearsing attacks, nuclear attacks, once or twice a year for decades against North Korea, so it’s no surprise when we have negotiated with North Korea, it has been productive. Had the U.S. not retrenched from its commitments, we might not have the problem that we have right now. But we’ve been threatening attack, we’ve been rehearsing attack. The people of South Korea have a much better understanding of what dialogue has occurred with North Korea. The public here has little understanding of that in this country. We read only inflammatory headlines. Yet those high up in U.S. intelligence are well aware that there have been many opportunities for negotiation. If we would just engage in the freeze-freeze negotiations right now, we could begin to build trust. As South Korea knows there are opportunities for cooperative economic development. There are many ways forward. The people of South Korea need to be setting the pace here and setting the policy. It was so reassuring to see that the people of South Korea are not afraid of North Korea, they are not afraid of China. They’re afraid of Donald Trump, though, and the irrational and hostile things that he might do. We need to allow democracy and justice to guide our way forward here, and that means giving the people of South Korea the sovereignty that they deserve. That is their right. They should be sovereign over South Korea and sovereign in deciding how to proceed in putting an end to this conflict that doesn’t need to be there. PL:  What is the freeze-freeze proposal that you mentioned? JS:  The freeze-freeze proposal calls for the U.S. to freeze the war games in exchange for North Korea freezing its missile and nuclear weapons development. They pause and we pause. There is absolutely nothing to lose here for anyone, particularly for the U.S. We have a huge advantage here in every way imaginable considering that we have thousands of nuclear bombs. North Korea may have 20 or 30, something like that. Freezing things where they are right now and beginning negotiations is a no-lose proposition on both sides. It’s a win-win. At worst we go back to where we were before. But at best we actually then begin to roll back the nuclear crisis which is on a hair-trigger alert right now. I believe it was Senator Lindsey Graham who said if a war is going to happen. it’s going to happen over there. That’s false, there’s no such thing as a limited nuclear war. Nuclear winter comes from all the debris that’s thrown into the atmosphere. It would cause a massive global reduction in food production which will last for years. It’s predicted that this would kill hundreds of millions of people all around the world. It’s essentially the unmaking of civilization as we know it. There’s no way the world will survive the massive consequences of even a limited nuclear exchange. It’s not just the Korean peninsula that’s at risk. What’s going on in Korea is a microcosm of a foreign policy based on economic and military domination at a time when we are no longer unipolar world. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, was the author of this unipolar view of the world and foresaw a century of American domination. This generated the policies of regime change in the Middle East. Even Brzezinski had moved on from this view before he died recently. He said it was no longer possible to have a world based on U.S. military domination anymore, that we needed to develop a new approach based on collaboration and cooperation. This is what we need to do. PL:  When Obama was elected president, there was a hope that things would change on many fronts, domestic and also foreign affairs. And he did make some overtures that indicated that he would try to bury the hatchet with some of United States’ adversaries. Why did we end up in such a difficult situation with U.S. policy towards Korea where there’s virtually no diplomacy going on back and forth? He was supposedly the president that was going to change that or bring something new to the table. JS:  He did do some good things including negotiating with Iran. But in so many ways Obama did not, I’d say, generally did not, fulfill expectations of a kinder, gentler policy. There was kinder, gentler rhetoric. But beneath the rhetoric we generally moved backwards, even economically in the U.S. in the way the banks got bailed out. Larry Summers the architect of the Wall Street meltdown was reappointed. The recovery was a recovery for Wall Street. And in the realm of foreign policy we went on to expand the wars and we surged into Afghanistan. We brought the troops out of Iraq. But no real peace was made. Obama was the architect of the pivot to Asia. The rhetoric made it seem as if we were going to cool our jets in the Middle East and stand up against the bully China in Asia. This was a very misguided policy. We didn’t make amends in the Middle East. We continued expanding our drone war, ground wars, and we had regime change in Libya. The Middle East under Obama was largely a disaster. The policy towards Korea, towards North Korea, called “strategic patience” was neither strategic nor patient. It essentially continued the squeeze of economic sanctions, isolation and threats. It didn’t go down the pathway of engagement and negotiations. It was a misnamed policy and it was a missed opportunity. To my mind, it has been a bipartisan problem. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is funded by the dollars of the military-industrial complex and they don’t exercise independent policymaking in the world of foreign relations any more than they do in health care where the leading figures in the Democratic Party, the chair of the DNC, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, remain fans of health insurance as we know it. They keep putting the brakes on movement towards a Medicare for all policy, even at a time when people are clamoring for it. The opportunity has never been greater. This is the time to move forward and yet the Democrats are not capable of doing the right thing. So what’s going on in Korea is a reality check. It’s an opportunity for people to say, “Hey is this working?” It’s clearly not, even though there’s a solution within arm’s reach if we just do the right thing. PL:   The delegation to Korea was called the Solidarity Peace delegation and the purpose was to build solidarity with the grassroots struggle that is going on in Korea along with the struggles that are going on in the U.S. for social justice. From your interaction with the villagers in Seongju and Gimcheon, what is the key message from the villagers to the peace movement here for working together, trying to achieve common goals? [L-R] Jill Stein, Will Griffin, Reece Chenault, Medea Benjamin and delegation hosts Wolsan Liem and Hosu Kim JS:  I think the villagers were delighted and surprised to see that our goals were their goals, and that we understood their leadership, and that they are taking the lead. We want to support them and help raise their voices so that their voices are heard around the world. My own feeling about the direction we need to go in is very much based on that strategy. It is the human struggle, their rights to democracy, to sovereignty, to justice, to freedom from occupation, to freedom from this missile system that makes them a target. The fact that they are camping out in the streets waiting for the next shipment of THAAD missiles to come in, the fact that the Won Buddhists have set up their tent and are there 24/7—that’s their human rights struggle. The heroism and courage of the villagers standing up to confront the military coming in, that they’ve been unbelievably heroic and courageous in their struggle—that to me is the real engine of the global fight here. The villagers are the face of that struggle. There is a global crisis in the making on the Korean peninsula. It’s going to take a global effort, a global peace movement, I think, to reverse that crisis. This crisis is instructive because if we can establish the ground rules on the Korean peninsula we’ve established ground rules globally, that it is time to end the militarization, that it’s time to end occupation, that it’s time to support local democracy and local sovereignty. It is time also to demilitarize our foreign policies, to shift our resources to supporting human needs, militarism which is half of our budget in the U.S. But it’s the face of the villagers who are compelling. When you put this together with the faces of other human rights struggles for peace, for democracy, for environmental and economic justice and racial justice, that’s when we really get to critical mass, by bringing those local struggles together. The role of the villagers is critical in igniting this new global movement. There’s a global force for war and that’s called Lockheed Martin and the like, the incredible economic powers that are pushing for war all over the world. And it’s the regimes that the U.S. is supporting, dictatorships all over the world that are based on consumption of the U.S. military weapons. That global force for war needs a global counterweight for democracy, human rights, and peace. It is by unifying those struggles that I think we engage the imagination of the public around the world and especially the U.S. public which is riveted right now on the fight against fascism and the fight against racism. Fascism and militarism are two sides of the same coin. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that the three evils of militarism, racism, and materialism go hand-in-hand. Looking at fascism and militarism as flip sides of the same monster, it helps people in this country understand that they’re not taking away from the fight against fascism by supporting the peace movement in Korea. This is a crisis that all of us need to weigh in on right now, and for people to understand that this is the same movement as fighting fascism in Charlottesville and throughout the U.S. I think that’s the way we need to go forward, understanding that this is a win-win domestically and a win-win in terms of foreign policy. You cannot separate them. PL:  It’s tremendous that the delegation went there and took this step forward connecting the struggle in Asia and in Korea with struggles here in the United States. On that note I want to ask if there is anything else that we should cover this morning, anything else that you would like to address. JS:  Only that this is not a long term goal. We need to build the common cause between these struggles, share the love and share the fight and understand that we’re one unified community. I was in Flint, Michigan, recently where people are struggling for clean water, for housing and for human rights. So many stepped up to send their good wishes and signed the petition. The same thing in Detroit where similar struggles are going on. Miko Peled, who is one of the leaders of the Palestinian Human Rights Movement, signed the petition. Alice Walker, Cornell West who was in Charlottesville also took time out to sign our petition, understanding that militarism and fascism are one and the same. There are many steps we can take right now to capitalize on this surge of resistance. There is a rising up of these forces for democracy and justice and we can unify the peace movement with that fight as we build solidarity. The moment this becomes a unified human rights struggle, the quicker we get to critical mass and the faster we build a global force for peace to counter the global force for war. The potential for the breakout of nuclear and other wars right now and the potential for fascism are equally devastating threats. PL:  It’s inspiring that these progressive leaders have signed the petition to avert war in Korea especially as they are so involved in the actions that occurring now in the U.S. JS:  Exactly, and I think we need to bring the people of Guam in on this too because they are also in the target-hairs. The more we can bring the hotspots together to say we’re going to be a global force for peace, the more that global force for peace can be exercised in a variety of hotspots around the world.  That includes Asia, South America and the regime change that is about to be practiced against Venezuela, and real peace and human rights in Israel and Palestine. The more we come together as a global force for peace, the stronger we’ll be. PL:  I want to thank you for sharing and spending the time with me this morning and let’s continue the work. JS:  Yes absolutely. ______________________________________ *Dr. Jill Stein was the Green Party’s U.S. presidential candidate in 2016 and 2012 and a co-founder of the Global Climate Convergence for People, Planet and Peace over Profit.  She has helped fight for workers’ rights, to stop environmental racism and injustice, promote green economies and democracy, and is currently working to build support for Green Party candidates who are campaigning for progressive, sustainable solutions that are critical for our future. #GreenParty #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #THAAD #Nuclearweapons #JillStein #FreezeforFreeze #NorthKorea

By Tim Beal | November 2, 2017 Originally published in Zoom in Korea. Japanese Prime Minister’s gamble in calling a snap election to harness anxiety and hysteria over the much-publicized ‘threat from North Korea’ has succeeded, as it was widely predicted. The political achievement is considerable. Only a couple of months back, things were not looking good for Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party. The New York Times described the ‘Abe conundrum’: Mr. Abe’s public approval ratings dipped below 30 percent over the summer as he was dogged by a series of scandals, and opinion polls taken during the campaign found that more voters disapproved of Mr. Abe’s hawkish strategy toward North Korea than approved of it.“There is an Abe conundrum,” Professor Kingston [the director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo] said. “How does a guy who is basically unpopular with voters, whose policies are not particularly popular, who doesn’t get high marks for leadership, and yet he keeps winning in elections?” He had a little bit of luck – a typhoon kept some voters away, and the opposition was fractured– but his winning card was the hysteria over North Korea after the recent tests of the Hwasong-12 missile that overflew Japan. Electors might not have approved of Abe’s North Korea policy or his plans for remilitarization, but it appears that he frightened a sufficient number. The Japanese government and the media made a big fuss over the Hwasong-12 tests of 28 August and 15 September. They were portrayed as a deliberate threat to Japan, and the authorities heightened the hysteria by sending emergency alerts through cellphones and over loudspeakers. Presumed flight path of Hwasong-12 on 28 August 2017 The reality was that the tests were actually about developing a deterrent against the US and the flight over Japan was primarily a matter of geography. If North Korea is to test a long-range missile on a standard (rather than lofted) trajectory that will end up in the unpopulated northern Pacific, then it has to go over Japan. David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists explained: Yesterday’s launch was the first time North Korea flew a ballistic missile over Japanese territory, although in 1998 and 2009 it launched rockets that overflew Japan on failed attempts to put satellites into orbit. It has gone to some lengths to avoid flying over Japan, by launching its missile tests on highly lofted trajectories so they will land in the Sea of Japan. In addition, it has directed its more recent satellite launches to the south, even though it is preferable to launch to the east—over Japan—since it allows the rocket to gain speed from the rotation of the earth. After its threats of firing Hwasong-12 missiles near Guam, it is interesting that North Korea fired this missile to the east rather than in the direction of Guam, which might have been interpreted as an attack despite the short range. The missile also appears to have flown in a direction that did not pass over highly populated parts of Japan. As the picture shows, it appears that the missile was routed over the Straits of Tsugaru between Honshu and Hokkaido, and the second missile is thought to have done the same. Both were well above Japanese airspace, higher than many satellites, when they passed over Japanese territory. Basically, long range missiles are designed for distant targets, so neither IRBMs such as Hwasong-12 nor ICBMs, such as Hwasong-14, pose any particular danger to Japan. But perceptions count more than reality, and Abe swept to victory and towards a renewed drive for constitutional revision and remilitarization: Reuters: Abe to push reform of Japan’s pacifist constitution after election winWashington Post: Abe retains supermajority in Japan’s election, may push to amend constitutionThe Independent: Japan election results: Shinzo Abe scores major victory for ruling coalition and pledges to reform pacifist constitution And that is bad news – for Japan and for the region. Abe family tree — Kishi Nobusuke, ‘America’s favorite war criminal’ Political dexterity runs in Abe’s family. Politics at the top is his natural habitat: ‘Abe hails from one of Japan’s most famous political dynasties: his father and grandfather both held top jobs.’ Both grandfathers did, in fact, but it is the maternal one, Kishi Nobusuke, that is the one to note. Kishi was one of the architects of Japan’s war against China in the 1930s and 1940s, which led to the Pacific War against the US, various European countries and finally the Soviet Union. He was particularly notorious for his governing of the puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria or currently Northeastern provinces of China) where he was known as 昭和の妖怪 (‘the Shōwa era monster/devil’). One of his underlings in Manchukuo was none other than Park Chung-hee, who served in the puppet army hunting down resisters to Japanese rule, Chinese and Korean; one of the latter was Kim Il Sung though their paths did not cross. He was arraigned as a Class A war criminal by the Americans after the war and held for three years. But times changed; friends became enemies, and enemies became friends. The US was in the process of ‘losing China,’ and Kishi’s killing of Chinese was transformed from an outrageous slaughter of gallant allies to a rather prescient act of defending America against the Red Chinese. Kishi became, in Michael Schaller’s words, America’s Favorite War Criminal. Given President Trump’s predilection for golf, it is interesting to note how Kishi used the sport in his political career. He had developed a friendship with pre-war US ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew. When Grew was held under detention after Pearl Harbor, Kishi arranged for him to be allowed out for a round of golf. The favor was reciprocated when Kishi visited the US in 1957 to arrange some funding from the CIA and played golf with President Eisenhower at an otherwise racially-segregated golf club. By that time, Kishi was Prime Minister, a position he owed to a lobby that included amongst its members, former Ambassador Grew. This lobby was instrumental in overturning America’s war aim of creating a deindustrialized, demilitarized Japan in favor of remilitarization and reindustrialization to counter the Soviet Union and China. That is Abe’s pedigree, and that is how he and remilitarization fit in with US strategy to preserve and expand hegemony. However, history can leave unwelcome legacies behind, and one of those, from Abe’s perspective, is Japan’s ‘Peace Constitution,’ in particular its Article Nine: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. Although details of its provenance are disputed, it is generally considered that it was basically drafted by Americans in the staff of General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers, or SCAP. Militarism had brought Japan to devastating defeat in 1945 – counting not merely the casualties of the atomic bombs and the fire bombings of Japanese cities but also the millions of soldiers and civilians evicted from liberated colonies (such as Korea)–that the ideals of peace and the renunciation of war had widespread popular support in Japan then as they do now. Not everyone saw it in this light of course–not the Kishi’s and the Abe’s nor the US strategists who wanted to harness Japan’s military potential against the Soviet Union and China. Fortunately for them, god created lawyers, who argued that Article Nine did not really mean what it seemed to mean to the untutored eye. To start with, the ‘land, sea and air forces’ that were ‘never to be maintained’ were renamed; the Japanese Imperial Army and its constituents became the Japanese Self Defense Forces. This process, called ‘reinterpretation,’ alternates with another–constitution revision. In other words, you either change the words or change the meaning of the words, and this has been the dominant trend, because it encounters less opposition. Thus, Abe has maintained for some years that the Constitution does not stop Japan from acquiring nuclear arms. Moreover, he argues, increased military expenditure and military operations overseas are nothing to do with ‘right of belligerency’ forbidden by Article Nine but rather an example of ‘proactive pacifism.’ And that is not a misprint. The New York Times on Abe’s ‘Proactive Pacifism’ The ‘North Korean Threat’ as a facilitator of Japanese remilitarization The much-publicized ‘North Korean threat’ and, in a slightly different way, the ‘Chinese threat’ offer an obvious and, at first sight, seemingly heaven-sent justification for Japanese remilitarization. Even proponents admit that ‘The Japanese public, which remains apprehensive of even minimal use of force, is another constraining factor [to remilitarization].’ These threats in fact are not heaven-sent but, in their different ways, largely constructed to serve the purpose. Both are built on a bedrock of racism. Colonialism/imperialism and racism go hand in hand and feed on each other. We rule over a foreign people, because we believe they are inferior, perhaps even sub-human, and our rule over them proves that we are superior. The Korean peninsula and much of China were part of the Japanese empire, and because the past has not been exorcised in the way it was, to quite an extent, in Germany, these attitudes pollute the present. Japan is not alone in this, and we can see variants around the world, in the US, Britain, and wherever there is a present or past colonial relationship. One important aspect of racism is that it distorts and degrades people’s ability to think rationally and realistically about others. By ascribing irrationality – essentially non-human behavior – to others, it leads to a false, if comforting, perception of the situation. The racist becomes a victim of delusion. It gives rise, for instance, to Donald Trump’s assertion that ‘Rocket Man {Kim Jong Un] is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.’ You can only believe such nonsense by abandoning rationality and embracing fantasy, something to which it is alleged that Trump is prone. On the elite level, these antagonisms towards North Korea and China are exacerbated by chagrin. A century ago, Japan lorded over both. Now Japan is still, as Gavan McCormack puts it, a client state of the US, but China is economically and militarily larger than Japan and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Even North Korea, while much smaller and poorer, is an independent state. No foreign generals, American or Chinese, there to give ‘guidance.’ Clearly, China is a competitor to Japan in many ways, and it does possess substantial and growing military power. China could, perhaps, pose a threat to Japan in the future. North Korea is clearly different. It has a population 1/5 of Japan’s and an economy much smaller. And despite Japan’s peace constitution, its military budget in 2016, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, was $47 billion. That is about 13 times that of North Korea if we use State Department figures, and 50 times if we use an estimate quoted in the South Korean National Assembly in 2013. North Korea has not the ability to attack Japan nor reason to do so, and does not appear to ever have threatened it. The danger for Japan is that if the US attacks North Korea, then as the country hosting the main forward US bases in Asia, it will become a target of Korean retaliation. Exactly what that would entail is unknown, but for what it is worth, a recent estimate put the possible numbers of dead in a nuclear attack on Seoul and Tokyo at up to 3.8 million. Mr. Abe seems to think such dangers are worthwhile in his pursuit of remilitarization, but it should be remembered that none of this is inevitable. Japan could have turned to a neutralist path in the 1950s (which is why the CIA channeled funds to Kishi Nobusuke) and back in September 2002 when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi went to Pyongyang. The resulting Japan- DPRK Pyongyang Declaration promised all sorts of good things, but little has come to pass. It appears that the George W. Bush administration was very concerned that a Tokyo-Pyongyang rapprochement would upend its strategy in East Asia and took steps to prevent peace from breaking out. The Agreed Framework signed by the Clinton administration was scuttled, and pressure was put on the Japanese. The very emotional but highly suspicious issue of abductees still continues to bedevil relations despite further negotiations between Pyongyang and Tokyo; perhaps the matter is too much of a crowd-pleaser for Japanese politicians to resolve it. American hostility to detente between Japan and North Korea–as part of its strategy to contain China and strengthen Japan’s client relationship (‘the US-Japan alliance’)–and the populist advantages to Japanese politicians of inciting anti-North Korean–or perhaps just anti-Korean–feelings together suggest that the pious hopes of Japanese liberals that relations will be normalized will be thwarted for the immediate future at least. The dead end road of Japanese remilitarization Remilitarization is clearly a response to Japan’s client state relationship with the US. The Peace Constitution came about as a result of Japan’s defeat, primarily but not exclusively by the United States. One way to exorcise that defeat and its consequences would be to attempt to return to the status quo ante 1945 and become a ‘normal country’ with the same rights to belligerency as the victor nations (and even Germany). This is understandable, but it is taking the wrong direction.  Militarism wreaked terrible damage on Japan and its neighbors, and it is that which should be recognized and renounced. To be fair, this is difficult in a world suffused with hypocrisy and double standards; why should the defeated do things that the victors do not. When has the United States, to take the leading example, apologized for its history and renounced belligerency? Besides this difficult ethical issue, however, there are practical reasons why Japan should not remilitarize but rather forge a path as a pioneer of a primarily pacifist country where soft power replaces hard power. Firstly, Japanese remilitarization is gestating within the womb of American strategy in East Asia, which focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the containment and possible dismemberment of China. If the US goes to war against China, most probably through an attack on North Korea, Japan will almost certainly be drawn in. The consequences would be disastrous for Japan and less severe for the US unless there is an all-out nuclear exchange, and if there were victory over China, the benefits would accrue to the US and not Japan. If there were booty, it is unlikely that the US would share it. Secondly, ethical considerations and long-term consequences for humanity aside, military power may make sense for some countries and not others. It makes sense for countries such as North Korea or China that are threatened by far more powerful adversaries, as a deterrent. It also makes sense for the US, which has a global empire to maintain. It does not make much sense for, say the Netherlands or New Zealand, which face no credible enemies, even less so for Britain where it encourages dangerous imperial nostalgia, and it does not make sense for Japan.  Even without a formal US-Japan alliance (the client relationship), the US would not tolerate an attack on Japan by North Korea or China for pragmatic balance of power reasons. The question of ‘military power making sense’ takes place within history; sometimes it makes sense, and at other times it does not. Take Japan for the three quarters of a century after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. At that time, empires were all the rage, and if you didn’t have one you would almost certainly end up as part of somebody else’s. The British had one, as did the French, the Dutch, and the Russians. Germany was trying to get into the act, as was the United States, which introduced a new style of imperialism, partly based on compellence and threat (what is often misleadingly called ‘diplomacy’) but also by ruthless armed force, as in the Philippines. In these circumstances, it made sense for Japan, too, to carve itself out an empire. The Japanese and American empires had two major intersections. The second was at Pearl Harbor in 1941, but that had been preceded by the Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905, which, in the words of Bruce Cumings, ‘ acknowledged a trade-off between the Philippines and Korea: Japan would not question American rights in its colony and the United States would not challenge Japan’s new protectorate.’ Neither Taft nor Katsura could know that 40 years later the US would own all of Japan and half of Korea. Japan’s annexation of Korea, its puppet rule over Manchuria and its earlier seizure of Taiwan in 1895 all made economic sense. The colonies provided raw materials, closed markets, labor and a place for Japan’s surplus population and something probably unique to Japan whereby parts of the empire became a blueprint for the future: ‘The planners at the South Manchurian Railroad Research Department, for example, called for an ultra-modern economy in the colonies in order to transcend what they saw as the deeply flawed economy of the homeland.’ Those times are over and cannot be recaptured. Contemporary Japan lies between two behemoths – rising China and declining America. There are no great technological impediments to Japan becoming a major military power with the full range of assets, including nuclear weapons and delivery systems. But what could be done with that military might? China is too big and strong; there can be no more seizures of Taiwan or Manchuria. The US encourages Japanese remilitarization, because it is confident that Japan is a tamed beast that can be used against China. But as Palmerston pointed out back in the 19th century, countries do not have permanent friends and enemies, only permanent interests. Japan and the US could fall out, and Japan might desire to exclude the US from Asia as it tried to do in 1941. But that would be a ridiculous dream. In the short term, Japanese remilitarization exacerbates danger in Northeast Asia. It feeds on crisis on the Korean peninsula and the region to provide it with a proclaimed justification. It enhances US intransigence towards North Korea and makes a peaceful settlement less likely. It sees a war in Korea as an opportunity to intervene, thereby breaking free of the constraints against foreign military adventures. But in the long term, remilitarization leads to a dead end, both for Japan and the region. It offers no prospects nor hope for prosperity or security. Retired New Zealand-based academic Tim Beal has written two books and numerous articles on Korean issues and US global policy. He is an Asia-Pacific Journal contributing editor and writes for NK News and Zoom in Korea amongst others. He maintains the website Asian Geopolitics. #Japanmilitary #KoreaJapanRelations

US and South Korean destroyer ships in the western Pacific Ocean, May 2017. (Reuters / Courtesy of the US Navy) By Tim Shorrock | October 29, 2017 Originally published in The Nation.com “There’s battle lines being drawn,” Stephen Stills sang in the 1960s about the war in Vietnam. Today those same words can be applied to the escalating confrontation between the United States and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear-weapons and missile programs. That conflict will be front and center when President Donald Trump pays his first state visits to Japan and South Korea in November. In Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—Trump’s closest friend in the region—just won a smashing reelection victory, Trump will be honored with an audience with the country’s aging emperor and his usual golf game with the hawkish Abe. But in Korea, where there is far more ambivalence about Trump’s policies, antiwar groups and unions—many of which backed President Moon Jae-in’s election campaign last spring—are planning major rallies to greet him. As a precursor to what’s to come, South Korean activists this week in the southern port of Pusan handed out leaflets reading “US Troops Go Home!” to US soldiers arriving for another round of military exercises with the South Korean military. They have good reason to be concerned. Listening carefully to the Trump administration and the government of Kim Jong-un over the last week, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the two sides are trying to signal the limits of their policies—and their patience. Nobody is sure whether these statements are a prelude to the diplomacy long promised by Trump’s national-security team, or the opening salvos of what will be a bloody and destructive war if the situation explodes. Trump, who appears to have stopped tweeting about Kim, is leaving the policy pronouncements to H.R. McMaster, his national-security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, his CIA director. Both men have been warning for weeks about the possibility of a risky “preventive” war that would theoretically destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile capability and—in a strategy known as “decapitation”—take out Kim and his military leadership team in Pyongyang. (As if to underscore that threat, a team from the Navy’s SEAL Team Six, which assassinated Osama bin Laden, was aboard the nuclear submarine USS Michigan as it participated in recent bilateral maritime drills with South Korea.) Last week, in separate appearances before the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, McMaster and Pompeo made clear that Trump’s endgame is the termination of the North’s nuclear program, by any means necessary. Trump “is not going to accept this regime threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon,” McMaster told the organization, which has supplanted the American Enterprise Institute as the spiritual home of the neocons. McMaster also ruled out the suggestion, made by some former US officials, that Trump should accept the North as a nuclear power, like Pakistan and Israel, and build a system of deterrence similar to the containment policies of the Cold War. “Well, accept and deter is unacceptable,” said McMaster, who first gained his fame as a counterinsurgency innovator in Iraq during the Bush “surge” of 2008. “And so, this puts us in a situation where we are in a race to resolve this short of military action.” He repeated his bottom line twice: “The only acceptable objective is denuclearization.” Pompeo signaled that US intelligence has concluded that the North is closer than ever to building a capability to place a nuclear weapon on an ICBM and lob it great distances. “I expect they will be closer in five months than they are today, absent a global effort to push back against them,” he said, adding that “from a US policy perspective, we ought to behave as if we are on the cusp of them achieving that objective.” He also argued that the United States viewed North Korea as a dangerous threat even if its rockets can’t reach the continental United States. “There are enormous US interests in South Korea and Japan and in Asia, as well,” he said, speaking of the vast string of US Navy, Air Force, and Marine bases that ring North Korea. But, in an odd aside for a man threatening war, he added that “Intelligence isn’t perfect, especially in a place like North Korea,” making it possible that the United States could be “off by months or a couple of years in our understanding.” (“Hell of a thing for anyone in this [administration] to be considering a first strike on North Korea while the CIA director notes intel ‘isn’t perfect,’” Ankit Panda, a senior editor at The Diplomat, tweeted in response.) The intense focus by McMaster and Pompeo on military action has led many observers to wonder whether Trump has decided to abandon the negotiations promised since the beginning of the crisis by his top officials at the Pentagon and the State Department, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson. In August, they co-authored a highly unusual op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which they essentially offered to open negotiations with Kim without preconditions, including the North’s immediate abandonment of nuclear weapons. Talks were possible, they said, if Kim would “signal his desire to negotiate in good faith” by ceasing North Korea’s tests and missile launches for a period of time. However, it’s unclear that such an offer is on the table any longer, even as both Mattis and Tillerson continue to insist that diplomacy is their chosen route. For its part, the North, which has recently taken to calling Trump “mentally deranged,” has rejected the idea of total denuclearization and instead argued that the United States should make the “right choice” by recognizing it as a nuclear state. That would lead to a “way out” of the current standoff, Choe Son-hui, the director-general of the North American department of North Korea’s foreign ministry, told a recent conference in Moscow attended by several Americans. South Korean officials who were there told the Yonhap wire service that Choe stated that the North “will never give up its nuclear weapons as long as the US’ hostile policy, including military activities, sanctions and pressure, continue.” Further details of her speech were broadcast on the Russian-state media outlet RT. “Our weapons are designed for the protection of our homeland from the constant nuclear threat from the US,” Choe said, adding that her government “won’t supply nuclear weapons to third parties, notwithstanding its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).” Moreover, “despite quitting NPT, we are committed to the idea of non-proliferation of our nuclear weapons.” Choe’s emphasis on the United States’ “hostile policy” offers a ray of hope, says Suzanne DiMaggio, a former United Nations official and a senior fellow at New America who spoke on the same Moscow panel as Choe. In a long string of tweets on October 23, DiMaggio wrote that “there is a ‘way out.’ The US needs to abandon its hostile policies” and “[s]top provocative military exercises & nuclear threats.” The United States’ priority, DiMaggio added, should be to get talks underway by first engaging in bilateral “talks about talks,” without preconditions, so both sides can “clarify positions” and “explore what’s possible.” And “while not abandoning denuclearization as [an] end goal,” the United States “should set it aside” because “it’s currently outside realm of possibility.” Instead, she urged that the Trump administration focus on “achievable” goals, such as deterrence and non-proliferation, and then “pursue talks to address” the policies the North considers hostile. While “this would be a longer, arduous discussion,” involving a peace agreement and security guarantees, it’s better than the alternative, she offered. “We are in dangerous territory,” warned DiMaggio, one of a group of former US officials and intelligence officers who met informally with North Korean officials from time to time, in her Twitter analysis. “In Washington policy making circles, talk of kinetic options is increasingly heard,” she continued (kinetic is a term for lethal military operations). “The longer this course persists [or] intensifies, the greater the chances for spiraling into military conflict by design or miscalculation.” Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He is a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Trump #KimJongUn #DPRK #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

Nikki Haley, United States ambassador to the United Nations, during an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council at United Nations headquarters, July 5, 2017 in NYC. The US requested an emergency meeting of the Security Council after North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile earlier this week. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images) By Andrea Germanos | July 7, 2017 Originally published in Common Dreams. As tensions continue to rise following Pyongyang’s testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and subsequent military exercises carried out by the U.S. and South Korea, anti-war voices are calling de-escalation and restraint, with one advocacy group charging Wednesday that “both sides are acting to escalate the crisis” and that only way forward is through diplomacy. Rising tensions were evident on Wednesday as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley addressed the U.N. Security Council. “Time is short. Action is required,” Haley said as she also threatened possible use of “considerable military forces” to address the situation. The London-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), however, pointed to the Iran nuclear deal reached in 2015 as evidence that diplomacy can deliver meaningful results. “We condemn the missile test and we urge the DPRK government to put an end to further missile tests. The U.S. military drills are a reminder that both sides are acting to escalate this crisis,” said CND general secretary Kate Hudson. “We call on the international community to strengthen efforts to seek an end to the growing tensions in the region,” she said. Referring to now-collapsed six-party negotiations aimed at Pyongyang’s nuclear disarmament—which involved the U.S., North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and China—Hudson said those talks “need to be resumed as a matter of urgency. The Iran nuclear deal shows what can be achieved through engagement and dialogue.” “Russia and China are promoting a joint freeze on North Korean missile tests and further U.S. and South Korean military drills. The British government should support this initiative, which acknowledges the security fears on both side of the conflict,” Hudson added. As Martin Hart-Landsberg, former economics professor and member of the Board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, wrote last month, “it is important to realize that what is happening is not new.” He wrote: The U.S. began conducting war games with South Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North, and that was before North Korea had nuclear weapons. In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying its nuclear facilities. In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act of war. In 2013, the U.S. conducted war games which involved planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike nuclear attack. Given that background Christine Ahn, founder and international coordinator of peace group Women Cross DMZ, told Democracy Now! Wednesday that Pyongyang likely conducted the missile test “as a way to advance their capability to defend in the case of any kind of preemptive strike from the United States.” According to Ahn, the North Koreans “want to put the pressure on the United States, on the Trump administration, to say, ‘We need to negotiate some kind of peace settlement,’ because they feel threatened.” Ahn also pointed to the China- and Russia-backed proposal for a missile test and military drill freeze, saying “it originally came from the North Koreans in 2015,” and called it “the most viable proposal that is on the table.” That proposal, she continued, “is the deal that should be seriously considered, but the Trump administration is not accepting it. And, in fact, you know, I think by virtue of not accepting it and not seriously considering it, the only way that Americans can interpret that is to say that we value the exercises more than we value freezing North Korea’s nuclear program. And so I think that this is North Korea’s message to the United States: ‘We want to negotiate, and we’re going to do what we can to defend our sovereignty and our country from any kind of preemptive strike from the Trump administration.'” Ahn also referenced a letter (pdf) sent last week to President Donald Trump by a group of former U.S. government officials which says “we strongly urge your administration to begin discussions with North Korea in the near future ” as it is “a necessary step to establishing communication to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.” They warned: “There is no guarantee diplomacy will work. But there are no good military options.” Haley, meanwhile, told the U.N. Security Council that past efforts to curtail North Korea’s nuclear and long-range missile capabilities had clearly failed and called on the body to support a much stronger U.S.-back resolution she indicated would soon be forthcoming. “The United States is prepared to use the full range of our capabilities to defend ourselves and our allies. One of our capabilities lies with our considerable military forces. We will use them if we must, but we prefer not to have to go in that direction.” She added: “We will not look exclusively at North Korea. We will look at any country that chooses to do business with this outlaw regime. We will not have patience for stalling or talking our way down to a watered down resolution. Yesterday’s ICBM escalation requires an escalated diplomatic and economic response.” Those calling for calm, however, suggest a different path. “To be clear: peaceful alternatives are at hand,” Christine Hong, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute, recently wrote. The U.S., says Hart-Landsberg, can “accept North Korean offers of direct negotiations between the two countries, with all issues on the table.” Andrea Germanos is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #Sanctions #NorthKorea

Leaders of national peace organizations meet with Rep. John Conyers before delivering petitions to South Korean Embassy. (Photo provided by Christine Ahn) By Christine Ahn | July 6, 2017 Originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus and Common Dreams As the newly elected South Korean President Moon Jae-in meets President Donald Trump for his first White House visit, the South Korean leader should stay focused on his calls for diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement with Pyongyang. The Trump administration will undoubtedly try to steer Moon in the opposite direction, towards “maximum pressure” on North Korea. However, while the United States may have heavily influenced South Korea’s economy and politics for the last 70 years, including still maintaining wartime operational control over its military, it’s a new day. Not only did Moon win the May 9 election in a landslide victory with the largest margin and greatest number of South Koreans voting in history, he has maintained his enormous popularity with approval ratings at 80 percent. At a forum in Seoul, former U.S. ambassador Kathleen Stevens urged Moon not to mention this when he meets Trump, whose approval ratings stand at 36 percent. Moon swept into office after millions of South Koreans took to the streets and staged candlelight vigils for months to demand the ouster of former President Park Geun-hye, a conservative who was impeached by the National Assembly on charges of corruption. On the even of his election, the progressive Moon told the veteran journalist Tim Shorrock that his election completes the Candlelight Revolution. Unlike other parts of the world, democracy is alive and well in South Korea, and the public are wildly supportive of Moon and his pro-engagement policies. According to a just released South Korean poll, 80 percent of South Koreans want inter-Korean dialogue with North Koreans. While the overwhelming majority of South Korean people and their president may be aligned in this wish, their efforts for reviving the “sunshine policy” — that is, a posture of engagement toward the north — will be hamstrung by Washington’s hardline policy and UN Security Council sanctions. But Moon should be reminded of the international community’s abhorrence of Donald Trump. After all, Trump’s inauguration was welcomed by the historic women’s march, where 5 million women in 673 cities worldwide took to the streets to protest his incoming presidency, in fact the largest protests in U.S. history. From Germany’s Angela Merkel to France’s Emmanuel Macron, Trump has angered many historic U.S. allies. Moon doesn’t have to try to please Washington the way his predecessors have. South Korea is the 11th largest economy in the world and among the top 10 militaries. If South Koreans say they are open to halting joint military exercises with the United States, as was floated last week by Moon Chung-in, a special presidential adviser, Washington should listen. But it’s not just the South Korean people and its leaders that the Trump administration should hear from. According to a May Economist/YouGov poll, 60 percent of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support direct negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. On the day of the Moon-Trump summit, nearly a dozen national civic organizations, including Win Without War and Credo, will deliver a petition to Moon signed by more than 100,000 Americans offering strong support for his commitment to diplomacy with North Korea. “President Moon’s commitment to diplomacy and peace is a welcome breath of fresh air, and it is important that he know he has the support of the American people in his efforts,” says Stephen Miles, Director of Win Without War. “Whatever President Trump may tell him in their meetings, President Moon should know the American people want peace.” When the people lead, the leaders will follow. Also this week, a bipartisan group of six prominent former U.S. government officials sent a letter to President Trump urging talks immediately with North Korea. “Pyongyang has shown it can make progress on missile and nuclear technology despite its isolation,” they warned. “Without a diplomatic effort to stop its progress, there is little doubt that it will develop a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the United States.” This builds on a letter to Trump signed last month by 64 congressional Democrats urging direct talks with North Korea to avert an “unimaginable conflict.” The letter was co-led by John Conyers, the last Democrat who served in the Korean War. “As someone who has watched this conflict evolve since I was sent to Korea as a young Army Lieutenant,” Conyers said, “it is a reckless, inexperienced move to threaten military action that could end in devastation instead of pursuing vigorous diplomacy.” The American and South Korean people want peace. Hopefully an outcome of the Moon-Trump summit will be that diplomacy prevails, not war. Christine Ahn is a KPI Advisor and a founder of the the National Campaign to End the Korean War.  Ahn is the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a movement of women globally walking to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in the peacebuilding process. #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #THAAD #ChristineAhn #MoonJaein #Armistice

By Martin Hart-Landsberg | June 4, 2017 Originally published in Reports from the Economic Front US-North Korean relations remain very tense, although the threat of a new Korean War has thankfully receded.  Still the US government remains determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear infrastructure.  And the North for its part has made it clear that it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the region and even the US itself. This is not good, but it is important to realize that what is happening is not new.  The US began conducting war games with South Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North, and that was before North Korea had nuclear weapons.  In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying its nuclear facilities.  In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act of war.  In 2013, the US conducted war games which involved planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike nuclear attack. I don’t think we are on the verge of a new Korean war, but the cycle of belligerency and threat making on both sides is intensifying.  And it is always possible that a miscalculation could in fact trigger a new war, with devastating consequences. The threat of war, perhaps a nuclear war, is nothing to play around with.  But – and this is important — even if a new war is averted, the ongoing embargo against North Korea and continual threats of war are themselves costly: they promote/legitimatize greater military spending and militarization more generally, at the expense of needed social programs, in Japan, China, the US, and the two Koreas.  They also create a situation that compromises democratic possibilities in both South and North Korea and worsen already difficult economic conditions in North Korea. There is a choice for peace We doesn’t have to go down this road—we have another option—but it is one that the US government is unwilling to consider, much less discuss.  That option is for the US to accept North Korean offers of direct negotiations between the two countries, with all issues on the table. The US government and media dismiss this option as out of hand—we are told that (1) the North is a hermit kingdom and seeks only isolation, (2) the country is ruled by crazy people hell bent on war, and (3) the North Korean leadership cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises.  But none of this is true. First: if being a hermit kingdom means never wanting to negotiate, then North Korea is not a hermit kingdom. North Korea has been asking for direct talks with the United States since the early 1990s.  The reason is simple: this is when the USSR ended and Russia and the former Soviet bloc countries in central Europe moved to adopt capitalism.  The North was dependent on trade with these countries and their reorientation left the North Korean economy isolated and in crisis. The North Korean leadership decided that they had to break out of this isolation and connect the North Korean economy to the global economy, and this required normalization of relations with the United States.  Since then, they have repeatedly asked for unconditional direct talks with the US in hopes of securing an end to the Korean War and a peace treaty as a first step towards their desired normalization of relations, but have been repeatedly rebuffed.  The US has always put preconditions on those talks, preconditions that always change whenever the North has taken steps to meet them. The North has also tried to join the IMF and WB, but the US and Japan have blocked their membership. The North has also tried to set up free trade zones to attract foreign investment, but the US and Japan have worked to block that investment. So, it is not the North that is refusing to talk or broaden its engagement with the global economy; it is the US that seeks to keep North Korea isolated. Second: the media portray North Korea as pursuing an out of control militarism that is the main cause of the current dangerous situation.  But it is important to recognize that South Korea has outspent North Korea on military spending every year since 1976.  International agencies currently estimate that North Korean annual military spending is $4 billion while South Korean annual military spending is $40 billion.  And then we have to add the US military build-up. North Korea does spend a high percentage of its budget on the military, but that is because it has no reliable military ally and a weak economy.  However, it has largely responded to South Korean and US militarism and threats, not driven them.  As for the development of a nuclear weapons program: it was the US that brought nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula.  It did so in 1958 in violation of the Korean War armistice and threatened North Korea with nuclear attack years before the North even sought to develop nuclear weapons. Third: North Korea has been a more reliable negotiating partner than the US. Here we have to take up the nuclear issue more directly.  The North has tested a nuclear weapon 5 times: 2006, 2009, 2013, and twice in 2016. Critically, North Korean tests have largely been conducted in an effort to pull the US into negotiations or fulfill past promises.  And the country has made numerous offers to halt its testing and even freeze its nuclear weapons program if only the US would agree to talks. North Korea was first accused of developing nuclear weapons in early 1990s.  Its leadership refused to confirm or deny that the country had succeeded in manufacturing nuclear weapons but said that it would open up its facilities for inspection if the US would enter talks to normalize relations.  As noted above, the North was desperate, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, to draw the US into negotiations.  In other words, it was ready to end the hostilities between the two countries. The US government refused talks and began to mobilize for a strike on North Korean nuclear facilities.  A war was averted only because Jimmy Carter, against the wishes of the Clinton administration, went to the North, met Kim Il Sung, and negotiated an agreement that froze the North Korean nuclear program. The North Korean government agreed to end their country’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid and normalization.  And from 1994 to 2002 the North froze its plutonium program and had all nuclear fuel observed by international inspectors to assure the US that it was not engaged in making any nuclear weapons.   Unfortunately, the US did not live up to its side of the bargain; it did not deliver the aid it promised or take meaningful steps towards normalization. In 2001 President Bush declared North Korea to be part of the axis of evil and the following year unilaterally canceled the agreement.  In response, the North restarted its nuclear program. In 2003, the Chinese government, worried about growing tensions between the US and North Korea, convened multiparty talks to bring the two countries back to negotiations.  Finally, in 2005, under Chinese pressure, the US agreed to a new agreement, in which each North Korean step towards ending its weapons program would be matched by a new US step towards ending the embargo and normalizing relations.  But exactly one day after signing the agreement, the US asserted, without evidence, that North Korea was engaged in a program of counterfeiting US dollars and tightened its sanctions policy against North Korea. The North Korean response was to test its first nuclear bomb in 2006.  And shortly afterwards, the US agreed to drop its counterfeiting charge and comply with the agreement it had previously signed. In 2007 North Korea shut down its nuclear program and even began dismantling its nuclear facilities—but the US again didn’t follow through on the terms of the agreement, falling behind on its promised aid and sanction reductions.  In fact, the US kept escalating its demands on North Korea, calling for an end to North Korea’s missile program and improvement in human rights in addition to the agreed upon steps to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.  And so, frustrated, North Korea tested another nuclear weapon in 2009. And the US responded by tightening sanctions. In 2012 the North launched two satellites.  The first failed, the second succeeded.  Before each launch the US threatened to go to the UN and secure new sanctions on North Korea.  But the North asserted its right to launch satellites and went ahead.  After the December 2012 launch, the UN agreed to further sanctions and the North responded with its third nuclear test in 2013. This period marks a major change in North Korean policy. The North now changed its public stance: it declared itself a nuclear state—and announced that it was no longer willing to give up its nuclear weapons.  However, the North Korean government made clear that it would freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US would cancel its future war games.  The US refused and its March 2013 war games included practice runs of nuclear equipped bombers and planning for occupying North Korea.  The North has therefore continued to test and develop its nuclear weapons capability. Here is the point: whenever the US shows willingness to negotiate, the North responds.  And when agreements are signed, it is the US that has abandoned them.  The North has pushed forward with its nuclear weapons program largely in an attempt to force the US to seriously engage with the North because it believes that this program is its only bargaining chip.  And it is desperate to end the US embargo on its economy. We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before the country had a nuclear arsenal. Things have changed.  Now, the most we can reasonably expect is an agreement that freezes that arsenal.  However, if relations between the two countries truly improve it may well be possible to achieve a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, an outcome both countries profess to seek. New possibilities and our responsibilities So, why does US refuse direct negotiations and risk war?  The most logical reason is that there are powerful forces opposing them.  Sadly, the tension is useful to the US military industrial complex, which needs enemies to support the ongoing build-up of the military budget.  The tension also allows the US military to maintain troops on the Asian mainland and forces in Japan.  It also helps to isolate China and boost right-wing political tendencies in Japan and South Korea.  And now, after decades of demonizing North Korea, it is difficult for the US political establishment to change course. However, the outcome of the recent presidential election in South Korea might open possibilities to force a change in US policy. Moon Jae-in, the winner, has repudiated the hard-line policies of his impeached predecessor Park Guen-Hye, and declared his commitment to re-engage with the North.  The US government was not happy about his victory, but it cannot easily ignore Moon’s call for a change in South Korean policy towards North Korea, especially since US actions against the North are usually presented as necessary to protect South Korea. Thus, if Moon follows through on his promises, the US may well be forced to moderate its own policy towards the North. What is clear is that we in the US have a responsibility to become better educated about US policy towards both Koreas, to support popular movements in South Korea that seek peaceful relations with North Korea and progress towards reunification, and to work for a US policy that promotes the demilitarization and normalization of US-North Korean relations. Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea; and Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Korea Policy Institute and the steering committee of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned About Korea, a co-editor of Critical Asian Studies, and has served as consultant for the Korea program of the American Friends Service Committee. #KoreaPeace #MartinHartLandsberg #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #Armistice #NorthKorea

Students learn to use gas masks in case of chemical or biological attacks in Seoul, South Korea, April, 2017. (Photo: Lam Yik Fei / The New York Times) By Simone Chun | June 1, 2017 Originally published in Truthout.org Is the Korean Demilitarized Zone poised to become “ground zero for the end of the world”? Historian Bruce Cumings, the author of The Origins of the Korean War, raised this question in a recent article for the London Review of Books, and judging by a series of exchanges between the United States and North Korea in recent weeks, the possibility may not be as remote as it once seemed. In April, North Korea warned of the imminence of “a thermonuclear war,” a prospect seemingly acknowledged by President Trump’s declaration that, “We could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.” On May 2, a US carrier strike group patrolled the waters off the Korean Peninsula in anticipation of North Korea’s sixth nuclear test, which never happened. Nevertheless, on May 14, Pyongyang test-fired a new class of missile into the waters between the North and neighboring Japan, prompting the US to move a second heavily armed carrier strike group, equipped with Aegis missile defense systems, to the Korean Peninsula. These two strike groups, which jointly field a total of some 160-attack aircraft and are escorted by substantial support fleets, considerably raise the stakes in the region. According to Cumings, the latest high-stakes exchanges between the United States and North Korea are a continuation of six decades of US foreign policy which, “Since the very beginning … has cycled through a menu of options to try and control the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea].” According to The New Yorker, in this asymmetric conflict, North Korea uses “belligerent propaganda — not to mention nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles” to counter what it perceives as a persistent existential threat from the United States. Noam Chomsky has described the current situation as the logical outcome of the propensity of the United States to “play with fire” rather than making genuine efforts to achieve denuclearization: “Over and over again,” he observes, “There are possibilities of diplomacy and negotiation … which are abandoned, dismissed, literally without comment, in favor of increased force and violence.” Republicans and Democrats have historically shown great unity in this approach toward North Korea, with the notable exception of the Clinton administration, whose direct talks with Pyongyang achieved an eight-year freeze on all North Korean plutonium production (from 1994-2002). However, in 2001, George W. Bush abruptly inducted North Korea into the “axis of evil,” prompting Pyongyang to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and return to the reasoning that nuclear weapons alone could prevent an inevitable full-scale attack by the US in the future. More recently, President Obama’s much-touted “pivot” to Asia — essentially a policy of isolating North Korea while boosting Japanese militarism — has succeeded only in laying the groundwork for a new regional cold war. Under the Trump administration, the pivot to Asia is overtly accelerating the militarization of the entire region, with some $7.5 billion being invested to boost infrastructure, equipment, and new troop and asset deployments. This amount accounts for nearly 14 percent of the total $54 billion increase in military spending requested by the Trump administration. North Korea experts point out that, “Even with its nuclear program, North Korea is a weak country with an outdated military and a very small population,” incapable of anything but an insignificant military threat to the US. Yet US mainstream media pundits and government officials have tirelessly molded public perception of North Korea, portraying it as a determined, bristling adversary bent on raining destruction upon the US mainland with little or no provocation. Rounding out the propaganda image of the fearsomely irreconcilable foe, North Korean leadership itself is regularly depicted as irrational by the US, and often labeled with pseudo-psychiatric diagnoses. Most recently at the UN, US Ambassador Nikki Haley endeavored to display her psychiatric insight by “get[ting] into Kim Jong-un’s head,” and pronouncing him to be “in a state of paranoia … incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him.” Such sophomoric appraisals of North Korea, while lacking historical and analytical perspective, play well to public fears. The characterization of North Korea as the unequivocally irrational and constantly threatening “other” have skewed US public opinion over the span of six decades. Pew public opinion polls show that “78% of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the North, with 61% holding a very unfavorable view.” A YouGov survey ranked North Korea first among a list of 144 countries considered by Americans to be an “enemy,” even though, according to a New York Times survey, only 36 percent of Americans polled were able to locate North Korea on a world map. This “one-sided and ahistorical” characterization of North Korea, in Cumings’s words, has been the centerpiece of US foreign policy toward the two Koreas, with the specter of North Korean cross-border — and increasingly, intercontinental — aggression being used to justify harsh economic sanctions and increased military exports, and weapon system deployments to South Korea. The systematic demonization of North Korea is dangerous. As the practiced propagandists who eagerly sow such fears know all too well, it is far easier to annihilate a nation that has already been dehumanized. What is needed are alternative perspectives capable of harmonizing the relationship between the United States and North Korea by making heard those voices that have been drowned out by six decades of unending hostility. These are the voices that tell of the persistent human costs of the war, of family members torn apart between North and South Korea, and of the Korean diaspora — particularly in the United States — whose stories can raise critical awareness of the ongoing human legacy of the unresolved Korean conflict and provide the basis for a discourse of reconciliation, and ultimately of peace. Nearly 10 million Korean families were forcibly separated when Korea was divided at the end of the Korean War, with around 100,000 of those families coming to the United States. Approximately 3,000 such family members are alive in the US today, having lived their lives permanently separated from loved ones in North Korea. Won Chan Noh, a 93 year old who was separated decades ago from his wife and their two toddlers during the Korean War, traveled to Washington, DC, to create awareness about the suffering of families such as his. “Time is running out for us in the United States and for our family members in North Korea” he says. Noh is a member of the National Coalition of the Divided Families, an organization working on behalf of Korean-Americans whose families were divided by the Korean War. Thousands more like him in both the US and South Korea have since passed on without being able to achieve their lifelong dream of reuniting with their relatives in the North. On November 29, 2016, the US House of Representatives passed H.Con.Res.40, a resolution aimed at facilitating the reunification of family members separated by the Korean War. The resolution highlighted the plight of these divided families, which represent the last living connections shared by the United States and North Korea, and recognized their potential for normalizing the relationship between the nations. In a May 2017 letter to President Trump, 64 House Democrats led by Rep. John Conyers urged the administration to work with North Korea to “outline steps to address humanitarian issues of mutual concern such as the reunification of Korean and Korean-American families as well as the repatriation of the remains of US servicemen left in North Korea following the war.” While the Korean War continues to haunt the lives of survivors and their descendants on both sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and across the Pacific, Soya Jung, a Korean-American activist, tells Truthout that, “Very few Americans understand the absolute devastation that the Korean War caused, particularly in North Korea, and how deeply that devastation is imprinted on the collective consciousness of North Korean people.” This widespread ignorance can undermine efforts toward sincere engagement with North Korea, for whom the trauma of war is a living memory, and the US an enemy that has never left. Consider this fairly representative North Korean view offered by Kwang Yon So of Pyongyang’s Institute for Disarmament and Peace, during the Regional Peace Building conference in Hong Kong on June 10, 2010: “It is not us, but the United States which divided Korea and has posed a threat, including through nuclear arms as well as constant joint military exercises with the South. We are the victims. Should we not at least maintain the right to our sovereignty and the ability to defend ourselves?” Nevertheless, American voices are increasingly calling for a new dialogue between the US and North Korea, for even though Americans by and large view North Korea as “the enemy,” an Economist/YouGov poll conducted in May 2017 found that 60 percent of Americans supported direct negotiations between the United States and North Korea. This statistic in itself speaks volumes, and shows that even in the worst of times, humans hope for commonality and view interpersonal interaction as a catalyst that has the potential of triggering positive change. Officials on both sides of the Pacific have also begun renewed calls for dialogue amid heightening tensions. The new South Korean President Moon Jae-in was elected with a strong mandate for engagement with North Korea, and has promised a renewed emphasis on diplomacy and rapprochement. Even Pentagon chief James Mattis, noting the grave risks of open conflict, has reiterated the US commitment to working with allies in order to arrive at a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear stalemate. As former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry recently noted, opportunities for peace and security in Northeast Asia still exist in the midst of conflict, awaiting only the political will and foresight to actualize them: “We now have the opportunity for a new approach to diplomacy. Will we have the wisdom to seize it?” An overt shift toward diplomacy would be a welcome development for the many Koreans who still dream of an end to the painful schism imposed on their collective psyche by six decades of hostility and separation. David Kang, a Korean studies scholar at the University of Southern California, dreams of crossing the Korean Demilitarized Zone with his 81-year-old father to visit the site of the elder Kang’s hometown, which was destroyed during the height of the Korean War. “I would love to fly to Seoul with my father” he says, “and drive together to where he was born.” Dr. Simone Chun has taught at Northeastern University in Boston, and served as an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is an active member of the Korea Peace Network, a member of the steering committee of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea, and a Korea Policy Institute Fellow. Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission. #KimJongUn #DPRK #KoreanWar #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #SimoneChun #NorthKorea

Korean Peace – Resistance History Walk,  November 11th, 2017 On Saturday, November 11, 2017, on Armistice Day, over one hundred people convened to take part in a Korea Peace Walk jointly sponsored by the Korea Policy Institute (KPI) and Hella Organized Bay Area Koreans (HOBAK), a dynamic and creative collective of Korean American activists working on peace and social justice issues in the Bay Area since 2009. Tracing a route beginning in downtown Oakland and ending in Temescal, the marchers stopped at historic sites of organized labor, black radical, anti-imperialist, and Korean community struggles to honor the peoples’ movements that have come before and that continue to inspire social justice work and organizing today. Marching under the banner of peace in Korea and resistance to Donald Trump’s warmongering stance toward North Korea, those who came together in solidarity represented a wide swath of Bay Area and international organizations: Vets for Peace, Anakbayan East Bay, Critical Resistance, Stop Urban Shield, Migrante Northern California, The Center for Political Education, Comfort Women Justice Coalition, One Heart for Justice, Committee for Korea Studies, Answer Coalition, Western States Legal Foundation, The Bikery, Nikkei resistors, Socialism and Liberation Party, Beyond the Bomb, VietUnity, Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, U.S. Labor Against the War,Workers World Party, Women’s Magazine, and Q.U.I.T(Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism). Speakers at the various stops called for an end to the Korean War, no renewed U.S. aggression against North Korea, a dismantling of the genocidal U.S. and UN sanctions regime against North Korea, a stop to U.S. and South Korean joint war games, an end to Trump’s travel ban, and a repeal of South Korea’s national security law. All throughout, Dohee Lee of Puri Arts and the drumming troupe, Ieumsae, kept the heartbeat while marchers distributed informational flyers to members of the public. Funds raised by the Peace Walk support the work of KPI and HOBAK – and you can still support! Checks can be made to KPI with “KPI/HOBAK Peace Walk” (and, if relevant, the person whom you’re sponsoring) in the comment section. Please mail your donations to the Korea Policy Institute, P.O. Box 2281, Berkeley, CA 94702. You can also donate online and in your billing address include KPI/HOBAK on one line.