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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.

South Korean antiwar protesters at a rally for peace in Seoul, South Korea, November 7, 2017. (Sipa via AP Images) By Tim Shorrock | November 7, 2017 Originally published in the Nation.com Even before President Trump arrived Monday night at Osan Airbase in South Korea for the second stop on his five-nation tour of East Asia, thousands of Koreans fearing another war had flooded the streets in eight Korean cities to tell the militaristic president to go home. The unpopular leader may have gotten the message: In his first public remarks in Seoul, Trump made sure to emphasize his interest in negotiating an agreement with Kim Jong-un over his nuclear-weapons program. “It makes sense for North Korea to come to the table and make a deal that is good for the people of North Korea and for the world,” Trump declared at a news conference. “I do see certain movement.” Koreans, however, see movement toward war. The protests peaked over the weekend in Seoul, where a coalition of antiwar, trade-union, and civil-society groups organized a “No Trump, No War National Rally” that ended with a march to the US embassy. They demanded that Trump stop his war threats against the North and end the massive military exercises the Pentagon holds with South Korea twice a year. “We’re opposed to this visit to South Korea by Trump, who is inciting a crisis of war on the Korean Peninsula,” members of the coalition declared in a press conference Saturday in front of the embassy. “I hope that American citizens pay attention to what’s happening here,” Kim Hyun-a, a teacher attending the protest with her students, told The Washington Post. “War brings tragedy.” Hundreds more were in the streets when Trump arrived. But the antiwar demonstrators—who vastly outnumbered a crowd of right-wing, pro-Trump Koreans the Post felt compelled to highlight—were met by the largest mobilization of police since President Moon Jae-in came to power last May (during the visit, most anti-Trump actions were banned, and the huge police presence could be seen live on CNN and other networks broadcasting from Seoul). Moon is the progressive politician who once visited North Korea during the brief period of détente in 2007 and was elected on a wave of citizen power known as the “candlelight revolution” (see his May interview with The Nation here). Unlike Trump, Moon has emphasized dialogue and engagement as a way to defuse tensions with Pyongyang. And he has continually warned against the dangers of a war and cautioned the United States not to take military action without South Korean involvement and approval. But as the crisis on the peninsula has deepened with North Korea’s stream of missile and nuclear tests and the Pentagon’s retaliatory flights of B1-B bombers and F-35 fighter jets into Korean airspace, Moon has disappointed many of his followers by endorsing Trump’s matrix of intensified sanctions and unprecedented military pressure to push the North to give up its nuclear ambitions. He further endeared himself to Trump on Tuesday morning when he made a surprise visit to US Army Garrison Humphreys to welcome the president (when USAG’s expansion is completed in 2020, it will be the largest American military base in the world). Today “marks the first time the two presidents of South Korea and the United States have come together to a U.S. military base in South Korea to encourage their troops,” Moon declared at a lunch for Trump and South Korean and US soldiers, according to Yonhap News. No fewer than three US aircraft carriers were in the region as Trump touched down, and over the weekend the Pentagon ordered B1-B Lancer bombers stationed in Guam to make another sweep through Korean skies before Trump arrived (“we hope to God we never have to use” these weapons, Trump said in Seoul). These actions have touched off strong criticism of Moon’s support for the US president. “The current U.S.-South Korea alliance is based on South Korea’s subordination and is a war alliance that is far too dangerous,” Kim Chang-han of the Minjung (“Peoples”) Party, which was formed to oppose Moon’s ruling Democratic Party, declared at the Seoul rally, according to Zoom in Korea, a progressive news site. In solidarity on Monday, several hundred US, Korean, and Japanese civil-society organizations released a joint statement “calling upon their governments to avert war with North Korea through policies that could lead to regional peace,” according to Korean-American activist Christine Ahn. The dangers confronting the peninsula were underscored in Washington in the weeks leading up to Trump’s departure for Asia (he is also visiting Japan, China, and the Philippines). Over the past month, Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster has underscored the administration’s tepid interest in diplomacy by threatening military action to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. Trump “is not going to permit this rogue regime, Kim Jong-un, to threaten the United States with a nuclear weapon” and is willing “to do anything necessary to prevent that from happening,” McMaster recently told Fox News. He pushed that line even further in a November 3 interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK. “If necessary, [Trump’s] prepared to use military force,” McMaster said. “They really have no other option but to denuclearize.” But McMaster and Trump have not been telling the full story of what a war to end Kim’s nuclear forces would entail. Last weekend, the Pentagon revealed the enormous stakes involved when it informed two members of Congress that nothing less than a US ground invasion could locate and secure all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and prevent them from being used. (To my knowledge, that’s the first time the term “ground invasion” has been used in the context of Korea since 1953.) A few days earlier, the Congressional Research Service delved deep into the true costs of war, predicting that “tens of thousands” of people in South Korea could die from North Korean artillery in just the first hours of a conflict. “A protracted conflict—particularly one in which North Korea uses its nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons—could cause enormous casualties on a greater scale, and might expand to include Japan and U.S. territories in the region,” CRS said. In any case, the drift toward war has definitely captured the attention of peace and disarmament activists in Washington. On Monday, Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, burst into anger at the tail end of an otherwise quiet discussion on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “If you don’t pay attention, we will go to war,” he warned, pointing to the predictions from top military experts in The New York Times on Sunday that the chances of a US war with North Korea are between 30 and 50 percent. “You can feel the winds of war in this town right now,” he said. Worse, chances are high—some say 10 percent—that a war would not be restricted to conventional weapons. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t go nuclear,” he said. In terms of casualties, “we’re talking Korean War, World War II” levels. Like many observers, Cirincione argued that Trump’s aggressive actions and fiery statements—particularly his threat to “totally destroy North Korea”—have pushed the situation to a breaking point and given the American people false hopes that an air war against North Korea would succeed. “We’ve been living in a world of counterinsurgency and special operations,” he said in a stinging attack on Trump and hubris generated by the high-tech US style of war. “Some Americans think we can do a ground invasion,” he said. “Well, that would bring Korean War levels of combat.” Trump’s threats to attack North Korea were the basis for new legislation introduced by Representative John Conyers Jr. and Senator Ed Markey. Written by Conyers, a Korean War veteran, the bill would require congressional approval for any military strike on North Korea by “restricting funds available to the Department of Defense” or any other agency from being used to launch a strike without prior approval of the House and Senate. It has over 60 co-signers, according to Conyers’s staff. The pressing need for the bill was outlined last Friday in a press conference in front of the Capitol attended by about a dozen Democratic lawmakers. “There is no military option; there is no nuclear option,” declared Senator Jeff Merkley. Representative Barbara Lee, the only member of the House to vote against the 2001 authorization for the Afghanistan war and the daughter of a Korean War veteran, said legislation was necessary because “President Trump’s war-mongering has been really disastrous. We will put some checks on the government not to do a first strike.” Meanwhile, Seoul was holding its collective breath about Trump’s upcoming speech to the National Assembly, where the left (including the new Minjung Party) holds a substantial number of seats. “Depending on what Trump says during the address, his message to North Korea could send shockwaves across the Korean Peninsula, and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) could also come under attack,” the progressive Hankyoreh reported. But so far Trump has held his tongue. Addressing US and Korean troops in his first hour in Seoul, he was sanguine, and his tone “almost blithe,” the Times reported. “Ultimately, it will all work out,” he declared, as Gen. Vincent Brooks, the US commander at Camp Humphreys, stood by his side. “It always works out. It has to work out.” Millions of Koreans hope so as well. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #NorthKorea #USKorearelations

Image from “Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (Dir Stanley Kubrick (USA/UK, 1964) By Christine Hong | November 12, 2017 Originally published by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – NY Office In recent months, the American public has engaged in rare self-reflection with regard to US foreign policy. With the US mainland now theoretically within North Korean nuclear striking range, it has for the first time ventured to look at itself through North Korean eyes and, much to its consternation, seen Donald Trump. The days when Americans exercised cavalier disregard with regard to US regime-change policy toward North Korea—even as that disastrous policy has defined the official US posture from the Korean War’s hot fighting days to the present—now appear to be largely over. The key question is whether this reckoning comes too late. On August 8, Trump astonishingly appeared to draw a line at North Korean speech acts. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he ranted to the media and, to underscore his point, followed up with a description of retaliatory consequences, “They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen.” That his own threat to obliterate North Korea fell around the anniversary of the atomic catastrophe the United States had visited on Japan some seven decades earlier and echoed Harry Truman’s warning to Imperial Japan did not go unnoticed. Since Trump’s drawing of the line, however, North Korea has fired two ballistic missiles over Japan, conducted a sixth nuclear test of what it stated was a hydrogen bomb, and threatened an “unimaginable strike at an unimaginable time” on the USS Ronald Reagan, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier which has been engaged in joint strike drills with the South Korean navy in the waters just off the Korean peninsula. At least thus far, Trump’s annihilationist rhetoric toward North Korea has amounted, as Korean War historian Bruce Cumings recently noted in reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.”[1] Yet given the ricocheting potential of his words to signify untold death and environmental ruin not just “over there” but “here,” few can afford to ignore them. Indeed, every off-the-cuff comment and tweet as well as carefully vetted statement from Trump have sent ripples of alarm through an increasingly unnerved American public and, with the arguable exception of the Japanese right under Shinzo Abe, distressed US allies around the world. North Korea may long have been described by North Korea watchers as opaque, with ex-CIA Seoul station chief and former US ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg dubbing it as “the longest-running intelligence failure in the history of espionage,” yet it is a curious feature of our contemporary moment that the speculative business of tea-leaf-reading has shifted to the pressing task of deciphering Trump’s North Korea policy.[2] For those seeking to crack the code of his ultimate intentions toward North Korea, the relationship of words to deeds when it comes to his potentially Strangelovian nuclear ambitions has been hard to determine. Is he truly “locked and loaded,” ready to rain down “fire and fury,” willing to “totally destroy” North Korea and take out its leadership? Has he seriously entertained the Pyrrhic prospect of denuclearizing North Korea by way of nuclear means, a measure that he surely realizes would devastate regional allies and rebound in harm onto the United States? Will his theatrical threats materialize in the form of apocalyptic action? Whereas few doubt North Korea’s resolve to remain a nuclear power—since 2012, it has affirmed its status as a nuclear state in its constitution—less clear are the lengths to which Trump is willing to go to achieve his stated goal of denuclearizing North Korea. On top of what media commentators have inadequately referred to as a “war of words” between Trump and Kim Jong Un, both the United States and North Korea have continued to flex their military might, with spectacles of force substituting for dialogue in this bleak moment. On October 22, the Pentagon announced that the US Air Force’s fleet of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers would be placed on indefinite 24-hour alert status. This is just the latest escalation in what might be called a war of the spectacle, a back-and-forth exchange of publicized strategic measures, missile tests, and staged military maneuvers that have stopped short of direct military engagement. (Here, we should recall that Trump and his administration made clear that the US attack on a Syrian airfield and its “mother of all bombs” strike in northern Afghanistan this past spring were meant to double as object lessons for North Korea.) If warfare between nuclear powers has emerged as a virtual affair—as cultural theorist Rei Chow states, in order to “terrorize the other, one specializes in representation, in the means of display and exhibition”—the fact remains that the line between the show of force and the use of force is all too thin.[3] Whether the words of Trump, who commands the world’s most powerful military, prove to be bluster by a former reality-TV star, he has left little room for face-saving exit possibilities. Taken on the whole, his words have suggested a disdain for dialogue and an itchy-fingered willingness to trigger a “military option.” His autocratic sensibilities, coupled with growing awareness of the profoundly undemocratic scope of US presidential war powers, have fostered a climate of national and global insecurity. On September 19, standing before the United Nations, Trump unabashedly declared a genocidal willingness to wipe out North Korea, signaling to the world what human rights scholars have described as “his criminal intent in advance.”[4] Exacerbating the intensifying sense of doom, nuclear weapons experts have assessed Trump’s presidency to be a “nightmare.”[5] Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a one-time staunch Trump ally, likewise sounded the alarm in a recent interview with the New York Times. In Cassandra-like fashion, he condemned Trump’s bellicose threats as potentially hurtling the United States down “the path toward World War III.”[6] Championing surprise as a signature feature of his foreign policy, Trump has not been averse to fanning the flames of fear. On multiple occasions, he has hinted darkly at what lies in store for North Korea. In an interview with Fox News, Trump acknowledged that his baiting phrase, “calm before the storm,” which he used following his October 5 conference with top military officials, was specific to what has amounted to be his “you’ll find out” North Korea policy.[7] That he has also kept the political establishment in the dark can be discerned from the frantic flurry of legislative activity aimed at checking his capacity to start a nuclear war. In recent days, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called for legislation that would curb the president’s unilateral power to launch a nuclear first strike.[8] Representative Ted Lieu and Senator Edward Markey have introduced a bicameral, Democratic National Committee-backed “First Use of Nuclear Weapons” bill that would require Congress to declare war before the President could authorize a nuclear strike. Democrat John Conyers, a Korean War veteran, and Republican Thomas Massie will soon be introducing a “No Unconstitutional Strike on North Korea Act” that also aims to forestall any unilateral move toward nuclear war by Trump. Fearful that the President’s prerogative of launching a nuclear war, if exercised, will rebound in consequences, including to the point of origin, Washington policymakers have belatedly sought to reform a nuclear kill-chain process that, in our present moment, arrogates apocalyptic power to Trump. Yet while seeking to avert the worst-case scenario of Trump making a bad call, few elected officials have conceded the imperialist nature of US foreign policy risks, as a structural given, the very real possibility of war. In other words, what Trump’s presidency has exposed is the dangerously undemocratic nature of US foreign policy. As Seymour Melman, a longtime critic of the military-industrial complex, observed, US foreign policy, like all “major policy orientations of US governments since World War II,” has “required the active use of military power.”[9] Absent thus far from the conversation is reckoning, moreover, with the fact that current US-North Korea tensions stem, in the first instance, from the historical reliance of the United States on catastrophic military power to underwrite its coercive foreign policy on the Korean peninsula. Rather, on the alarmist basis of Trump’s erratic temperament, figures who previously voted for US military interventions and green-lighted Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar renovation of the US nuclear arsenal are likely to support measures that restrain or delay only the most egregious exercise of US unilateral aggression without viewing the latter as symptomatic of a policy orientation predicated on military force. Although North Korea’s recent strides in nuclear weapons technology have challenged the terms of US-North Korea relations, on the level of substance, the measures Trump has adopted toward North Korea are difficult to differentiate from Obama’s pursuit of crippling sanctions that aimed to bring North Korea to heel; his refusal to suspend annual joint war games with South Korea that simulate the invasion and occupation of North Korea and the “decapitation” of its leadership; his undemocratic regional deployment of US missile defense/surveillance systems, including the controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system; and his rejection of direct dialogue to end the as-yet unresolved Korean War. Obama, this is to say, maintained a hard line toward North Korea, and Trump is following suit. Yet with their strenuous insistence that “the era of strategic patience is over,” Trump and members of his administration have rhetorically sought to distance his North Korea policy from that of his predecessor. Their intimation is that Obama’s “strategic patience” policy failed because it was passive or weak. In promoting this revisionist interpretation, the Trump administration willfully overlooks the fact that Obama’s posture toward North Korea—unlike his policies toward Iran and Cuba—was premised not only on non-engagement but also on the vast remilitarization of the Asia-Pacific region under an aggressive “pivot” policy that ideologically mobilized North Korea as an indispensable enemy. In the Shadow of Obama In 2013, on the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the July 27, 1953 Korean War armistice agreement that halted active fighting but did not usher in peace on the Korean peninsula, Barack Obama addressed an audience of American veterans, US military officials, and South Korean dignitaries in a joint US-South Korean ceremony in Washington, DC. Even as he attempted to frame the Korean War’s mostly desegregated frontlines as a watershed in the civil rights struggle, his core message was notable for its sheer illiberalism. Disquietingly, he maintained that the Korean War’s lasting lesson was that “the United States will maintain the strongest military the world has ever known, bar none, always.”[10] In a plug for his militarized “pivot” policy to Asia and the Pacific, the region his administration had identified as “the dominant arena of strategic interaction” in the twenty-first century and America’s economic future, Obama represented what had been several decades of unending war between the United States and North Korea as a long, vibrant era of peace and stability: “What our allies across the Asia Pacific know—as we have proven in Korea for sixty straight years—[is] that the United States will remain a force for peace and security and prosperity.”[11] Consistent in deflecting what it described as “come home” advocacy by Americans tired of chronic US military involvement in Asia, his administration reaffirmed, at this event and elsewhere, the US determination “to remain engaged and to lead” in the Asia-Pacific region.[12] The Korean War “was no tie,” Obama insisted in his speech, skirting the fact the Korean War was not over. Countering conventional historical wisdom, he startlingly declared, “Korea was a victory. When fifty million South Koreans live in freedom—a vibrant democracy, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, in stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North—that’s a victory; that’s your legacy.” Perpetual war, it would seem, was good for something after all. Indeed, it was under the Obama presidency that the militarized contours of a neo-Cold War structure, one aimed at China’s containment, emerged into view in the Asia-Pacific region. Against an economically ascendant China, Obama harnessed the portrait of an unpredictable nuclear-armed North Korea as the pretext for a heavily militarized US presence in the greater region—and in the process, lined the pockets of those that profit from the business of global instability and war. As Jang Jinsook, Director of Planning of South Korea’s new left-progressive Minjung Party, has pithily noted, “The US-North Korea crisis is a bonanza for the military industrial complex.”[13] During Obama’s two terms in office, the jingoistic image of an unhinged North Korea justified the accelerated deployment of missile-defense/surveillance systems in Guam and South Korea; the strategic positioning of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers throughout the region; the sales of military weapons to allies; amplified war exercises between the United States and its regional partners; and the entrenchment of the forward-deployed US military posture. It was specifically by exploiting the volatility of US-North Korea relations consequent to the Korean War’s irresolution that Obama achieved the vast re-militarization of the Asia-Pacific region, one of his signature foreign policy accomplishments. As Kang Jeong-Koo, professor emeritus of Dongguk University in South Korea, observed with regard to Obama’s Korea policy, “To reverse its loss of power, the United States has targeted global weak points: the divided Korean peninsula and the Middle East. […] From the perspective of U.S. foreign policy, the divided Korean peninsula offers a flexible occasion for a staging of power transitions within the arena of global politics. Korea can serve as a facilitator or a delayer, a weakener or a strengthener.”[14] Few people have trouble recognizing Trump, with his businessman’s approach to the military-industrial complex, as a merchant of death. His “America First” policy depends on the stripping down of social welfare programs, environmental protections, and diplomatic infrastructure while boosting military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. His first weapons sale was a $1.42 billion arms package to Taiwan. With the specter of nuclear North Korea in the background, he announced in early September the easing of restrictions to enable Japan and South Korea “to buy a substantially increased amount of highly sophisticated military equipment from the United States.”[15] Yet in hawking weapons to US allies in Asia, he follows a well-worn pathway forged by his predecessor. Trump and Obama, to adapt Alain Badiou’s critique, are “two forms of the same world,” the “world of globalized capitalism, of imperialist wars, and of lack of any idea concerning the destiny of human beings.”[16] Obama may have come into office promising to “extend a hand” to those “willing to unclench [their] fist,” yet he refused to engage at all with North Korea, let alone conclude a lasting peace agreement. His administration slapped repeated rounds of sanctions on North Korea and denied the nation humanitarian aid, even when it made a direct appeal, in the hopes that the longstanding US foe would collapse.[17] His unyielding and shortsighted posture contributed to North Korea’s determined pursuit of nuclearization as a guarantee of its survival. This is the legacy that his successor inherits. Tragedy and Farce In the Trump era, Western media caricatures tend to reduce the crisis between the United States and North Korea to a monumental clash of personalities, a farcical mudslinging contest between laughable yet monstrous figures: Mentally Deranged Dotard and Rocket Man. The implication is that these opponents make for an unlikely match of equals, with the one as rash, egomaniacal, and trigger-prone as the other. Yet in suggesting equivalence between the United States and North Korea, this smackdown narrative ignores the structural asymmetry that has conditioned US-North Korea relations from the unrestrained US air campaign against North Korea at mid-century to the present day. By lampooning North Korea’s defensive crouch against the world’s greatest military power as incomprehensible belligerence by a thin-skinned madman, this facile and ultimately jingoistic portrait inverts cause and effect, enabling the present-day consequences of the Korean War’s irresolution, including North Korea’s defensive steps to nuclearize, to be decontextualized as “provocations” that justify catastrophic “preemptive” violence. The demonization of North Korea is, of course, nothing new. Donald MacIntyre, former Seoul bureau chief for Time magazine during the George W. Bush “axis of evil” years, noted that by adhering to a “demonization script” and “dehumanizing the other side,” Western media played its part in priming the public for war with North Korea.[18] Perhaps unsurprisingly, although 65 percent of US voters, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, want Trump to negotiate with North Korea, a plurality of Republicans support the prospect of a US first strike.[19] In this regard, “Rocket Man,” Trump’s derisive epithet for Kim Jong Un, serves as a warmongering device. By separating North Korea’s leader from the people and thus figuratively decapitating North Korean society in advance, it allows for the soothing fiction that US wars of intervention are surgical strikes against isolable bad guys rather than far-reaching humanitarian catastrophes. With its whiff of antiquated technology, “Rocket Man” casts North Korea as a throwback to the Cold War, diminishing its acquisition of nuclear weapons technology. Yet, it paradoxically also exposes Trump’s weakness, his militarized hubris and ahistorical failure to recognize that the US military, fresh off victory in World War II and technologically unrivaled in the world, proved no match for North Korea’s and China’s peasant armies during the Korean War. It is no coincidence that post-Cold War, regime-change narratives routinely feature burlesque versions of tinpot dictators. Instead of viewing these figures, and the societies they reference, as intimate relations—what Arundhati Roy has described as “America’s family secret […] sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy”—Americans all too often perceive them as distant and inexplicable dangers that call out for further US war violence.[20] Racist personifications of societies deformed by US war power soothe the American conscience and they do so by pitting the presumed illiberalism of incomprehensible social worlds against the freedoms of home. In this regard, it is revealing that US presidents insistently refer to the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the world’s most heavily militarized border, as “freedom’s frontier.” Yet the dictators that feature in America’s regime-change pretexts are incomprehensible because our relationship to those societies remains shrouded in a persistent fog of war. As a nation, the United States is afflicted with what Chalmers Johnson described as the amnesia of imperial powers. Few Americans realize that at the root of the present US-North Korea crisis is the unresolved Korean War, a remarkably dirty war that set the paradigm for subsequent US wars of intervention. Fewer still understand the key role Korea played in consolidating US war power by justifying the creation of a formidable crisis-generating, self-perpetuating, institutional architecture—the national security state, the military industrial complex, and the perpetual war economy. From mid-century onward, this is to say, the Korean War, although cushioned in a self-serving regime of forgetting, has been crucial to US imperial state-building and global capitalist hegemony. For those of us in the United States, the postwar peace “masks a reality in which we are all a product of Korea whether we know it or not.”[21] Yet in the shadows of the long postwar American peace are societies structured by the profound memory, indeed mass consciousness, of apocalyptic ruin—societies with the misfortune of knowing firsthand what it means to be on the receiving end of devastating asymmetrical US wars of intervention. For them, “fire and fury” is not an off-the-cuff bombastic comment, and “they won’t be around much longer!” is not a chest-thumping tweet. For North Koreans, the genre of war is tragedy, not farce. The United States reduced North Korea to rubble during the Korean War, taking out even civilian infrastructure in heedless violation of international humanitarian law. Sven Lindqvist describes the war as “an unreal war”: “The US had absolute domination of the airspace over Korea, and the heavy bombers […] rained down death and destruction on the Koreans without ever having met a Korean in real life.”[22] As he points out, less than half a year into the US bombing campaign of North Korea, “there was nothing left worth the bomb to blow it up.” Indeed, it was during this juncture that North Koreans learned to live underground. Chinese statistics suggest that North Korea lost thirty percent of its population. Of the four million Koreans killed during the hot-fighting phase of the war, seventy percent were civilians. French filmmaker Chris Marker visited North Korea as it was engaged in rebuilding its society from the ashes of the Korean War. His was a supple eye that perceived a supple reality. In Coréenes, he dwells on the suffering perceptible behind the hustle and bustle of a society in full reconstructive swing and observes, “Extermination passed over this land. Who could count what burned with the houses?” North Korea does not weigh on the American conscience, though it should. With the election of Trump, the world may indeed be hurtling toward World War III, yet the danger of the present, which his presidency has exposed, resides in the structure of US power—its unilateralism and asymmetrical relationship to the rest of the world. The US president’s expanded war powers, including his unilateral nuclear-launch capacity, and the forward deployment of the US war machine did not arise with Trump. In the current tendency to exceptionalize the Trump presidency, however, may be a seed of hope. Just as Americans have for the first time seen fit to view the United States through North Korean eyes, so too have we been forced to defamiliarize our gaze toward North Korea. As Marker noted in his travels through North Korea, “The gaze of the victor, perhaps alone among all the gazes captured in Korea, seems lacking in modesty.” In the hubris of Trump’s gaze on North Korea, we might extract a powerful and broad argument, one that moves people to action, for peace at last on the Korean peninsula. [1] “Invaders, Provokers Will Meet Most Miserable Death,” Korea Central News Agency, October 19, 2017; Bruce Cumings, “Americans once carpet-bombed North Korea. It’s time to remember that past,” The Guardian, August 13, 2017. [2] Quoted in Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (New York: Basic books-Perseus Books, 2001), p. 60. [3] Rei Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 33. [4] Ben Kiernan and David Simon, “Donald Trump just threatened to commit genocide,” Washington Post, September 26, 2017. [5] Jeffrey Lewis, “I’m a nuclear weapons expert. Trump’s presidency is my personal nightmare,” Washington Post, August 24, 2017. [6] Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler, “Bob Corker Says Trump’s Recklessness Threatens ‘World War III,” New York Times, October 8, 2017. [7] See “Asked to explain ‘calm before the storm’ remark, Trump talks North Korea,” Reuters, October 11, 2017; Andrew Prokop, “Trump’s odd and ominous ‘calm before the storm’ comment, not really explained,” Vox, October 7, 2017. [8] See Mike Lillis, “Pelosi urges new law to limit president’s use of nuclear weapons,” The Hill, October 12, 2017. [9] Seymour Melman, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Touchstone-Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 284. [10] Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at 60th Anniversary of the Korean War Armistice,” Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, July 27, 2013. [11] The description of the Asia-Pacific region is that of Kurt Campbell, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from June 2009 to February 2013. See transcript of “The Obama Administration’s Pivot to Asia: A Conversation with Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell,” The Foreign Policy Initiative, December 13, 2011. [12] Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October 11, 2011. [13] Jang Jinsook, “Honoring the Candlelight Revolution in a Time of Looming War in Korea,” trans. Hyun Lee, The Korea Policy Institute, October 11, 2017. [14] Quoted in Christine Hong, “The First Year of Peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Foreign Policy in Focus, October 11, 2012. [15] Donald Trump, tweet, September 5, 2017, 8:36am, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/905047095488516098. [16] Alain Badiou, “Alain Badiou: Reflections on the Recent Election,” VersoBooks,com, November 15, 2016. [17] “Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” New York Times, January 20, 2009. [18] Donald MacIntyre, “U.S. Media and the Korean Peninsula,” in Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis, and News in the Land of the Morning Calm, ed. Donald Kirk and Choe Sang Hun (EunHaeng NaMu, 2006), p. 405. [19] See “U.S. Voter Support for Gun Control at All-time High, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Trump Helped Texas, Florida, Not Puerto Rico, Voters Say,” Quinnipiac University Poll, October 12, 2017. [20] Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” The Guardian, September 29, 2001. [21] Cumings, War and Television (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p. 148. [22] Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 127. #Trump #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #USNorthKoreaRelations #ChristineHong #NorthKorea

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in shake hands at the truce village of Panmunjom inside the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, April 27, 2018. (Korea Summit Press Pool / Pool via Reuters TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) By Jon Wiener | May 11, 2018 | Originally published in the Nation. Historian Bruce Cumings is the author of many books, including The Korean War: A History and North Korea: Another Country. He writes for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Nation, and teaches at the University of Chicago. This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to Bruce Cumings on the Start Making Sense podcast. Jon Wiener: North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed formally to end the Korean War and promise not to invade his country. Let’s start with a little history: Why did North Korea develop nuclear weapons? Bruce Cumings: The US put hundreds of nuclear weapons into South Korea starting in 1958 with “Honest John” and “Matador” missiles, even nuclear land mines. Ever since then, the North Koreans have tried to come up with a deterrent. For decades, they built underground—about 15,000 facilities. Almost their entire military is underground in caves, in mountains. It was their only recourse, since they didn’t have nuclear weapons. George H.W. Bush removed all battlefield nuclear weapons from around the world in 1991, including Korea, but every president since then has sent B-1 nuclear-capable bombers along the North Korean coast. Obama did it many times. Trump has done it. We also have Trident submarines in the area—they’re basically killing machines that could wipe out North Korea in a few hours with nuclear weapons. The North finally succeeded with a deterrent, exploding an atomic bomb in 2006, a very small one, and then last September they detonated what seems to have been a hydrogen bomb, much larger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs. JW: A little more history: Why was there a war in Korea in the early 1950s? What was the Korean War about? BC: The Korean War is one of the most vexed in our history. If you look at high school and college textbooks, they say there was a war because Stalin in 1950 told Kim Il-sung to invade the South. But the war had origins going back to the 1930s, when Korea was a colony of Japan and Kim Il-sung and his friends fought the Japanese for a decade—as guerrillas in the most forbidding circumstances imaginable in Manchuria, where winter temperatures get down to 40 below zero. The Japanese, after their fashion, found Koreans to chase down Kim Il-sung. That set up a terrible nationalist dynamic in Korea after the Japanese left. Kim and his people set up the North Korean government in 1948, made up of former guerrillas and supported by the Soviets, and an American-supported South Korea was created with an entire army high command consisting of officers who fought with the Japanese. Americans never understood this dynamic. The Korean War was fundamentally a civil war, a war just waiting to happen because of this fratricidal colonial background. But because it came at the height of the Cold War, it generally was never seen—by most Americans—as a war similar to the Vietnam War. But it was a very similar war. JW: What’s life like in the North for ordinary Koreans? BC: It’s a lot better than it was 20 years ago when they had a famine caused by floods that destroyed about 40 percent of their arable land: 600,000–700,000 people died. Our papers always say it was two million, but careful demographic studies have shown that, while it was pretty awful, two million is wrong. The North Korean economy fundamentally collapsed in the 1990s. Their industries weren’t working. Their energy regime was gone. Then came the floods and the famine. Now, their economy is actually good by North Korean standards. It grew about 4 per cent last year. Kim Jong-un has tried to begin creating a middle class, at least in the urban areas, especially Pyongyang. They have many markets there now. People dress in a great variety of clothing, unlike the old proletarian garb. A lot of people have private cars now. I was supposed to go to Pyongyang last September for a visit. I haven’t been there for many years, but I was prevented by President Trump’s embargo of all American travel to North Korea. However, a friend of mine went last summer, and said he was just flabbergasted by the changes in Pyongyang: so much new building, new construction. JW: It’s not just the Trump administration that’s deeply skeptical about North Korean promises. The mainstream media has been saying, “Don’t trust Kim Jong-un.” When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Seoul a year ago, he said, “North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another, and it would be foolish to trust them now.” I wonder if you agree. BC: No, I don’t. Our mainstream media, including The New York Times, gets this stuff wrong all the time. The first major agreement between the US and North Korea was made in 1994 under Bill Clinton. That agreement froze North Korea’s plutonium production—all of it, for eight years, under UN inspection. The whole facility was sealed, with closed circuit cameras all over the place. As a result they had no plutonium until 2002. Also, under the prodding of Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president who came in, in 1998, and started the reconciliation with the North, the Clinton administration moved to buy out North Korea’s medium- and long-range missiles. The general who ran the conglomerate making those missiles came to the White House in October 2000, and Madeline Albright went to Pyongyang two weeks later to complete this missile deal. But everybody’s forgotten that, because the 2000 election ended up in the Supreme Court and five people decided George Bush would be president. When Bush came in, he did everything he could to destroy our agreements with North Korea. John Bolton and Dick Cheney, in particular, were determined not to proceed with the missile deal and to kill the agreement that froze North Korea’s plutonium. The main reason they did this was not because North Korea was a threat to the United States, but rather because it was a useful foil for China, which Cheney and Bush and others saw as a looming threat; here was a great way to build up missile defense. And of course, Bush put them into the Axis of Evil. So I don’t blame the North Koreans for moving in the direction they did after 2002. It’s the same today: when North Korea explodes an atomic bomb or tests a missile, we put more anti-missile batteries into the Far East, which undermine China’s deterrent, and we try to weld together South Korea, Japan, and the US in a tight alliance against China. JW: North Korea has said it will abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for an agreement with the United States that we will not invade. That seems like a great idea, but how do we get from here to there? BC: When the general who ran the North’s missile conglomerate came to Washington in 2000, he signed an agreement with President Clinton that neither North Korea nor the United States would have hostile intent toward the other. This diplomatic agreement is very much like what North Korea appears to want again in 2018. However the Bush people acted as if it had never been signed, never even been written. I’m not, of course, suggesting that North Korea is faultless in all this. Quite the contrary. But the fact is that we already signed an agreement saying that we would not have hostile intent toward North Korea, which implies we’re not going to invade it or try to overthrow the regime. I’m skeptical now about what kind of an agreement we could make with North Korea that would convince them that we’re sincere about it this time. I imagine it would have to come in the context of diplomatic relations finally being opened between Pyongyang and Washington, and guarantees both by South Korea and the US that they would not attempt regime change, or invade the North. JW: How much can be accomplished by South Korea working with North Korea, and how much has to be the work of the United States, and China? BC: The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has a long-term plan for relations with North Korea. He wants to reconcile with it, not necessarily unify with it but to proceed with reconciliation, and rebuild the North Korean economy road by road, bridge by bridge, business by business. That’s really what’s behind this, and it’s what’s attracting Kim Jong-un. China has to be a part of ending the war in Korea and getting a peace agreement, since it signed the armistice agreement and South Korea didn’t. There are only three signatories: China, the US, and North Korea. But I think that a real tension exists, more hidden now than open, between Seoul and Washington. Moon Jae-in is committed to moving forward quickly to reconcile with North Korea and help rebuild its economy and get rid of its nukes. But the foreign-policy establishment in Washington mostly agrees with John Bolton, who said that South Korea is like putty in the hands of the North Koreans. A former high official in the Obama State Department said they’re running off the cliff like lemmings. I think that attitude is going to become prominent—unless Donald Trump somehow turns into a big supporter of President Moon. JW: Last question: If we get a treaty ending the Korean War, would you support the proposal to give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize? BC: No, I think it would be much better to give the Peace Prize to President Moon and Chairman Kim. The North and South Koreans are doing much more to move this peace process forward than Trump is. Just a few months ago he was screaming that he was going to totally destroy North Korea. I don’t think Trump has the slightest idea about the nature of the Korean conflict, how deep it has run, or how long it has been going on. I’ll just say this: If he gets the Nobel Peace Prize, let’s hope it’s not like Henry Kissinger’s Nobel for achieving “peace” in Vietnam. Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation. #Trump #KoreaPeace #KimJongUn #BruceCumings #SouthKorea #MoonJaein #NorthKorea

South Korean F-16 © Cpl. Carlos Jimenez, USMC / Reuters In response to last week’s start up of a new round of war games, Max Thunder 2018, in disregard of the Panmunjom Agreement of April 27, 2018, in which “South and North Korea agreed to completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain, including land, air and sea, that are the source of military tension and conflict,” North Korea canceled high level talks with South Korea, May 16, 2018, and issued a statement warning that it may cancel the the summit meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim, scheduled for June 12, 2018. “If the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S.summit,” the statement reads. What follows is the official English and Korean text of the statement by Kim Kye Gwan, First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Press Statement by Kim Kye Gwan, First Vice- Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK Comrade Kim Jong Un, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, made a strategic decision to put an end to the unpleasant history of the DPRK-U.S. relations and met Pompeo, U.S. secretary of state for two times during his visit to our country and took very important and broad-minded steps for peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and over the world.  In response to the noble intention of comrade chairman of the State Affairs Commission, president Trump stated his position for terminating the historically deep-rooted hostility and improving the relations between the DPRK and the U.S. I appreciated the position positively with an expectation that upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit would be a big step forward for catalyzing detente on the Korean peninsula and building a great future. But now prior to the DPRK-U.S. summit, unbridled remarks provoking the other side of dialogue are recklessly made in the U.S. and I am totally disappointed as these constitute extremely unjust behavior.  High-ranking officials of the White House and Department of State including Bolton, White House national security adviser are letting loose the assertions of so-called Libya mode of nuclear abandonment, “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization”, “total decommissioning of nuclear weapons, missiles, biochemical weapons” etc, while talking about formula of “abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterwards”. This is not an expression of intention to address the issue through dialogue. It is essentially a manifestation of awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers. I cannot suppress indignation at such moves of the U.S. and harbor doubt about the U.S. sincerity for improved DPRK-U.S. relations through sound dialogue and negotiations. World knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate. It is absolutely absurd to dare compare the DPRK, nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development. We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him. If Trump administration fails to recall the lessons learned from the past when the DPRK-U.S. talks had to undergo twists and setbacks owing to the likes of Bolton and turns its ear to the advice of quasi-“patriots” who insist on Libya mode and the like, prospects of upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit and overall DPRK-U.S. relations will be crystal clear. We have already stated our intention for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and made clear on several occasions that precondition for denuclearization is to put an end to anti-DPRK hostile policy and nuclear threats and blackmail of the United States. But now, the U.S. is miscalculating the magnanimity and broad-minded initiatives of the DPRK as signs of weakness and trying to embellish and advertise as if these are the product of its sanctions and pressure. The U.S. is trumpeting as if it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon nuke. But we have never ever had any expectation of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future too. It is a ridiculous comedy to see that Trump administration, claiming to take a different road from the previous administrations, still clings to the outdated policy on the DPRK – a policy pursued by previous administrations at the time when the DPRK was at the stage of nuclear development.  If president Trump follows in the footsteps of his predecessors, he will be recorded as more tragic and unsuccessful president than his predecessors, far from his initial ambition to make unprecedented success.  If Trump administration takes an approach to the DPRK-U.S. summit with sincerity for improved DPRK-U.S. relations, it will receive a deserved response from us. However, if the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit. Pyongyang, May 16, Juche 107(2018) 조선민주주의인민공화국 외무성 김계관 제1부상 담화  조선민주주의인민공화국 국무위원회 위원장 김정은동지께서는  조미관계의 불미스러운 력사를 끝장내려는 전략적결단을 내리시고 우리 나라를 방문한 폼페오 미국무장관을 두차례나 접견해주시였으며 조선반도와 세계의 평화와 안정을 위하여 참으로 중대하고 대범한 조치들을 취해주시였다. 국무위원회 위원장동지의 숭고한 뜻에 화답하여 트럼프대통령이 력사적뿌리가 깊은 적대관계를 청산하고 조미관계를 개선하려는 립장을 표명한데 대하여 나는 긍정적으로 평가하였으며 다가오는 조미수뇌회담이 조선반도의 정세완화를 추동하고 훌륭한 미래를 건설하기 위한 큰 걸음으로 될것이라고 기대하였다. 그런데 조미수뇌회담을 앞둔 지금 미국에서 대화상대방을 심히 자극하는 망발들이 마구 튀여나오고있는것은 극히 온당치 못한 처사로서 실망하지 않을수 없다. 백악관 국가안보보좌관 볼튼을 비롯한 백악관과 국무성의 고위관리들은 《선 핵포기,후 보상》방식을 내돌리면서 그 무슨 리비아핵포기방식이니,《완전하고 검증가능하며 되돌릴수 없는 비핵화》니,《핵,미싸일,생화학무기의 완전페기》니 하는 주장들을 꺼리낌없이 쏟아내고있다. 이것은 대화를 통해 문제를 해결하려는것이 아니라 본질에 있어서 대국들에게 나라를 통채로 내맡기고 붕괴된 리비아나 이라크의 운명을 존엄높은 우리 국가에 강요하려는 심히 불순한 기도의 발현이다. 나는 미국의 이러한 처사에 격분을 금할수 없으며 과연 미국이 진정으로 건전한 대화와 협상을 통하여 조미관계개선을 바라고 있는가에 대하여 의심하게 된다. 세계는 우리 나라가 처참한 말로를 걸은 리비아나 이라크가 아니라는데 대하여 너무도 잘 알고있다. 핵개발의 초기단계에 있었던 리비아를 핵보유국인 우리국가와 대비하는것자체가 아둔하기 짝이 없다. 우리는 이미 볼튼이 어떤 자인가를 명백히 밝힌바있으며 지금도 그에 대한 거부감을 숨기지 않는다. 트럼프행정부가 지난기간 조미대화가 진행될때마다 볼튼과 같은 자들때문에 우여곡절을 겪지않으면 안되였던 과거사를 망각하고 리비아핵포기방식이요 뭐요 하는 사이비《우국지사》들의 말을 따른다면 앞으로 조미수뇌회담을 비롯한 전반적인 조미관계전망이 어떻게 되리라는것은 불보듯 명백하다. 우리는 이미 조선반도비핵화용의를 표명하였고 이를 위하여서는 미국의 대조선적대시정책과 핵위협공갈을 끝장내는것이 그 선결조건으로 된다는데 대하여 수차에 걸쳐 천명하였다. 그런데 지금 미국은 우리의 아량과 대범한 조치들을 나약성의 표현으로 오판하면서 저들의 제재압박공세의 결과로 포장하여 내뜨리려 하고있다. 미국이 우리가 핵을 포기하면 경제적보상과 혜택을 주겠다고 떠들고있는데 우리는 언제한번 미국에 기대를 걸고 경제건설을 해본적이 없으며 앞으로도 그런 거래를 절대로 하지않을것이다. 전행정부들과 다른 길을 걸을것이라고 주장하고있는 트럼프 행정부가 우리의 핵이 아직 개발단계에 있을때 이전 행정부들이 써먹던 케케묵은 대조선정책안을 그대로 만지작거리고있다는것은 유치한 희극이 아닐수 없다. 만일 트럼프대통령이 전임자들의 전철을 답습한다면 이전 대통령들이 이룩하지 못한 최상의 성과물을 내려던 초심과는 정반대로 력대대통령들보다 더 무참하게 실패한 대통령으로 남게 될것이다. 트럼프행정부가 조미관계개선을 위한 진정성을 가지고 조미수뇌회담에 나오는 경우 우리의 응당한 호응을 받게 될것이지만 우리를 구석으로 몰고가 일방적인 핵포기만을 강요하려 든다면 우리는 그러한 대화에 더는 흥미를 가지지 않을것이며 다가오는 조미수뇌회담에 응하겠는가를 재고려할수밖에 없을것이다. 주체 107(2018)년 5월 16일 평양. #Trump #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #WarGames #NorthKorea

KOREAN CONFEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS UNIFICATION COMMITTEE AND U.S. LABOR AGAINST THE WAR SOLIDARITY DELEGATION TO KOREA 11AM, May 3, 2018 in front of the U.S. Embassy, Seoul Press Conference statement AMERICAN AND KOREAN WORKERS WELCOME THE PANMUNJOM DECLARATION, CALL FOR A LASTING PEACE ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA, ANFD AN END TO U.S. MILITARISM IN EAST ASIA A delegation of 20 unionist and community activists representing the U.S. Labor Against the War coalition has been visiting South Korea since May 1. They have participated in the International Workers’ Day Rally, showed support to the residents of Soseongri and Gimcheon in their fight for the removal of the THAAD missile defense system and discussed means to build a collective fight for demilitarization of U.S. foreign policy and peace on the Korean Peninsula, with Korean workers. USLAW supports the self-determination of people around the world and opposes U.S. intervention in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Korea. USLAW opposes the militarization of police as a contributor to the intensification of international and domestic racism. The delegation has come at an unprecedented time in Korean and world history. On April 27 the leaders of South and North Korea walked back and forth across the Military Demarcation Line while holding hands and solemnly declared before South and North Korean society and the whole world that, “There will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula.” Through the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula, they committed to dramatically improve South-North relations through exchange and cooperation, pursue trilateral or quadrilateral meetings toward the declaration of the end of the Korean War and the signing of a peace treaty, and work together towards full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and the establishment of a peace regime on the Peninsula with the help of the international community. Korean and American workers come together to welcome this historic declaration. We understand the inter-Korean summit as having opening up space for Korean workers and common people to determine their own future, and for workers and peace-loving people in Korea and the U.S. to broaden our struggle against U.S. militarism in the East Asian region. Korean and American workers alike suffer from the United States government’s aggressive foreign policy. In Korea, U.S. intervention led to the division of the peninsula and millions of deaths during the Korean War (1950 – 1953). The United States hostile policy towards North Korea, including the threat of nuclear pre-emptive strike, and President Donald Trump’s threats and hostile outburst have contributed to a vicious cycle of distrust and escalating tensions with North Korea, which brought us to the brink of war only a few months ago. Korean workers have had to deal with the economic and political instability created by this crisis for 70 years. For American workers, U.S militarism abroad means billions of dollars are diverted away from investment in addressing domestic problems including decaying infrastructure, unprecedented economic inequality, and limited access to basic public services. Furthermore, U.S. foreign policy has primarily benefited the interests of multi-national corporations while pitting American workers against their natural allies – working people and poor people around the world. For this reason, US Labor Against the War has been fighting for the demilitarization of the U.S. foreign policy and economy. The Inter-Korean Summit signals a new page in Korean and world history. North Korea has made significant promises and already taken real steps towards full denuclearization and the two Koreas are moving to de-escalation of tensions. It is time now for equal steps on the part of the U.S.-South Korea alliance. First and foremost, we call on the U.S. and South Korean military to stop the operation of the THAAD unit in Soseongi and construction on the site immediately, and to make a plan for removing the THAAD entirely from Korea. The U.S. and South Korean authorities should also suspend further joint military exercises as a measure to build trust and support the dialogue process. In the upcoming U.S.-North Korea Summit, the United States must be ready to commit to withdrawing its policy of pre-emptive strike against North Korea and other hostile policies, sign a peace treaty, lift sanctions and normalize relations. American workers recognize that Korean workers and the Korean people must lead the process towards Korean peace and unification. U.S. workers are inspired by the effort of our brothers and sister workers in South and North Korea to build bridges through exchange and cooperation and we pledge to find ways to practically support their leadership. #KoreaPeace #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #Reunification #PanmunjeomDeclaration #Labor

Tim Shorrock in Mokpo, South Korea at Sewol Ferry wreck site, 2017 (Stephen Wunrow) By Tim Shorrock | May 16, 2018 Originally posted in Dispatch Korea Five days ago, after reading stories in the Korean press about the latest US-South Korean military exercises called “Max Thunder,” I tweeted out a warning that the strategic weapons being deployed might set off red flags in Pyongyang. I’m a little surprised about the scale of these exercises, which include F-22s and B-52s from Guam. And I’ve even more surprised by North Korea’s silence about them. https://t.co/0Gu3B5McEv — Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) May 11, 2018 Why was I surprised? Because Kim Jong Un, in his preliminary meetings leading up to his April 27 summit with Moon Jae-in, had said that North Korea would not object to “normal” US-South Korean military exercises. That was widely understood in South Korea to mean that he would accept the drills as long as they didn’t include “strategic” weapons such as B-1B and B-52 bombers, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, all of which had taken part in earlier exercises and were viewed by the Kim government as both provocative and threatening. So when I saw reports in the Korean media that the “Max Thunder” air exercises were to include both B-52s from Guam and advanced F-22s stationed in Japan, I wondered why we hadn’t heard anything critical from Pyongyang about them. Well, yesterday we did. Late Tuesday afternoon in Washington, South Korea’s Yonhap News Service issued a bulletin: North Korea “said Wednesday it is canceling high-level talks with South Korea and threatened to pull out of a summit with the United States over the allies’ ongoing military exercises.” This immediately set off a firestorm in the US media. Even before reading the official North Korean statements that the Yonhap report was based on, cable news leapt on the news as proof that 1) the Trump-Kim Summit, set for Singapore on June 12, may not happen after all, and 2) the North Koreans were up to their old tricks again. One of the first out of the gate was MSNBC, where daytime host Katy Tur declared that Trump’s Korea diplomacy was “unravelling.” To buttress her point, she brought on Jeremy Bash, a former high-ranking Pentagon and National Security Council official from the Obama administration, to argue that North Korea, by criticizing the US-ROK exercises, was trying to force the United States out of the region. “The withdrawal of US troops from the Korean Peninsula,” he declared, “is something the North Koreans want, but is not something the United States should give, and not something the South Koreans should abide by either.” As for the military exercises, he continued, “we’re not going to stop those either. Those are critically important to our deterrence…We will not leave Asia just because Kim Jong Un says we should.” It would be better “to have no deal at all than to have the United States withdraw from Asia.” This, of course, was nonsense: North Korea, in its discussions with the Moon government this year, has actually said it might accept the presence of US forces in South Korea if there was a peace agreement ending the Korean War (and naturally, MSNBC neglected to mention that Bash, a major hawk on Korea, is a partner with former CIA Director R. James Woolsey in the Paladin Capital Group, which invests heavily in the military industrial complex). Later, on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC brought on Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, to explain how “predictable” North Korea’s statement was and that it solidified her own skepticism that Trump should “never have leapt at this summit when it was first presented” by South Korea. It was a repeat of MSNBC’s meltdown when the summit was announced in March. On CNN and everywhere else, it was the same message: North Korea can never be trusted. Amazingly, Fox got it right, bringing on Senator Rand Paul to explain that the US military exercises are indeed provocative. Why is @Fox the only network making sense right now? Sen. Paul is correct – it would be no sweat for the US to keep its B-52s out of its military drills at this time. And it would go a long way. This is not a one-way street. https://t.co/0N3LXqmzmi — Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) May 15, 2018 Clarity about North Korea’s position began to emerge when journalists in Korea and China began tweeting out the official KCNA statements that Yonhap had been quoting from. The official English report from KCNA is out: pic.twitter.com/4Qyq9Zvsa6 — Martyn Williams (@martyn_williams) May 15, 2018 And here it is: the English-language translation of N. Korea’s latest statement, taking aim pretty clearly at John Bolton. pic.twitter.com/Utl8vYStVB — Jonathan Cheng (@JChengWSJ) May 16, 2018 Pyongyang, it turned out, was concerned about two things: the possibility of B-52s showing up in Korean skies during a period of intense peace diplomacy, and the recent statements by John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, that the US would attempt to impose a Libya-type solution on North Korea. As Anna Fifield reported in the Washington Post on the exercises: The two-week-long Max Thunder drills between the two countries’ air forces, an annual event that began Friday and involves about 100 warplanes, including B-52 bombers and F-15K jets, have clearly struck a nerve. “The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” the KCNA report said. And as Jonathan Cheng reported in the Wall Street Journal on Bolton: The North Korean statement focused its ire on Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, who has called for Pyongyang to turn over its nuclear arsenal to the U.S. and commit to “irreversible” disarmament. It cautioned Mr. Trump that if he follows Mr. Bolton’s lead, “he will be recorded as more tragic and unsuccessful president than his predecessors, far from his ambition to make unprecedented success.” The Journal then turned to Bolton and Libya: On Wednesday, Pyongyang expressed its disdain for what it called a “Libya mode” of dealing. Mr. Bolton helped reach a deal with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2003 that gave up its nuclear program. Gadhafi was ousted and killed in 2011 during the Arab Spring. North Korea said it had never sought “economic compensation and benefit” in exchange for relinquishing its nuclear arsenal, throwing into question a core pillar of North Korea nuclear diplomacy stretching back to the early 1990s. But in terms of denuclearization and what that might cost Trump: Pyongyang didn’t make clear what kind of a deal it wants in lieu of economic inducements. Some experts say the North is likely to want security concessions, such as the scaling back of U.S. military exercises with South Korea, a drawdown of the 28,500 American troops on the Korean Peninsula and even the removal of the U.S. nuclear security guarantee for South Korea. The Journal then quoted Adam Mount, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington: “North Korea has reasserted its standard position as a condition for talks: denuclearization as a protracted negotiation that requires security concessions from the alliance, not just economic payoffs.” In other words, this was not Armageddon again, but an attempt by the North to assert itself at a critical time in the peace process make clear that it has its own interests to protect, and let Trump know that it will not just lie down and surrender. For years, and particularly over the last year, it has said over and over that it is willing to talk about denuclearization, but will act only when it believes that the United States had dropped its “hostile policy,” which in its view includes not only provocative military exercises but attempts at regime change as well as sanctions. By Wednesday morning, after intense discussions between South Korean and US officials, it looked like a compromise had been reached on the exercises: the B-52s simply won’t take part. Yonhap again: Contrary to the original plan, nuclear-capable U.S. B-52 bombers will not participate in the ongoing combined air drills between South Korea and the United States, a military source said Wednesday. “In the Max Thunder exercise that began on Friday, the U.S. F-22 stealth fighters have already participated, while the B-52 has yet to join,” the source said on condition of anonymity. “B-52 will not take part in the exercise, which runs through May 25.” Around 10 AM, CNN reported that the White House was playing down both Bolton’s role in Korea policy and the possibility of a summit collapse: Referring to the Libya comparison, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday that she hadn’t “seen that as part of any discussions so I’m not aware that that’s a model that we’re using. “I haven’t seen that that’s a specific thing. I know that that comment was made. There’s not a cookie cutter model on how this would work.” She continued, “This is the President Trump model. He’s going to run this the way he sees fit. We’re 100% confident, as we’ve said many times before, as I’m sure you’re all aware, he’s the best negotiator and we’re very confident on that front.” Later on Trump himself chimed in during his daily banter with the media: “We haven’t seen anything. We haven’t heard anything. We will see what happens.” But there were no early morning tweets warning darkly about the collapse of the summit, as some Koreans had feared. Everything was apparently back on track. In fact, as Politico pointed out, the real split on North Korea may be between Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: The key to understanding the [Trump] team is the relationship between Bolton and Pompeo. Most observers see the new secretary of state and national security adviser as two peas in a pod—hard-liners who will implement Trump’s vision and combat the bureaucracy. Some say it is a “war Cabinet.” But a closer look at their backgrounds, worldviews and ambitions suggests that they might be destined for rivalry. Significantly, the White House basically admitted these differences to the New York Times this afternoon: American officials acknowledged that the North appeared to be seeking to exploit a gap in the administration’s messages about North Korea — between the hard-line views of the national security adviser, John R. Bolton, and the more conciliatory tone of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has met twice with Mr. Kim in Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for the summit. In a recent television interview, Mr. Bolton said the precedent for the North Korea negotiations should be Libya, which agreed to box up its entire nuclear program and ship it out of the country. Mr. Bolton said North Korea should receive no benefits, including the lifting of sanctions, until it had surrendered its entire nuclear infrastructure. Mr. Pompeo, by contrast, put the emphasis on the American investment that would flow into North Korea if it agreed to relinquish its nuclear arsenal. He, too, said that the North would have to agree to “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” the technical shorthand used by the administration to describe its bargaining position with Pyongyang. And there was this: Some officials suggested that Mr. Trump needed to rein in Mr. Bolton, though they expressed few qualms about the White House’s broader strategy. Officials noted that the United States had not made any concessions to Mr. Kim, beyond agreeing to the meeting itself. Mr. Kim has agreed to stop nuclear and missile tests and to blow up an underground nuclear site in the presence of foreign journalists. Finally: “The president is ready if the meeting takes place,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told Fox News on Wednesday. “And if it doesn’t, we will continue the maximum pressure campaign that has been ongoing.” But on Wednesday evening, NBC Nightly News was still at it, framing the story as another example of North Korea’s untrustworthiness and raising doubts again about the upcoming summit. To make his case, reporter Peter Alexander hauled in the perpetually wrong (and totally predictable) China hawk Gordon M. Chang from The Daily Beast. He said, among other absurdities, that North Korea’s objections to the military exercises and Bolton’s Libya policies were just “another page from his playbook.” (How the discredited Chang, who has been predicting for nearly a decade the coming collapse of both China and North Korea, gets on national television so much is beyond me. But reporters can always count on him to parrot the current hardline.) So what’s the lesson from all this? For the most part – as I outlined in a recent feature for The Nation – the US media appears desperate to undo the Korea peace process. Nothing North Korea says, it seems, even its complaints about US policy, is seen as legitimate. And at the the first sign of North Korea asserting itself, the media immediately goes to its stable of “experts,” like Chang and Bash, who are really experts in group-think but know very little about what’s happening in either North or South Korea (or the White House, for that matter). So it’s obvious that the upcoming summit is going to be a real negotiation, and the Trump team is going to have to come prepared to offer real incentives – including security guarantees, an end to provocative military drills, and political and economic normalization – for Kim Jong Un to agree to do away with his nuclear program once and for all, as he’s said he will do if the conditions are right. I’m looking forward to being in Singapore and bringing you the unvarnished word on what unfolds. UPDATE: Some good news on public opinion about the summit: Pew Center polling shows again “broad approval” in U.S. for diplomacy with #NorthKorea even amid skepticism about #KimJongUn‘s intentions to denuclearize. https://t.co/oDkblPyL7f — Patrick McEachern (@ptmceachern) May 16, 2018 #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #PanmunjeomDeclaration #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

John Bolton (Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr) By John Feffer | May 16, 2018 Originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus. For a man with a reputation for venting spleen and flying off the handle, John Bolton bided his time before finally rising to the position of power he now occupies. The former U.S. ambassador to the UN spent much of the last decade consolidating his political base through stints at right-wing institutes like the American Enterprise Institute, media appearances on Fox, and the occasional reckless op-ed. He considered running for president in 2012 and 2016 but chose not to take the risk. Instead, he raised large amounts of money for extreme right-wing Republican candidates like Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). Moreover, Bolton’s continued support for the Iraq War and a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy seemed to put him forever at odds with the new president. “Bolton’s lambasting of global aristocrats aside, there isn’t much in the man’s worldview that rings consonant with President Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy,” wrote Daniel DePetris in The American Conservative. That was then. Now John Bolton is Trump’s national security advisor. After a steady diet of levelheaded corporate execs and restrained military men, Trump clearly wanted a little more hot sauce in the Oval Office. As for the differences in ideology, those were largely fictitious. Trump has no ideology, and Bolton is smart enough to tailor his message to his audience. Trump is a very powerful boat with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is now his rudder. Which effectively means, when it comes to foreign policy, that it’s Bolton’s administration now. Bolton’s Impact National security advisor is the perfect position for Bolton. He didn’t have to go through any messy confirmation hearings. He doesn’t have to perform any of the ceremonial tasks of a secretary of state. He can instead focus on what he does best: steering government policy far to the right. Only a few weeks into his job, he can already put one notch in his gun for helping to steer the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal. This should have been an easy task, since Trump had already made clear his distaste for the agreement. But there was still significant disagreement within the administration. Bolton, it appears, tilted the balance away from those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who preferred to remain within the agreement. Writes Mark Langler in The New York Times: Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted to fight for the deal, it is not clear how much he would have been heard. Mr. Bolton, officials said, never convened a high-level meeting of the National Security Council to air the debate. He advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions, otherwise keeping the door to his West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has forged a comfortable relationship with the president, several people said, channeling his “America First” vocabulary. Now that he has this comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to more challenging assignments. “By working in the West Wing, the national security adviser spends more time with the president than the secretaries of State or Defense, and so can always get the last word,” writes Jonathan Swan in Axios. “But Bolton is signaling restraint until Trump makes a decision.” So, for instance, with the Iran deal decision made, Bolton has been coy about whether he’s still pushing a regime-change strategy toward Iran. In public, of course, he must defer to the president. In private, Bolton would never keep his ideas to himself. As one of the biggest boosters of the militant, cult-like People’s Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK), Bolton is no doubt whispering into Trump’s ear at every possible opportunity that Iran is on the verge of regime collapse and a cadre of Ahmed Chalabis are ready to take over. All it needs is a tightening economic noose and a military nudge from Israel. Meanwhile, as the president’s enforcer, it’s Bolton’s job to play the bad cop. He’s already done so with Europe, raising the possibility of sanctioning European businesses that continue to work with Iran. Bolton must love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with one unilateral stone. However, the test of Bolton’s impact shouldn’t be Iran, where his views intersect with Trump’s. The real challenge will be on issues where Bolton’s stated preferences are diametrically opposed to current policy. From Regime Change to Rapprochement? John Bolton has never concealed his desire to see the collapse of the current government in North Korea. In February, even after the two Koreas had cooperated in the Winter Olympics, Bolton continued to argue in the Wall Street Journal that the United States should launch a preemptive military attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities. The Journal piece featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his interpretation of a British attack on a Canadian steamboat in U.S. territory in 1837. (No, I’m not making this up). Bolton didn’t bother to devote any space to the likely consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korea that, unlike the British example, could escalate to an exchange of nuclear weapons and involve the deaths of more than a million people. It was pure Bolton: a legal intellect plus an instinct for bombast — and minus any acknowledgement of real-world consequences. Now, as national security advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around the reality of the potential summit between his boss and Kim Jong Un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. This might seem to put Bolton in a bind, forcing him to make arguments that run counter to his long-held preferences. But remember: Bolton knows how to bide his time. He knows that the track record of U.S.-North Korean negotiations isn’t very good. He knows that a failed summit could easily push Donald Trump to the other side of the spectrum — or perhaps, given North Korea’s reaction to the recent U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the summit might not happen at all. A Trump scorned will likely find regime-change arguments more compelling. In the meantime, Bolton is doing what he can to subtly undermine the upcoming summit. He’s ratcheted down expectations by saying that the Trump administration isn’t “starry-eyed” about the meeting. He’s loaded the summit agenda by adding “their ballistic missile programs, their biological and chemical weapons programs, their keeping of American hostages, the abduction of innocent Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years.” It would be hard enough to negotiate a nuclear agreement even without adding these other elements (though North Korea has already released the “American hostages”). But perhaps the most sinister tactic Bolton has deployed involves his references to Libya. In interviews, he has said that Libya’s denuclearization in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea talks. Libya? The country that gave up its nuclear weapons program and then, within a few years, experienced civil war, foreign intervention, and regime collapse? Is that really the kind of model you want to highlight with a country like North Korea, which is worried about precisely such a scenario? An anonymous source in the Trump administration told Abigail Tracy of Vanity Fair that Bolton is sending his own message to the North Koreans: “I mean, there is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans, and that is to tell them, ‘Warning: don’t go any further because we are going to screw you’… So yeah, I completely agree that that is a dog whistle to the North Koreans, telling them, ‘don’t trust us.’” Of course, Bolton’s mere presence in the administration, even if he just stands quietly in the corner and scowls, sends the message that this government is not to be trusted. Perhaps that’s the real reason for North Korea’s sudden summit skepticism. War at the Top? John Bolton isn’t stupid enough to contradict his boss, at least not directly. He’s a sycophant to his superiors and a sunvabitch to his subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations to his equals. The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Thomas Wright, in Politico, argues that Bolton and Pompeo are cruising for a mutual bruising. He argues that it’s not hawks versus doves in the Trump administration, but “litigators versus planners.” The litigators, led by Trump and deputized to Bolton, see national security policy as a way of settling scores with enemies, foreign and domestic, and closing the file. They will torpedo multilateral deals, pull out of international commitments and demonstrate American power before moving on to the next target. Planners, on the other hand, are worried about the day after — for instance, how the United States addresses Chinese economic power in the wake of a pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. It’s not yet clear whether Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and thus whether he’ll team up with Bolton or side with the quintessential planner, Jim Mattis, to challenge the national security advisor’s blow-‘em-all-up philosophy. Wright expects a showdown. I’m not sure. I expect tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo (on Iran) and tactical disagreements (on China). Where they disagree, Bolton probably will gain the upper hand, if not immediately then eventually, because he knows better how to manipulate the levers of power. But on the general direction of Trump’s foreign policy, Bolton and Pompeo are in agreement. The faux-isolationism of Trump during his presidential campaign fooled a number of neoconservatives into voicing their opposition. But it didn’t fool either Bolton or Pompeo. Let’s be clear: There is no American “retreat” from the world. Under the rubric of “America First,” the Trump administration has created a new kind of multilateral engagement — aligned with the hard right in Israel and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, allied with authoritarian and far-right leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in support of a range of plutocratic interests over and above the wellbeing of the majority and the planet as a whole. (I long for Angela Merkel to just come out and say it: “Gott in Himmel, we must oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!) So, not a retreat from the world but a retort to the world: Move this way, not that. As the Washington Examiner recently editorialized, “Trump’s foreign policy record is one of America continuing its role as global leader — even if we’re leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry.” But please, let’s not talk about Trump’s “foreign policy record.” This is not the world of Donald Trump. The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago, Fox News, and his Twitter account. His worldview is limited by his over-inflated ego and bank account. No, this is the world of John Bolton. And, for a limited time before he blows it up, we’re just living in it. John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of several books and numerous articles.  He is a KPI Associate. #JohnBolton #JohnFeffer #NationalSecurity #Trump

In 2015, Women Cross DMZ visited North Korea before crossing the border into the South. By Tim Shorrock | May 21, 2018 Originally published in Dispatch Korea. The US State Department has denied special permits for travel to North Korea to two prominent American women mobilizing international support for the Korea peace process. Christine Ahn, the founder and international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, an international coalition of women peace activists, was denied a permit to travel to North Korea on April 3. Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work to ban landmines and chairs the Nobel Women’s Initiative, was denied her permit on May 18. In 2017, after a US student, Otto Warmbier, died after being released from a North Korean prison, the State Department imposed a “geographical travel restriction” on US travel to the country, effectively banning US citizens from visiting North Korea. The government, however, can grant a “special validation permit” to Americans seeking to visit the North if they meet certain conditions. Both Ahn and Williams had applied under that clause, but were turned down. “The Department has determined that granting your request is not in the national interest of the United States,” Ahn and Williams were informed in identical letters obtained by Dispatch Korea. They were signed by Jonathan Rolbin, the director of State’s Office of Legal Affairs and Law Enforcement Liaison. Ahn, who is based in Hawaii, arrived in Seoul on Monday. “It’s unfortunate they aren’t allowing us in this critical moment of facilitating understanding, building goodwill and trust between the people of North Korea and the United States,” she said in an email as she was preparing for her flight. Ahn is leading an international women’s delegation to South Korea for a symposium and “DMZ Peace Walk” from May 23 to 26. She said the travel ban meant that she and other organizers had to shelve their planned program in North Korea. “Because I wasn’t allowed to travel to the North, our whole program was limited to South Korea, and I wasn’t able to go and discuss in detail the North Korea portion of the women’s peace talks and walk.” The State Department would not respond to specific questions about its decisions. Instead, it provided an official who issued a generic explanation on background. “We are not going to speak about individual applications for special validations of U.S. passports to travel to North Korea, but we continue to receive and adjudicate applications for special validations,” the official said. “A Geographic Travel Restriction was authorized to bar the use of a U.S. passport to travel in, through, or to North Korea due to mounting concerns over the serious risk of arrest and long-term detention in North Korea, absent a special validation.” The official explained that such validations are granted “only for extremely limited purposes,” including “humanitarian or other purposes in U.S. national interests.” She added that State’s travel warning “remains in place – the Department of State strongly warns U.S. citizens not to travel to North Korea.” Ahn said a total of 10 women were denied permits to visit North Korea, including Ann Wright, a former US Army Colonel and State Department official who was an original member of Women Cross DMZ. The denials come at a critical time in the Korea peace process. Just three weeks ago, the leaders of North and South Korea met in Panmunjom and declared their joint intention to end the Korean War and work towards the “complete denuclearization” of the peninsula. But prospects for a planned summit on June 12 between President Trump and Kim Jong Un seemed to dim last week when Pyongyang cancelled an upcoming meeting with South Korea and threatened to call off the Singapore summit over concerns with US-South Korean military exercises and other issues. On Tuesday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in will be in Washington to meet with Trump about how to move forward on the negotiating front. The two men also spoke on the phone over the weekend. On Sunday night, there was “no indication that the president is considering pulling out of the North Korea talks,” The New York Times reported. Ahn applied for her permit in March so she could visit Pyongyang in April to meet with North Korean officials about arranging another visit to the North. In 2015, Women Cross DMZ led an unprecedented delegation of women activists, including feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem and two Nobel laureates from Ireland and Liberia, to North and South Korea. During their visits to each country, they met with women’s groups and were given rare permission to cross the land border at the DMZ by bus (I was there when they crossed through a Customs and Immigration Center near the truce village of Panmunjom, and wrote about it for Politico). In discussions with North Korean diplomats in New York this spring, Ahn was told that a DMZ crossing this May might be “tough” because of the upcoming summits. But she said South Korean activists, who have been doing a peace walk annually since 2015, wanted to proceed. “We agreed with them,” she said, “so the compromise now is to get a delegation of North Korean women to Seoul” for the conference from May 23 to 26. “They are deliberating now, so there is still a 50 percent chance they will come.” In Seoul, the women activists will stage a candlelight vigil at Seoul’s famous Gwanghwamun Square and meet with key South Korean government officials as well as diplomats from foreign embassies. Said Ahn: “We’re going to strategize how to press for women’s inclusion in the peace process – clearly an uphill battle between authoritarian and deeply patriarchal regimes!” Women Cross DMZ posted a declaration about its delegation to Korea over the weekend. It reads in part: Given the critical window facing the two Koreas, Women Cross DMZ and the Nobel Women’s Initiative believe it is urgent to demonstrate international solidarity with the peace and women’s movements in Korea. Our delegation will ensure that leaders from the two Koreas, United States, China and other countries that participated in the Korean War understand that citizens in these countries and around the world want this peace process to succeed. In partnership with the Women’s Peace Walk, a coalition of more than 30 women’s peace organizations in South Korea, we are convening an international delegation of thirty seasoned feminist peace activists from across the world, representing peace movements based in Canada, China, Colombia, Guam, Hawaii, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mongolia, Navajo Nation, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. As a global community, we have a responsibility to help finally bring an end to the Korean War. The Korean people need our solidarity at this critical hour, and women’s peace movements will be working together to see through a Peace Treaty that formally ends the Korean War and ensure women’s inclusion in the peace process to build a just and feminist postwar Korea. Tim Shorrock is a journalist and trade unionist based in Washington, D.C.who has been writing about Korean affairs since the late 1970s, for the Nation and other publications.  He is a KPI Associate. #ChristineAhn #NorthKorea #TimShorrock #WomenCrossDMZ

Choe Son Hui,North Korea’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs In a letter to Chairman Kim Jong Un, May 24, 2018, President Trump called off their summit meeting scheduled for June 12, stating that “based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed by your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long planned meeting.” The “anger and hostility” came first in response  to recommendations by National Security Advisor, John Bolton, that the U.S. approach to denuclearization of North Korea should follow the Libyan model, and most recently in response to a warning issued by Vice President, Mike Pence, May 21, 2018, that “this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal.” The “Libyan model” was followed by the NATO led overthrow of Libyan leader, Muammer Gaddafi, and his death.  As then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, “We came, we saw, he died.” What follows is the reaction (English/Korean texts) of Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Vice President Pence’s remarks inferring that Kim Jong Un could share the fate of Muammer Gaddafi if he doesn’t make a deal with the U.S. Press Statement by Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of DPRK Pyongyang, May 24 (KCNA) — Choe Son Hui, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK, issued the following press statement on Thursday: At an interview with Fox News on May 21, U.S. Vice-President Pence made unbridled and impudent remarks that north Korea might end like Libya, military option for north Korea never came off the table, the U.S. needs complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization, and so on. As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice-president. If he is vice-president of “single superpower” as is in name, it will be proper for him to know even a little bit about the current state of global affairs and to sense to a certain degree the trends in dialogue and the climate of détente. We could surmise more than enough what a political dummy he is as he is trying to compare the DPRK, a nuclear weapon state, to Libya that had simply installed a few items of equipment and fiddled around with them. Soon after the White House National Security Adviser Bolton made the reckless remarks, Vice-President Pence has again spat out nonsense that the DPRK would follow in Libya’s footstep. It is to be underlined, however, that in order not to follow in Libya’s footstep, we paid a heavy price to build up our powerful and reliable strength that can defend ourselves and safeguard peace and security in the Korean peninsula and the region. In view of the remarks of the U.S. high-ranking politicians who have not yet woken up to this stark reality and compare the DPRK to Libya that met a tragic fate, I come to think that they know too little about us. To borrow their words, we can also make the U.S. taste an appalling tragedy it has neither experienced nor even imagined up to now. Before making such reckless threatening remarks without knowing exactly who he is facing, Pence should have seriously considered the terrible consequences of his words. It is the U.S. who has asked for dialogue, but now it is misleading the public opinion as if we have invited them to sit with us. I only wonder what is the ulterior motive behind its move and what is it the U.S. has calculated to gain from that. We will neither beg the U.S. for dialogue nor take the trouble to persuade them if they do not want to sit together with us. Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States. In case the U.S. offends against our goodwill and clings to unlawful and outrageous acts, I will put forward a suggestion to our supreme leadership for reconsidering the DPRK-U.S. summit. -0- 조선민주주의인민공화국 외무성 최선희부상 담화 21일 미국부대통령 펜스는 폭스 뉴스와의 인터뷰에서 북조선이 리비아의 전철을 밟을수 있다느니,북조선에 대한 군사적선택안은 배제된적이 없다느니,미국이 요구하는것은 완전하고 검증가능하며 되돌릴수 없는 비핵화라느니 뭐니 하고 횡설수설하며 주제넘게 놀아댔다. 대미사업을 보는 나로서는 미국부대통령의 입에서 이런 무지몽매한 소리가 나온데 대해 놀라움을 금할수 없다. 명색이 《유일초대국》의 부대통령이라면 세상 돌아가는 물정도 좀 알고 대화흐름과 정세완화기류라도 어느 정도 느껴야 정상일것이다. 핵보유국인 우리 국가를 고작해서 얼마 되지 않는 설비들이나 차려놓고 만지작거리던 리비아와 비교하는것만 보아도 그가 얼마나 정치적으로 아둔한 얼뜨기인가를 짐작하고도 남음이 있다. 백악관 국가안보보좌관 볼튼에 이어 이번에 또 부대통령 펜스가 우리가 리비아의 전철을 밟게 될것이라고 력설하였는데 바로 리비아의 전철을 밟지 않기 위해 우리는 값비싼 대가를 치르면서 우리 자신을 지키고 조선반도와 지역의 평화와 안전을 수호할수 있는 강력하고 믿음직한 힘을 키웠다. 그런데 이 엄연한 현실을 아직도 깨닫지 못하고 우리를 비극적인 말로를 걸은 리비아와 비교하는것을 보면 미국의 고위정객들이 우리를 몰라도 너무도 모른다는 생각이 든다. 그들의 말을 그대로 되받아 넘긴다면 우리도 미국이 지금까지 체험해보지 못했고 상상도 하지 못한 끔찍한 비극을 맛보게 할수 있다. 펜스는 자기의 상대가 누구인가를 똑바로 알지 못하고 무분별한 협박성발언을 하기에 앞서 그 말이 불러올 무서운 후과에 대해 숙고했어야 하였다. 저들이 먼저 대화를 청탁하고도 마치 우리가 마주앉자고 청한듯이 여론을 오도하고있는 저의가 무엇인지,과연 미국이 여기서 얻을수 있다고 타산한것이 무엇인지 궁금할뿐이다. 우리는 미국에 대화를 구걸하지 않으며 미국이 우리와 마주앉지 않겠다면 구태여 붙잡지도 않을것이다. 미국이 우리를 회담장에서 만나겠는지 아니면 핵 대 핵의 대결장에서 만나겠는지는 전적으로 미국의 결심과 처신여하에 달려있다. 미국이 우리의 선의를 모독하고 계속 불법무도하게 나오는 경우 나는 조미수뇌회담을 재고려할데 대한 문제를 최고지도부에 제기할것이다. 주체107(2018)년 5월 24일 평 양(끝) #Trump #KoreaPeace #DPRK #Nuclearweapons #USKoreaSummit #NorthKorea

US Labor Against the War Delegation upon arrival in South Korea, April 30, 2018 By Wol-san Liem | May 1, 2018 A U.S. Labor Against the War delegation arrived in Seoul April 30, 2018. They will spend a week in Korea showing solidarity for Korean workers and peace-loving people’s fight for peace and unification and to imprisoned labor leaders. They will also be discussing steps for collective action to end US militarism in East Asia with their Korean counter parts. Today they participated in the Korean Confederation of Trade Union’s (KTCU) International Workers Day (May Day) rally and March. Korean workers are welcoming the improvement in North-South relations following the inter-Korea summit on April 27. They are calling for a peace treaty and other real measures to ensure a lasting peace ahead of the U.S.-North Korean summit. They are also clear that they want the new era of peace to be accompanied by greater rights and equality for workers and ordinary people. To this end the May Day rally focused on the KCTU’s demands for reform of the chaebol-centered economic system, eradication of precarious work, and amendment of the Constitution and labor law to expand workers’ rights. The rally also highlighted the labor movement’s work for peace and unification, including exchange with North Korean workers, and efforts to bring the “Me Too” movement to the workplace. Wol-san Liem is the Director of International Affairs for the Korean Federation of Public and Social Services and Transportation Workers’ Unions, and a KPI Associate. #KoreaPeace #Labor #SouthKorea #THAAD