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By Christine Ahn | September 24, 2019 Originally published in Truthout.org On September 10, President Trump fired John Bolton, his third national security adviser, announcing on Twitter that Bolton’s “services were no longer needed.” Unsurprisingly, Bolton fired back by tweet, countering that he hadn’t been fired, but in fact had offered his resignation. It was no secret in Washington that Trump grew increasingly frustrated with Bolton’s hawkish positions, even joking in meetings with him, “If it was up to John, we’d be in four wars now.” Despite their differences, Trump viewed Bolton as instrumental to advancing his foreign policy agenda. According to several sources, “the president says having Bolton on his team improves his bargaining position and gives him a psychological advantage over foes like Iran and North Korea.” From the very day Bolton assumed the role of national security adviser 17 months ago, prospects for peace with North Korea didn’t have a fighting chance. Bolton was a proponent of U.S. military action to prevent Iran and Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and he made his position on North Korea clear in an August 2017 Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he outlined military options for North Korea, from cyberattacks to regime change through special operations forces. Uri Friedman in The Atlantic predicted that “Bolton’s firm belief in the purifying power of regime change, his confidence in the efficacy of war and distrust of measures short of war, suggest he’s more likely to steer the Trump administration in an even more hardline direction.” There was never a diplomatic deal with North Korea that John Bolton liked. In fact, from the 1994 Agreed Framework the United States negotiated with North Korea to freeze its nuclear weapons program, up to the February 2019 Hanoi summit, Bolton has had his hand in sabotaging any agreement between Washington and Pyongyang. Bolton was among the chief architects in the Bush administration who destroyed the Agreed Framework, the 1994 agreement the Clinton administration negotiated with then-leader Kim Jong Il to freeze North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. According to former State Department official Robert Carlin, “The Agreed Framework did not fail; it was murdered. It was deliberately destroyed by the Bush administration. That’s not a failure.” Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney justified gutting the Agreed Framework after discovering that the North Koreans were enriching uranium. “This was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework,” Bolton wrote in his memoir. Unsurprisingly, it was Bolton who played a key role in squandering the opportunity for a deal at the second summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un in Hanoi in February. According to longtime North Korea expert Leon Sigal, working-level meetings led by U.S. Special Representative Stephen Biegun ahead of the summit resolved a number of issues, including an end-of-war declaration, establishment of liaison offices in Pyongyang and Washington, and the scaling back of U.S.-South Korean war drills. Then, in Hanoi, Trump presented a “grand bargain” to Kim: trade all of its nuclear weapons, material and facilities in exchange for an end to U.S.-led sanctions. North Korea viewed this offer as a U.S. demand for North Korea’s unilateral disarmament. North Korea was further offended by Bolton, who explained on CBS after Hanoi that denuclearization also included Pyongyang’s “ballistic-missile program and its chemical- and biological-weapons program.” With election season upon us, Trump recognizes that he doesn’t have a single foreign policy victory — especially an agreement with North Korea, in which he has invested so much political capital. Although North Korea has not crossed the red line by testing long-range missiles, the country has conducted several short-range missile tests and Kim has set an end-of-year deadline for a diplomatic breakthrough before what many experts predict could be a return to testing nuclear weapons. To make progress on reaching an agreement with Kim, Trump likely realized Bolton had to go. That’s why Bolton was sent to Mongolia during the third summit with Kim in June, so as not to derail progress with North Korea. Instead of celebrating the deposing of one of the most dangerous men in power, the liberal establishment — especially the Democratic leadership — used Bolton’s firing to further attack Trump. While Trump himself was leading the charge to “totally destroy” North Korea during the early days of fire and fury, as the two Koreas began to make historic peace following the 2018 winter Olympics, his stance shifted while those of his national security adviser — and leaders across the aisle — hadn’t. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted, “John Bolton’s sudden departure is a symbol of the disarray that has unnerved our allies since day one of the Trump Administration. Steady leadership & strategic foreign policy is key to ensuring America’s national security.” But it wasn’t just the establishment Democratic leadership. Progressive champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a photo of a CNN headline that read: “Trump sides with Kim Jong Un over Bolton” and added, “That’s it. That’s the headline.” This was re-tweeted by Rep. Ilhan Omar who added, “Trump sides with yet another dictator.” Progressives, especially Korean Americans, were flabbergasted, especially given that both Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were among the first Democrats to co-sponsor H.Res. 152, which calls for an end to the Korean War with a peace agreement. Minju Bae, a labor organizer of Asian American communities in New York City tweeted, “Someone needs to write an oped about how @AOC and @IlhanMN’s tweet about 45 and Kim Jung Un is actually REALLY harmful to the people working towards a people’s reunification of the Korean Peninsula.” Progressive journalist Adam Johnson called out the squad by tweeting, “When U.S. leaders side with allied dictators it’s bad and should be called out. When they have mere talks with dictators of countries we’ve been sanctioning and threatening and bombed and killed 20% of the population … this is not at all the same thing.” This forced a nuanced response from Rep. Omar, “I support diplomacy with North Korea and a formal end to the Korean War, which is why I cosponsored the resolution by @RoKhanna recognizing that.” On North Korea, Democrats couldn’t be more wrong on how dangerous Bolton was and the numerous obstacles he placed to achieving diplomacy with Pyongyang. Meeting with Kim Jong Un isn’t a concession; it’s the process of building peace. Instead of perpetuating tired old tropes about North Korea that close the political space for diplomacy, progressives and Democrats should be attacking Trump from the left. Instead of a knee-jerk reaction to Trump’s erratic diplomacy with North Korea, progressives and Democrats could offer a bold vision for rigorous diplomacy that could yield a final resolution to the Korean War and ultimately denuclearization. In a memo to all presidential candidates, a network of peace and disarmament organizations led by the Korea Peace Now! campaign outlined pro-diplomacy and pro-peace principles for a new U.S. policy on North Korea. Among the principles are a step-by-step approach, confidence-building measures, supporting our ally South Korea, making the peace process more inclusive, but critically, ending the Korean War. Successful diplomacy to achieve denuclearization will require a step-by-step process that must include a peace agreement and normalized relations. With Bolton out of the way, Biegun now has a clear path to advance a peace process. In a speech last week at the University of Michigan, he offered a pragmatic approach to reviving stalled talks: Neither the United States nor North Korea has to accept all the risk of moving forward. There are immediate actions that we can take if negotiations make progress. Judging by the talks President Trump has had with Chairman Kim, and that our team has had over the past year with our North Korean counterparts, it is clear that both sides can quickly agree to significant actions that will declare to our respective peoples—and to the world—that U.S.-North Korea relations have taken an irreversible turn away from conflict. As veteran Korea journalist Tim Shorrock told Truthout in an email, “If Trump sticks with Stephen Biegun, who had embraced that strategy before being overridden by Bolton, then I think prospects are good once talks start again, at least for an interim agreement.” It’s time to end the Korean War by replacing the 1953 Armistice Agreement, which temporarily halted the Korean War, with a formal peace agreement. When U.S. and North Korean commanders signed the ceasefire, they promised within 90 days to return to negotiate a permanent political settlement. That agreement is long overdue. It is in the interests of 80 million people who live on the Korean Peninsula, the millions more throughout the region, and all Americans. Ending 70 years of hostility and mistrust will take leaders across the political aisle to support peace. Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission. Christine Ahn is the international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing for peace on the Korean Peninsula, and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #KoreaPeace #DPRK #JohnBolton #Nuclearweapons #ChristineAhn #NorthKorea

By Dan Scavino – Twitter, Public Domain, Link. By Tim Beal | November 16, 2019 | Originally published in Monthly Review Ever since the United States divided the Korean peninsula in 1945, North Korea has had to cope with the existential challenge of U.S. hostility. Korea marks the western boundary of the empire, a border area where the sea power of the United States adjoins the land power of Russia and China. North Korea has been able to utilize this liminality to create a sovereign state—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—whose independence is not welcomed by either Moscow or Beijing but tolerated because the alternatives, a client of the other or absorption into the U.S. empire, are considered worse. Washington, as global hegemon, has been less willing to tolerate this independence but has faced constraints. The result has been a policy of hostility, of unrelenting diplomatic and economic war of varying intensity, stopping short of actual kinetic war, though never far from it. The United States is frustrated by this situation, which is an affront to its hubris, but is restrained by the consequences. For North Korea, the situation is far more serious. Kinetic war would mean its destruction while the prevailing diplomatic and economic war produces its impoverishment—it is claimed that its per capita gross domestic product is less than 4 percent of that of South Korea.1 For North Korea, the U.S. relationship is of paramount importance, the key to survival and prosperity.2 For the United States, North Korea is but one part of the theater of politics, colorful but more fantasy than substance. The so-called North Korean crisis occupies a special place in the U.S. political repertoire. Policy in the Middle East, and now Venezuela, is bedded in the strategic necessity of domination of oil supplies. The confrontation with the Soviet Union/Russia and China, whatever the distortions in the narrative may be, has a grounding in real geopolitical struggle against substantial adversaries. The North Korean crisis is different in that it is basically a domestically constructed political issue fueled by the specific geopolitical needs for tension in East Asia supplemented by the generic hunger of the military-industrial complex. It is not a real security issue in itself: North Korea is far too small to pose any real threat to the United States, other than limited and suicidal retaliation if attacked. But politics are often not firmly tethered to reality. Additionally, over generations, especially in recent decades, the myth of the North Korean threat has been nurtured by politicians, the military and security sector, and the media to assume an unchallenged authenticity of its own. Most presidents have felt compelled to “do something” about North Korea and this has fluctuated between threats (coercive diplomacy and the military option) and negotiations. Talks, however, were always doomed and designed to probably fail because they came with preconditions or demands that were inherently unacceptable to Pyongyang. The U.S. state bureaucracy tolerated failure in negotiations because there was no danger, and secretly welcomed it because the real problems would start with a resolution of the supposed crisis. Peace on the Korean peninsula would erode the U.S. military presence and forward strategy in East Asia, and negotiated peaceful coexistence with a defiantly independent North Korea on the basis of its nuclear deterrent might well encourage other countries to follow that path and undermine U.S. global hegemony. Over the years, U.S. negotiations with North Korea have manifested this tension between the president’s desire to “do something” and the state’s desire to “do nothing” in order to preserve the status quo. But the Donald Trump presidency presents a new dimension to the drama with its distinctive level of dissonance, reaching public antagonism, between the president and the wider state apparatus. North Korea and the United States are so vastly different in historical experience, size, motivation, and governance that it is useful to see their relationship as a struggle between an angler, small but focused on the main task, and an octopus, gigantic and powerful but discordant and without a clear and unifying focus other than its voracious appetite. The U.S. Octopus and the Child Emperor Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man battled with a marlin, a giant fish longer than his own boat. The United States, in contrast, can be better considered an octopus for one main reason. Marlins, fish, and animals in general (both human and nonhuman) all have brains that basically control the rest of their bodies. The octopus is different: “Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting.”3 The octopus has a decentralized intelligence and decision-making system, which makes it a better analogy for the United States than a marlin. The Trump administration has a very soft center that exacerbates, though did not create, the dysfunctional, uncoordinated octopoid nature of the state. The tentacles of this particular octopus are not merely large in relation to the governing and guiding center, they are also fundamentally disproportional. The physical infrastructure arm is decrepit, the part representing social services such as health is enervated, while that of the military and the wider so-called national security apparatus is grossly bloated.4 This is, again, not unique to the United States and long precedes Trump, although he has markedly worsened the state of affairs. The State Department, long the poor relation of U.S. foreign policy compared to the military, has been eviscerated. So much has been written about Trump’s psychology that there is no need to repeat it here. He is like a child emperor who is managed by devious and more knowledgeable courtiers, any of whom he can (and often does) banish on a whim. No modern presidency has had as much opposition and pushback from the bureaucracy and the political elite in general, as articulated by much of the media and instrumentalized by Russiagate, as Trump. The fundamental, though unspoken, criticism of the foreign policy elite is that he does not understand that he is running an empire, not just a country. He does not value alliances and the soft power that is such an essential component of the empire. His knowledge is fragmentary and his strategy incoherent. He is not alone in that, but he takes these failings further than most. However, it is Trump’s very ignorance of his imperial role and his narcissistic, disheveled personality that paradoxically present a faint possibility of peace breaking out on the Korean peninsula. A cleverer president, such as Barack Obama, would not countenance peace, but Trump might just stumble across it. The chances are low but substantial enough to cause anguish across most of the foreign policy establishment. Nevertheless, there are indications that some, as we shall see, are looking for ways to mitigate the consequences so that, if Trump does succeed in “solving the North Korean crisis” and perhaps picking up a Nobel Peace Prize, the damage to U.S. hegemony in general and to geopolitical strategy in East Asia in particular will be limited. Kim’s Peace Offensive and Its Main Driver The 2018 New Year’s Address by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ushered in remarkable new developments.5 He claimed that advances in North Korea’s 2017 nuclear deterrence meant that “in no way would the United States dare to ignite a war against [him] and [his] country.” It is likely that the confidence the deterrent provided formed the foundation that enabled him to launch the diplomatic peace offensive. The United States portrays matters quite differently, claiming that “maximum pressure” has compelled Pyongyang to sue for peace on U.S. terms. Clearly, which driver—confidence or desperation—offers the better explanation is of utmost importance. If it is maximum pressure, that is, the intensification of economic and diplomatic warfare and the military threat, then its continuance and escalation where possible will bring victory: North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear deterrent and whatever consequences might follow that. If the driver is confidence, both in the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent and the ability to withstand U.S. pressure, then things will turn out differently: a refusal to buckle to U.S. demands leading to a stalemate in U.S.-North Korea negotiations, decreasing Chinese and Russian compliance with U.S. demands, and possibly a crisis in South Korea as South Korean president Moon Jae-in gets squeezed between aspirations for Korean détente and opposition to it from the United States. Eighteen months after the launch of the offensive, it is increasingly clear that, in the words of Ruediger Frank, “North Korea Is Not Desperate.”6 Confidence in its deterrent and resilience to withstand maximum pressure has led to a transformation of the diplomatic landscape, increasing support from China and Russia and continued disarray among U.S. ranks. The Angler Casts the Lure, Outflanking Washington and Utilizing Seoul Kim unsuccessfully attempted a direct overture to Trump in 2017. In turn, this led to Trump’s bellicose threats. This time, however, Kim embarked on an outflanking maneuver, ignored Trump, and made the initial overture to Moon. Moon had been swept into power by the Candlelight Revolution but, despite his rhetoric, it soon became clear that he was not going to make much progress on promoting peace on the peninsula. He was not strong enough to stand up to the United States or to the domestic conservative/military bloc. Since they had no interest in peace, except perhaps for the peace that follows conquest, as long as he was subservient to them, he would achieve little.7 And so it turned out.8 Indeed, Kim made this point in his address though he diplomatically refrained from naming Moon. He then played the Olympics card, suggesting that the North participate because “it is natural for us to share their pleasure over the auspicious event and help them.”9 The Winter Olympics held in Pyeongchang in February 2018 were of great importance to South Korea. Kim’s offer was welcomed by progressives, and of course President Moon himself. The North’s participation was not something the United States or conservatives could publicly oppose, although they were clearly unhappy about it, hiding behind the argument that an excluded North Korea would somehow disrupt the games. Thus began the diplomatic peace offensive of 2018. On February 10, 2018, Kim proposed a summit to Moon, who accepted. It took place at Panmunjom on the common border on April 27 of that year. While the relationship with the South is hugely important to North Korea, it is ultimately the United States that counts. The United States dominates South Korea—it is U.S. military power that threatens the independence of North Korea, and U.S. economic and diplomatic power that starves its people. Improving its relationship with the South, on its own, achieves little given Seoul’s limited freedom of action. Moon needs U.S. approval for virtually all aspects of the détente.10 Accordingly, Kim, like a boxer who jabs to the left then strikes on the right, made two overtures to the United States. The Double Overture to the United States: Freeze and Summit The first attracted little attention but was in fact of great importance, containing the kernel of a possible peace accord. On April 21, 2018, the DPRK announced, in a report given by Kim to the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK), a unilateral moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.11 An earlier moratorium, entered into during the final days of Bill Clinton’s administration to promote dialogue, had been withdrawn in 2005 after the George W. Bush administration, having abrogated the Agreed Framework, showed little interest in meaningful negotiations.12 The earlier moratorium was in effect before North Korea had tested a nuclear weapon (and would not have been if Bush had stuck to the Agreed Framework) or long-range missiles. This time was different. Kim claimed that tests were “no longer necessary” and that the task of constructing a deterrent was complete. The rhetoric masked a couple of significant issues. All countries that have developed nuclear weapons have needed physical tests in the early stages. For example, the United States conducted over one thousand such tests. Israel is the only exception, presumably because the testing was done by those who provided the technology. The United States and other leading nuclear weapon states signed test-ban treaties because their technology had reached the stage where such tests were no longer necessary and testing could be conducted without an actual explosion in what are known as subcritical tests.13 On April 21, 2018, Kim declared that North Korea had conducted subcritical tests. While claims are not proof, they can establish a useful degree of ambiguity if they are credible, as this one seems to be.14 The second leg of the deterrent—long-range missiles—also offers uncertainty. The big issue is whether North Korea has mastered reentry technology. A warhead reentering the atmosphere needs to be protected against the extreme heat generated, otherwise it will be destroyed before it reaches its target. Although Kim has claimed that this has been achieved, some foreign experts are skeptical. Thus, the moratorium provides what might be termed an ambiguity buffer, which, as we shall see, may turn out to be highly significant in that it allows U.S. officials to accept a freeze on further tests and a cap on North Korea’s nuclear program because it has not yet developed a real capacity to retaliate against the U.S. mainland. The moratorium on tests also addresses a core component of the U.S. so-called North Korea crisis. As noted at the beginning of this article, North Korea does not pose a meaningful threat to the United States. This is irrespective of issues such as reentry capability. North Korea is just too small and, even if it had a handful of fully functioning nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a unilateral attack is just not feasible. Nothing would be achieved—defeat, perhaps obliteration, would be inevitable. The threat of retaliation as a deterrent is one thing; an aggressive attack is quite another. The myth of the North Korean threat is a product of U.S. domestic politics generated over decades. It is a bogus fear accorded credibility partly by relentless propaganda, but also by the inevitable visibility of the development process. Nuclear and missile tests give politicians, officials, and the media a flag to wave; it is the testing of weapons rather than the weapons themselves that tends to attract political and hence public attention. This leads some to come up with what is called the Israel model of managing public perception, an issue to which we will return.15 However, it was the second overture that garnered by far the most attention. It was political theater pitched to a reality television host, and the bait was irresistible. Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security advisor, went from meeting Kim in Pyongyang to Washington, where he invited the United States to a summit on behalf of Kim, to which Trump—who sees himself as a superb negotiator who can dare to tread, and win, where his predecessors did not—agreed.16 Will Kim succeed in doing what his father and grandfather failed to, that is, hooking the U.S. president to haul him in for serious negotiations about peaceful coexistence? Only time will tell, but the metaphor of the fisher catching a large creature with patience, guile, and perseverance and bringing it to shore offers insights. The creature is large and strong, and the fishing line is relatively weak. If the fisher allows the prey to swim away, then eventually it will come to the end of the line and it will break. If the fisher hauls it in too impatiently, the creature will resist, again breaking the line. As Hemingway’s Old Man says: “I could make the line fast. But then he could break it. I must hold him all I can and give him line when he must have it.”17 Hemingway’s target was a marlin, but Kim’s is an octopus, a much more complicated creature. The U.S. establishment reacted to Trump’s acceptance of the summit invitation with dismay, chagrin, frustration, and concern.18 Interestingly, disapproval was often couched in sexual terms as a homophobic delegitimization device: it was variously described as “bromance diplomacy” and “improvisational flirtation.”19 Establishment disapproval is only one part of the problem. The octopoid nature of the U.S. state is compounded by Trump’s incoherent presidential management. He does, after all, personally appoint key staff and, in this context, that means Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Bolton’s recent replacement Robert O’Brien. No leader has a completely free hand and the pool of candidates is limited by various constraints. Nevertheless, the objective must be to have advisors who are broadly supportive of the leader’s vision—that is, if the leader has a vision at all, and it can be argued that Trump indeed does not. In this case, professed loyalty to Trump and a competitive disposition may be the most desired qualifications.20 O’Brien’s position on Korea is as yet unclear, but he is likely to take his lead from Pompeo. At the time, Bolton was independent and deeply hostile to negotiations with North Korea (and any other country for that matter), far preferring to bully and threaten. He thrived on antagonism toward most of the rest of the world and the resulting tensions. Negotiated peace was not in his lexicon. Pompeo, in contrast, is rather more difficult to pin down. His Middle East policy is clearly bedeviled by his evangelical Christianity, suggesting that God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran, but in respect to East Asia we might expect him to be more rational, pragmatic, and untroubled by any principles, as befits a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.21 Pompeo may entertain a deal if it were consistent with his strategy for preserving U.S. hegemony and, perhaps more importantly, his personal ambitions. Pompeo and Bolton reportedly had conflicting visions and were natural rivals.22 The foreign policy establishment, military or civilian, has no compelling reason to support a settlement and will oppose it, as overtly or covertly as needed. Thus, we have the U.S. octopus with the central brain exercising relatively little control over the tentacles, which are opposed to defusing tensions. Within the central brain, we have Trump: confused, narcissistic, and impulsive but also manipulable. And who better to manipulate him than advisors such as Pompeo, Bolton, O’Brien, and their ilk? It is often claimed that Kim is tricking Trump, and while there is some truth to that, it also draws on a deep well of racial stereotyping that bears little relationship to historical reality.23 All foreign leaders attempt to play the U.S. president—just think of Justin Trudeau, Theresa May, and Shinzō Abe—but with Trump success is ephemeral.24 Kim has to try to maneuver Trump into a deal, but ultimately his agency, as that of any foreigner, is limited. The real and decisive struggles are always in Washington.25 This is the key to understanding the political theater of the Trump-Kim summits. Other Denizens in Korean Seas The various countries in or adjoining East Asia have a strong interest in the tussle between the angler and the octopus, although there is diversity between them and ambivalence within them. Japan, especially under Abe, is keen to keep tensions high (though perhaps not boiling over) because it advances remilitarization and distracts the Japanese electorate from scandals at home.26 China and Russia, despite the obvious differences between them, have an overarching commonality. They are both facing U.S. belligerence, desperate to avoid war with the United States or to put it off as long as possible, and willing to sacrifice North Korean interests for this strategic objective. However, as U.S./Western aggressiveness mounts—Russiagate, Skripal, South China Sea, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), trade war, Syria, Huawei, and so on—the case for appeasement in Korea or elsewhere is weakened and they are forced together.27 Nevertheless, their position on Korea remains ambivalent, reflecting their weakness relative to the United States. Instead of taking a firm line against U.S.-led sanctions against North Korea in the UN Security Council—sanctions that are a clear violation both of the UN Charter and of the norms of international law—they have compromised and horse traded, using a strategy of watering down resolutions and then not implementing them rigorously.28 This strategy has been employed in other conflict areas, especially in the Middle East, and the reasons are clear enough. Not merely are they much weaker militarily than the United States, but the Security Council is constructed in such a way that the United States is undefeatable. For instance, a Russian resolution condemning the April 14, 2018, missile attack on Syria by the United States, together with Britain and France, was easily defeated despite the attack being a blatant violation of international law and the UN Charter.29 However, compromise yields the legal and moral high ground to the United States, whose sense of entitlement and exceptionalism is thereby reinforced and its intransigence, not least regarding Korea, strengthened. U.S. commandeering of the Security Council is one of the great triumphs of its foreign policy in that it greatly magnifies and legitimizes U.S. aggression. U.S. sanctions become UN sanctions and countries around the world reluctantly or enthusiastically implement U.S. power to starve North Korea into submission; some 40 percent of its people “struggle with food insecurity and undernutrition and lack of access to basic services.”30 This in the name of the United Nations and the so-called international community. South Korea between Autonomy and Subservience South Korea is a very special case. It was created by the United States in 1945 as a client state, hewed from the detritus of the Japanese empire as a bulwark protecting subjugated Japan against contagion from the Eurasian mainland. As a linchpin of U.S. East Asia strategy, it benefited in many ways from its subservience to the United States, receiving massive aid and access to the U.S. market (to Trump’s later regret).31 But benefits can also be bonds. Despite considerable economic and social growth, it is still a long way from independence. Its military is under U.S. control during wartime, but does any other time really matter?32 The deployment of THAAD, whose radar provides surveillance of Chinese ICBM launch sites but whose interceptors provide little defense against North Korea in the event of war, is just one example of South Korea’s interests being sacrificed to U.S. strategic objectives.33 However, South Korea’s history can also be viewed as an ongoing struggle, with successes and setbacks, to wrest autonomy and eventual independence from the United States. Moon exemplifies this conflict, partly inner, partly public, between subservience and rebellion. And there are two ways in which Moon is seeking a path out of this dilemma. After initial hesitation, he responded to Kim’s invitation for a summit. The meeting went well and others followed, but the limited power of the two Koreas to achieve much under the shadow of the United States suggests that the extravagant hope of observers such as David Kang that their initial summit “will be more important than any meeting between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump” is fanciful.34 Moon is also seeking to be an intermediary between Washington and Pyongyang, but this pretension is becoming increasingly hollow despite much wishful thinking in South Korea, illustrated particularly by the liberal newspaper Hankyoreh.35 The Racist Trope of the Fiendishly Clever Oriental It is quite common to describe Kim, along with his father and grandfather before him, as fiendishly clever, in the way that “devious Orientals” are often portrayed in supposed contradistinction to Westerners, who are portrayed as forthright and honest. As Bruce Cumings, among others, has pointed out, “cunning and shrewd are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians.”36 There are many variations on the theme and an extensive literature going back hundreds of years. The North Korean negotiating team is much more experienced, disciplined, and focused than its U.S. counterpart. For instance, Kim Myong-gil, the current lead negotiator, has worked on negotiations with the United States since the Agreed Framework talks in the early 1990s and lives in New York, working at the DPRK mission to the United Nations. There is no one on the U.S. side that comes near to matching his experience. Nevertheless, the strategy is not devilishly cunning. For one thing, there are not many options for a small country trying to defend itself against the belligerent U.S. behemoth. Foreign analysts often construct fanciful justifications to explain away what is, essentially, a fairly obvious response to imperialist aggression. However, Pyongyang can make some choices and there are a number of ways in which it could do better. It could improve its communications. As Harold Pinter has pointed out, the “United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road” when it comes to propaganda, and while North Korea does not have the resources and power to match, it need not be as inept as it is.37 It could, for example, make better use of the UN Charter; the United States may be able to bully and bribe the United Nations as an institution but it cannot do so with the founding document. The Charter may be continually broached, but it is clear that North Korea is broadly compliant and the United States frequently in violation—a point that should be forcefully reiterated, preferably in liaison with countries in a similar position.38 Denuclearization: The Confucian Albatross The main problem with North Korea’s diplomatic strategy, and one for which lack of power and resources is no excuse, is the centrality of the term denuclearization. What North Korea wants is peaceful coexistence with the United States. It needs, as it has frequently stated, the United States to drop its hostility policy, cease economic and diplomatic warfare, remove the military threat, live in regular diplomatic and economic intercourse with the DPRK, and recognize, as a member of the United Nations should, its legitimacy and sovereignty. Denuclearization does not address any of these issues but rather diverts attention from them. Denuclearization plays into U.S. hands because however much North Korea might talk about “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” of turning the Korean peninsula “into a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats,” and indeed of bilateral or global disarmament, the United States has a much louder megaphone.39 However many times North Korea may reiterate that it will not countenance unilateral disarmament, for most people that is what the negotiations are all about.40 The North Korean proposal for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is confusingly vague, at least in public discourse. Does it just cover land-based weapons or also those of the sea? If so, how far away? Does it include the U.S. nuclear umbrella?41 Moreover, does a geographical limit make any sense in a world where nuclear weapons have been a strategic weapon to be delivered from a great distance and, since the 1960s, from the U.S. mainland itself? Here, the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula suffers from the same yawning fallacy as proposals for a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone: if the major nuclear power involved, the United States, can strike targets within the zone from anywhere in the world, then the nuclear-free zone offers no protection.42 The North Korean emphasis on nuclear weapons is also misplaced. If the United States does invade North Korea, it will be by using what is now the standard procedure—U.S. airpower, local ground troops, and special forces for decapitation and asset seizure—not nuclear weapons, which are primarily a deterrent or, if used aggressively, would be employed only against large, indigestible countries such as Russia and China. Furthermore, and with deep irony, there has been a transformation of the nuclear weapons calculus since 1945. Then, nuclear weapons were the sole prerogative of the richest of the rich: the United States. They have since become a great leveler, potentially protecting the weak against the powerful, which is why the United States is so concerned about proliferation.43 For all these reasons, North Korea allowing denuclearization to occupy center stage of negotiations is very unwise. How has it come to pass? The answer would seem to lie in an undue Confucian deference to Kim Il-sung, who was particularly concerned about the nuclear threat. In the late 1970s, the United States had about seven hundred tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea.44 And in the 1970s it was South Korea, not North Korea, that was developing nuclear weapons.45 Changing circumstances should produce new, appropriate strategies, but North Korean thinking is still trapped in the past. The Political Theater of Summitry and Pushback Kim Jong-un’s diplomatic offensive unleashed a flurry of summits: three with Trump, three with Moon, five with Xi Jinping, and one with Vladimir Putin.46 These attracted a huge amount of media attention, especially because of their rarity and theatricality. The leader of North Korea had met with counterparts in the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and to a lesser extent South Korea over the years, but the Singapore summit was a historic first. Summits are, by their nature, theatrical and imbued with symbolism. Summits within the imperial framework, such as those between the United States and South Korea, carry little weight, although the minor power naturally attempts to inflate their importance. A summit with an independent, even adversarial, leader is quite another matter. Since the United States is the global hegemon and far more powerful than any other country, there is always opposition to presidential meetings with other leaders, even of large countries such as the Soviet Union/Russia and China. To have such a meeting with a small, defiant country such as North Korea was unthinkable until Trump came along. A summit accords legitimacy to a foreign leader, the argument goes, and legitimacy should only be bestowed on the obedient, or in the cant phraseology, a “member of the international community,” not a rogue regime. Bolton spoke for many when he said: “There’s no way we should give North Korea a peace treaty. They’re lucky to have a meeting with the president of the United States.”47 Bilateral summits are worth more than multilateral ones or those that take place as an adjunct to an international meeting, and the location has great significance. The host gains added stature and if neither side gives way, then a third location—Singapore or Hanoi—is a compromise solution. Summits are choreographed and scripted, with the substantive discussions remaining private and, if things go according to plan (which they did in Singapore but not in Hanoi), a joint statement, usually anodyne, is crafted by officials from both sides and signed by the leaders. Leaking is very much in the U.S. tradition, but leaks are done for a purpose and may well present a distorted version of what has been agreed in private. Much of the importance of summits is the reaction of power elites to what was agreed, and what is thought to have been agreed, or to the very fact that the meeting took place at all. This has been particularly the case in the Trump-Kim summits, where pushback from the establishment has dominated the media coverage and hence public awareness. The difficulty of ascertaining the significance of these summits is compounded by the indecipherability of Trump himself. When Kim described a letter from Trump as “excellent” and is reportedly “appreciating the political judging faculty and extraordinary courage of President Trump,” it is clear, despite the stilted translation, that he is encouraging Trump to continue the dialogue despite opposition from the elite. Trump’s unscripted words and his tweets display, on the surface at least, an astounding lack of understanding of the issues. He is like a 5-year-old, wandering through a conference of weapons manufacturers and generals, admiring the baubles, dazzled by the toys, but not really comprehending what the adults are talking about. The Washington Post reported thus on Trump’s comments about Kim in May 2019, after North Korea had tested some short-range missiles and just after the Department of Justice (with or without his approval) seized North Korea’s second largest ship, the Wise Honest, as it traveled toward Indonesia: But Trump portrayed the North Korean dictator as a leader who believes, as the president himself said he does, that his country has “tremendous economic potential,” but who understands he can’t develop it while still pursuing his nuclear ambitions. “He knows that with nuclear, that’s never going to happen, only bad can happen,” Trump said. “He understands. He is a very smart man; he gets it.” The president—a former real estate developer—also cast Kim’s opportunities through the lens of his previous passion. North Korea, the president said, is “located between Russia and China on one side, and South Korea on the other. It’s all waterfront property. It’s a great location, as we used to say in the real estate business.”48 The downside of great locations, as Trump’s father exemplified, is that they attract predators. Korea’s location has been the prime reason that it has attracted the attention of imperialists over the years, be they Mongolian, Japanese, or American. And unilateral disarmament is not the solution to that problem.49 However, it seems that behind the clichés many of the adults, if we take the Washington Post as representing them, do not understand much either. The Singapore Summit successfully brought together, for the first time, the leaders of the United States and North Korea. It produced a joint statement that was suitably aspirational and vague, with the potential to peacefully defuse tension in East Asia. So successful was it in this regard that it unleashed a torrent of backlash as the various tentacles of the octopus signaled their disapproval. The military, current and former officials, the security industry incorporating the intelligence community, and most think tanks all prophesized doom if peace broke out.50 Various state agencies, notably the Treasury and Department of Justice, did what they always do in such circumstances—they took action in an attempt to derail any peace process.51 In South Korea, the conservatives were particularly worried by the prospect of a U.S. rapprochement with Pyongyang allowing Moon’s détente to move forward and perhaps establish a peace regime that would erode their power.52 The mainstream media, in the United States and the West generally, acted as a cheerleader, collator, and disseminator of the pushback process. Perhaps the most prominent and flagrant ploy was to accuse North Korea of not honoring commitments that it had not actually made given that the Singapore statement was intentionally vague. Naturally, no mention was made of U.S. failure to promote the peace process, nor of its attempts to hinder and prohibit, through its control of the so-called United Nations Command (not in fact a UN body), inter-Korean détente.53 There were, however, occasional chinks in the propaganda curtain. For instance, CNN’s Will Ripley demolished the cheating accusation and injected a dose of reality—U.S. demands for “complete denuclearization” upfront was “a nonstarter for a nation that remains deeply suspicious of the outside world and would never leave itself strategically vulnerable simply for the promise of economic gain.”54 So much for Trump’s real-estate fantasies. However, Ripley was very much a lone figure in the media landscape. The campaign to demolish Trump’s idiosyncratic and confused peace negotiation had a natural, if unexpected, culmination in the Hanoi Summit. It was widely and reasonably supposed that this would follow the Singaporean format of happy photos and a joint statement of vague promise. It would be the calm before the storm and the real battle would be in Washington.55 That a further attempt to derail negotiations would be made was no surprise, but the fact that it happened in Hanoi and not later in Washington was. It is generally supposed that the botching was deliberately engineered by Bolton with possible assistance from Pompeo. According to Japanese analyst Kuni Miyake: When Trump was scheduled to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vietnam, Bolton seems to have been successful in convincing—probably with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—him that he should walk out of the negotiation room unless Kim agreed to the so-called big deal based on the Libyan nuclear agreement of 2004.56 Trump’s incomprehension about the issues, in particular what would be acceptable to the Koreans, and his susceptibility to being manipulated is clear enough, but it remains a mystery why he allowed himself to be publicly shafted. Perhaps he saw it as part of his unpredictability shtick and confirmation, in his eyes at least, that he was a smart negotiator who could walk away from a deal today to get a better one tomorrow. The bungled summit at Hanoi led to a stalemate. It seemed that the establishment had won, that the octopus would be untrammeled by the dangers of reducing tension in Korea and invigorated by the rapidly deteriorating relationship with China, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. Shards of Hope in the Detritus of Hanoi Gearing up for the 2020 presidential election, Trump needed something to tout as a foreign policy success. The confrontation with China was, predictably, producing all sorts of unwelcome consequences. The attempted coup in Venezuela had stalled. Fulminating against Iran was all very well, but Trump had a healthy fear of being dragged into another land war in the Middle East, and with a much more formidable adversary than Iraq or Afghanistan. When he was nearly maneuvered into an attack on Iran, he blinked. He became increasingly wary of Bolton and his penchant for war.57 Kim took various steps to rescue the situation, attempting to draw the United States into meaningful negotiations but also continuing to prepare for the likelihood that the line would be broken and that the octopus, rather than being drawn into peaceful coexistence, would break free and resume the attack. On April 13 of this year, he gave a major policy speech before the Supreme People’s Assembly, in which he said, inter alia: At the second DPRK-U.S. summit, we expressed our decision to take more prudent and trustworthy measures after setting stages and courses indispensable for the implementation of the June 12 DPRK-U.S. Joint Statement and expected a response from the U.S. to it. But the U.S. came to the talks, only racking its brains to find ways that are absolutely impracticable.… But as President Trump keeps saying, the personal ties between me and him are not hostile like the relations between the two countries and we still maintain good relations, as to be able to exchange letters asking about health anytime if we want. If the U.S. adopts a correct posture and comes forward for the third DPRK-U.S. summit with a certain methodology that can be shared with us, we can think of holding one more talk. However, what I feel now is if there will be any need to keep an attachment to the summit with the U.S. just because of the issue of sanctions relief. Anyway, we will wait for a bold decision from the U.S. with patience till the end of this year but I think it will definitely be difficult to get such a good opportunity as the previous summit.… Only when…written content favorable for the interests of both sides and acceptable to each other [is provided], I will sign the agreement without reserve.58 While he set December 31 as an ultimatum date, Kim did not specify exactly what measures the DPRK would take if the United States did not return to negotiations in good faith and agree to a mutually acceptable compromise, merely warning of “another path.”59 He cautioned that sanctions relief, though welcome, was not the essential issue. As a subsequent Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement reiterated, the hostility policy was “the root cause that pushed [North Korea] into a nuclear state.”60 In early May, after the beginning of the first round of joint U.S.-Republic of Korea military exercises labeled Dong Maeng (Alliance), North Korea tested some short-range ballistic missiles. These did not violate the self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range missiles but were a warning that the moratorium was contingent on U.S. movement toward peace.61 If that was a stick, then maintaining and developing the personal relationship with Trump was the carrot. This was done by an exchange of letters: on June 11, 2019, Trump received what he described as “a beautiful letter” from Kim and, in return, Kim received “an excellent letter” from Trump containing “interesting proposals.” These were not specified, but Kim complimented the U.S. president for his “political judging faculty and extraordinary courage.”62 This strange and surprising bonhomie between what not so long ago were the “Rocket Man” and the “dotard” remains a fascinating mystery. On the Korean side, it is clearly instrumental, for all foreign leaders must try to cultivate a good relationship with U.S. presidents, whatever they might privately think of them. For Trump, it is probably more psychological than political, reflecting his sense of insecurity.63 Perhaps now that Trump has a new best friend as British Prime Minister—he describes Boris Johnson as “Britain[’s] Trump,” and there can be no higher accolade—the relationship with Kim will become less significant.64 As the veteran Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pointed out, personal relationships can be important but they are subsidiary to political imperatives.65 North Korea’s recently promoted First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui has described the Trump-Kim relationship as “mysteriously wonderful.”66 Mysterious it certainly is, but given Trump’s volatility and the underlying thrust of U.S. policy, how long it will remain wonderful and to what effect is another matter. Kim meanwhile has continued his campaign to improve relations with Russia and China to considerable success, at least in terms of political theater and symbolism. These visible aspects are very important, but the longer-term impact can be difficult to ascertain and the vital private discussions, agreements, and, more crucially, disagreements are below the surface and we can only speculate about them. For instance, the long-awaited summit between Putin and Kim that finally took place in Vladivostok from April 24 to 26 produced talk about “international security guarantees” with Russia as one of the guarantors.67 This sent a warning to Washington—which unfortunately has a propensity not to hear, and certainly not to heed, advice—that the security of the DPRK was the key issue in which Russia, and by implication China, were vitally interested. However, security guarantees, Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, and peace treaties are ultimately only scraps of paper whose validity is contingent on political power and interest—and “a piece of paper is not going to do it.”68 The United States can give a reasonably dependable security guarantee to the likes of Japan and South Korea because it is so much stronger than any possible challenger, and would usually quite relish the opportunity to go to war. But neither Russia nor China is in that position in relation to the United States. The credibility of their guarantees would depend on the degree to which U.S. action, say against the DPRK, directly threatened them. However, Putin and Kim no doubt also discussed how U.S. and U.S.-led Security Council sanctions could be circumvented, especially in relation to Korean migrant workers in Russia, though their economic importance is debated.69 Xi’s visit to Pyongyang on June 20 and 21 was a diplomatic coup for Kim, being the first with President Xi on Korean soil. It was also a snub to South Korea, which had been talking for some time of a visit from Xi, only to have it postponed. Again, the symbolism of the public event was important, giving increased domestic prestige to Kim and putting pressure on the United States to move forward with negotiations. Presumably, both leaders discussed in private how to deal with the U.S. problem, which for the Chinese has greatly increased in virulence with attacks on Huawei and the trade war, though it has not reached the existential level felt by North Korea. The summit was yet another reminder that U.S. Korea policy must be analyzed within the context of the struggle to retain hegemony against China.70 The North’s relationship with the South remained in a state of suspended animation. Moon’s inability to stand up to the United States and implement the Panmunjom Declaration was manifested in numerous ways. Continued joint military exercises, the deployment of F-35s (aimed more at China than North Korea), the failure to reopen the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Park, and the decision to build an aircraft carrier—an offensive weapons system par excellence—all added to the souring of the relationship.71 Although there was no formal break, Pyongyang made its displeasure known most tellingly in advising Seoul to stay out of its negotiations with Washington because its subservience had invalidated its role as intermediary, suggesting that “it’s better for the South Korean authorities to mind their own business at home.”72 One of South Korea’s recurring nightmares is being sidelined in the U.S. treatment of Asia, which was one reason that Moon was so keen to assume the role of intermediary between Trump and Kim. But, again, South Korea was shunted to one side, in this case because of its failure to assert independence. Moon was not an honest broker, respected by both sides, but merely a messenger disdained by both. The most pressing political problem for Moon at the moment is the dispute with Japan over reparations for forced labor during the colonial period, which has led to Abe retaliating by imposing export controls on inputs vital to South Korea’s electronics industry.73 South Korea knows full well that, as in the past, if the United States has to choose between its two Northeast Asian clients, it will choose Japan.74 Whether these travails will break Moon or steel him to take a more independent role rather than just courting Trump is as yet unknown. While developments with respect to Russia, China, and South Korea, and Kim’s perseverance and angling skill are important, Washington’s decisions are ultimately what count. Moreover, as previously mentioned, the U.S. “North Korea crisis” is primarily a domestic political issue. It has little military importance in itself (since the North Korea threat is bogus), but it does have serious implications for U.S. global hegemony and its forward strategy against China and Russia. The American Octopus: Surface Convulsions, Internal Machinations The octopoid nature of the U.S. state has manifested in various ways. To begin with, there have been continued rogue actions by state organs. In particular, a New York Federal District Court allowed the sale of the North Korean ship Wise Honest, which had been seized by the United States in May on the grounds that it had infringed Security Council sanctions. The U.S. court decreed that it could be sold and the proceeds given to the U.S. Warmbier family.75 Otto Warmbier was a student given an inordinately long sentence for a petty but symbolic crime in North Korea, in a mechanism somewhat similar to the U.S. plea bargaining system.76 He died, probably as the result of a botched suicide attempt, after being repatriated to the United States.77 The unfortunate Warmbier became a cause célèbre much seized upon, not least by Trump. The actions of different parts of the U.S. state in the Wise Honest affair were clearly in violation of international law, but politically were somewhat different. The seizure might be seen as part of a deep state maneuver to derail U.S.-North Korea negotiations, while the District Court decision was probably more an expression of arrogant, exceptionalist extraterritoriality. The octopus has many tentacles. The thing that naturally captured the most attention was Trump’s invitation to Kim to meet at Panmunjom—a stratagem very much in the Trump style. He outmaneuvered his minders (Bolton was sent to Mongolia for the day) and asserted his presidential authority, securing much media coverage in the process.78 He became the first sitting U.S. president to stand in North Korea, a joke which no journalist should resist.79 The pundits shook their heads and the Democratic Party presidential candidates were apoplectic.80 On the face of it, Trump had broken the logjam and broken through the stalemate. There is some truth to this, including that the renewed contact with Kim (not quite a formal summit) opened up possibilities that Bolton’s derailing of the Hanoi summit had seemed to close off. But perhaps more important than this glittering, newsworthy, and theatrical spectacle, is a New York Times article entitled “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” which appeared on the same day, June 30. In it, authors Michael Crowley and David Sanger claimed that in the weeks leading up to the demilitarized zone meeting, a real idea has been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations. The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for.… While the approach could stop that arsenal from growing, it would not, at least in the near future, dismantle any existing weapons, variously estimated at 20 to 60. Nor would it limit the North’s missile capability.81 The article was important not merely because of what it said, but also because of who wrote it and for whom. Sanger earned his nickname Scoop Sanger in the 1990s from his success in publishing journalistic scoops deriving from his role as a mouthpiece for elements of the intelligence community that wanted to influence government policy.82 It was Sanger who coauthored what was probably the most influential 2018 article—“In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception”—as part of the pushback against the Singapore Summit.83 The obvious inaccuracies in the article and its agenda were so egregious that the executive editor of the Hankyoreh, South Korea’s leading liberal newspaper, wrote a personal open letter to his New York Times counterpart in protest.84 The freeze proposal elaborated in “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea” has been around for some time, stretching back to the 1990s. In 2015, North Korea proposed a freeze on nuclear testing in exchange for a U.S. suspension of its huge military exercises with South Korea.85 The Chinese took this up in their peace proposal of 2017.86 The United States constantly rebuffed the proposal, presumably regarding the exercises not merely as an indispensable preparation for a possible invasion of the North but also presenting the most opportune time to do so when troops were mobilized, tensions were high, and an incident could easily be manufactured to blame North Korea for the outbreak of hostilities.87 The idea of a freeze on testing overlaps with the concept of capping North Korea’s nuclear deterrent so it would continue to exist but not be expanded or exported. The main proponent of this has been Siegfried Hecker, the U.S. nuclear scientist who coined the term three nos—no more bombs, no better bombs, and no export.88 The suggestion has been taken up by, among others, William Perry and James Mattis.89 Hecker claims that it was first proposed to him on a visit to North Korea in 2006 by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.90 The capping proposal could form the basis for a resolution of the issue. From the North Korean side, it has the drawback that it probably leaves the deterrent program incomplete and not thoroughly tested. However, certainty is a luxury that North Korea can forgo in the circumstances. Since the country is, unlike China or Russia, a low-value target, it merely has to attain a level of perceived risk that would deter a U.S. attack. U.S. destruction of China would leave the world at its feet and would, in some eyes, justify considerable risk; the conquest of North Korea would achieve little and would remove a rationale for its forward position in Asia. Even the possibility that the Koreans might be able to retaliate with an ICBM would, in rational calculation, militate against attack. The U.S. position on capping is more complex. As noted, the so-called North Korean crisis is essentially a domestic political issue (with some international implications) of perception rather than a military threat. However, this is not how it is usually portrayed, to a large degree because the officials, generals, politicians, and experts whose opinions dominate the media are dependent on the perception of external threat for their income. As a domestic political issue, it becomes a battleground between Democrats and Republicans, and those within the parties jostling for power. Crowley and Sanger’s article is so important because it looks like kite-flying by powerful forces within the Trump administration. The run-up to the 2020 presidential election has begun. Russiagate has had a slow death, but even the Democrats have acknowledged that the Mueller investigation has failed to deliver.91 In his bid for reelection, Trump will face fierce opposition from the Democrats. Although he has the advantages of incumbency and the immigration issue, the state of the economy over the next year is uncertain and he is beset by numerous foreign policy problems. To appear to solve the North Korean crisis where his predecessors failed would be very welcome. Where Obama left the country in peril, Trump could point out that, on his watch, there have been no more North Korean nuclear and missiles tests, none will happen in the future, and the country is now safe. The fact that the United States was not in danger and that his predecessors did not fail because their policies produced desirable tension in East Asia, kept Japan and South Korea in line, and bolstered the containment of China is of no relevance and those consciously responsible would not admit it. It would be a variant of the Israel model of management of perception rather than reality. With no tests, people would forget today the weapons they had been so frightened about yesterday.92 Trump would also claim that the deal with North Korea proves that he is a great negotiator and that building a relationship with Kim was something that only a person with his qualities could achieve. He ventured where lesser presidents feared to tread. In reality, the freeze/capping proposal has been around for decades, but the United States had not responded. Times have changed and, in this very unequal contest, in North Korea’s favor. North Korea has achieved a sufficiently credible deterrent, with the ambiguity buffer allowing some maneuvering within the U.S. military establishment. North Korea’s relationships with the South, Russia, and especially China have greatly improved. It has shown reliance in the face of vicious economic and diplomatic warfare. Kim has played the angler’s role with skill. North Korea has engaged with the U.S. octopus in a way that has evaded it in the past. What happens now depends on struggles within the octopus. Korean overtures are contingent on U.S. reciprocity and, if Washington does not begin addressing the key issues of security and sanctions, privately if not publicly, then Pyongyang will disengage, probably seeking sanctuary within the bosom of China and Russia as the new Cold War intensifies. Convulsions in the Trump administration in September 2019 may signal a possible breakthrough in Korea policy in the run-up to the 2020 elections. The defenestration of the independent-minded Bolton and his replacement by O’Brien is significant not so much in terms of policy but in relationships. O’Brien shares Bolton’s enthusiasm for bellicose imperialism and has worked under him, but he is reportedly less personally abrasive and less adventurist.93 Bolton’s dismissal was widely welcomed in much of the establishment (not least in the Pentagon, where “there were cheers”). Although O’Brien is a firm advocate for strengthening the U.S. Navy to counter China, he has shown no inclination to precipitate war.94 He has published little on Korea and his book, While America Slept, while an attack on the Obama administration, contains little beyond standard clichéd references.95 Bolton and Pompeo were often in dispute and, in fact, O’Brien was one of Pompeo’s suggestions for a replacement. The rumored promotion of Stephen E. Biegun, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea, to Deputy Secretary of State, replacing a Rex Tillerson appointee, also strengthens Pompeo’s hold on U.S. foreign policy.96 This leaves U.S. Korea policy essentially unchanged but subtly different. If Pompeo decides that a capping deal will improve Trump’s reelection prospects, and if he decides that will advance his own personal ambitions, then he is in a stronger position to make this happen. The Biegun appointment suggests a focus on Korea, which makes sense. The Trump administration is beset with problems at home with threatened impeachment and falling polls, and abroad with multiple challenges to hegemony. Despite all the brouhaha about the difficulty of negotiating with North Korea, it is in fact the most manageable of U.S. foreign policy issues. North Korea is strategic, flexible, would probably accept a “capping” compromise, and poses no military threat. With the rise of China and increased hostility, it is no longer as important as it used to be as a pretext for furthering military presence in Asia. It is essentially a matter of domestic political infighting and perception management. The establishment might be unhappy to cede a perceived success to Trump, but might cede one to Pompeo if he is seen as the best restraint on Trump and as a future “safe” president. However, whether such a peace settlement will prevail against hostility in the mass of the wider octopus remains unlikely and, at best, uncertain. Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic who has written extensively on Asia with a special focus on the Korean peninsula. His most recent work is the entry on Korea for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (Springer Publishing, 2019). Reprinted with permission from the Monthly Review. Notes ↩ Yang Mo-deum, “Korea’s Per-Capita GDP Is Less Than 4% of S.Korea’s,” Chosun Ilbo, September 30, 2016. ↩ For an extended historical survey and analysis of this issue, see Tim Beal, “Korea and Imperialism,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2nd ed., ed. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (New York: Springer, 2019). ↩ Amia Srinivasan, “The Sucker, the Sucker!,” London Review of Books, September 7, 2017. ↩ Jessica T. Mathews, “America’s Indefensible Defense Budget,” New York Review of Books, July 18, 2019. ↩ Kim Jong-un, “New Year Address 2018,” Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2018. ↩ Ruediger Frank, “North Korea Is Not Desperate: The New Geostrategic Environment in East Asia,” 38 North, July 11, 2019. ↩ Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 15, no. 16 (2017); Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy: Update,” Zoom in Korea, September 12, 2017. ↩ Seong Yeon-cheol and Kim Ji-eun, “President Moon Reiterates Commitment to Intense Sanctions and Pressure on North Korea,” Hankyoreh, December 1, 2017. ↩ Kim Jong-un, “Kim Jong Un’s New Year Address,” Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2018. ↩ Yonhap, “South Korea Seeking Sanctions Waiver for Road Survey in North Korea” Korea Times, January 22, 2019. ↩ “Third Plenary Meeting of Seventh C.C., WPK Held in Presence of Kim Jong Un,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs DPRK, April 21, 2018; Yonhap, “North Korea Decides to Suspend Nuclear, Missile Tests, Shut Down Atomic Test Site,” Korea Times, April 21, 2018. ↩ “False Analogies: North Korea’s History of Missile Test Moratoria,” 38 North, May 6, 2019. ↩ Kyodo, “US Conducts Subcritical Nuclear Test,” ABC, February 24, 2006; Ian Sample, “Is Britain Conducting Nuclear Tests?,” Guardian, February 25, 2006. ↩ Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “North Korea’s Nuclear Program Isn’t Going Anywhere,” Foreign Affairs, August 13, 2018. ↩ Jeffrey Lewis, “‘Your Mission Is to Keep All This from Collapsing into Nuclear Hellfire,’” Foreign Policy, September 18, 2018. ↩ Mark Landler, “North Korea Asks for Direct Nuclear Talks, and Trump Agrees,” New York Times, March 8, 2018. ↩ Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons‎, 1952). ↩ Jennifer Rubin, “Damage Control at White House to Reverse Trump’s Stunning Blunder,” Washington Post, March 9, 2018. ↩ Victor Cha and Christian A. Katz, “What to Expect at the Second North Korea Summit,” Foreign Affairs, February 22, 2019; William J. Burns, “The Lost Art of American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, March 27, 2019. ↩ Stephen Costello, “Time to Internationalise Diplomacy with North Korea,” East Asia Forum, June 17, 2019. ↩ “Pompeo Says God May Have Sent Trump to Save Israel from Iran,” BBC, March 22, 2019. ↩ Thomas Wright, “John Bolton and Mike Pompeo Are Headed for a Clash,” Politico, May 9, 2018. ↩ Michael J. Green, “Pyongyang Is Playing Washington and Seoul,” Foreign Policy, April 27, 2018. ↩ Tsuneo Akaha, “Abe’s Gamble on Trump Threatens to Backfire,” East Asia Forum, July 8, 2019. ↩ Jeffery Lewis, “The Real North Korea Summit Is Inside the Trump Administration,” Foreign Policy, February 26, 2019. ↩ Tim Beal, “Abe Pulls It Off, but It Will End in Tears,” Zoom in Korea, October 24, 2017. ↩ James Griffiths, “Chinese Defense Chief Says His Trip to Russia Is a Signal to the US,” CNN, April 4, 2018. ↩ Tim Beal, “The United Nations and the North Korean Missile and Nuclear Tests,” NZ Journal of Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (2007). For a superb analysis of the role of the United States in establishing the United Nations and its strategic ambivalence to it, see Peter Gowan, “US : UN,” New Left Review 24 (2003); Joby Warrick, “How Russia Quietly Undercuts Sanctions Intended to Stop North Korea’s Nuclear Program,” Washington Post, September 11, 2017. ↩ “Security Council Rejects Russian Request to Condemn Airstrikes in Syria,” UNSC, April 14, 2018. ↩ Tapan Mishra, “2019 DPR Korea Needs and Priorities,” UN Resident Coordinator for DPR Korea, March 6, 2019. ↩ Philip Rucker, “Trump: ‘We May Terminate’ U.S.-South Korea Trade Agreement,” Washington Post, April 28, 2017. ↩ Yu Yong-weon, “S. Halts Process of Returning Full Troop Control to S.Korea,” Chosun Ilbo, September 18, 2017. ↩ Gregory Elich, “THAAD Comes to Korea, But at What Cost?,” Counterpunch, August 16, 2016. ↩ David Kang, “The Moon–Kim Summit Is the Main Event,” East Asia Forum, April 8, 2018. ↩ “Blue House’s Potential Role of Mediator in NK-US Deadlock Is Significant,” Hankyoreh, March 19, 2019. ↩ Bruce Cumings, “Fear and Loathing on the Pyongyang Trail: North Korea and the United States,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 3, no. 12 (2005). ↩ Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and Politics,” Nation, December 7, 2005. ↩ “Venezuelan Foreign Minister Announces Group to Protect UN Charter’s Principles,” Telesur, February 14, 2019. ↩ Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, “Pyongyang Joint Declaration of September 2018,” ROK Government, September 19, 2018; Nicholas L. Miller and Vipin Narang, “The Year of Living Dangerously with Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Affairs, January 11, 2019. ↩ Jung E-gil, “Kim Jong-un Says He Has No Plans for Unilateral Denuclearization,” Hankyoreh, September 11, 2018. ↩ Simon Denyer, “Confusion over North Korea’s Definition of Denuclearization Clouds Talks,” Washington Post, January 16, 2019. ↩ Morton Halperin, Peter Hayes, and Leon Sigal, “A Korean Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone Treaty and Nuclear Extended Deterrence: Options for Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula,” NAPSNet Special Reports, April 12, 2018. ↩ Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability,” Foreign Affairs 91, no. 4 (2012). ↩ Franz-Stefan Gady, “How the ‘Deep State’ Stopped a US President from Withdrawing US Troops From Korea,” Diplomat, June 15, 2018. ↩ Peter Hayes and Moon Chung-in, “Park Chung Hee, the CIA & the Bomb,” Global Asia 6, no. 3 (2011). ↩ For a chronology of summits and key events, as well as a bibliography to accompany this article, see Tim Beal, “The Angler and the Octopus: Supplementary Documents to Article Published in Monthly Review,” available athttp://timbeal.net.nz 25 the “Asian Geopolitics” section. ↩ John Bolton, “Interview: Trump-Kim Talks to be ‘A Very Short Meeting’ if Pyongyang Won’t Discuss Denuclearization,” Radio Free Asia, March 23, 2018. ↩ Ashley Parker and Simon Denyer, “Still Angling for a Deal, Trump Backs Kim Jong Un over Biden, Bolton and Japan,” Washington Post, May 27, 2019. ↩ Beal, “Korea and Imperialism.” ↩ Yonhap, “Mattis: N. Korea Is Most Urgent Threat to US,” Korea Herald, December 4, 2018; Lim Min-hyuk, “S. Ambassador Urges Caution in Ending Korean War,” Chosun Ilbo, August 3, 2018; Christopher Hill, “The U.S. Needs a New North Korea Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, September 5, 2018; Alexander Smith, “Experts Dismiss North Korea’s Latest Concession to U.S.,” NBC, October 8, 2018; Hayley Miller, “Leon Panetta Says Trump’s ‘Failed’ North Korea Summit Was ‘Doomed’ from the Start,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2018. ↩ Jacqueline Thomsen, “DOJ Charges North Korean National in Sony, WannaCry Attacks,” Hill, September 6, 2018; “US Imposes Sanctions on Three Top North Korean Officials,” Guardian, December 10, 2018. ↩ “Seoul, Washington Need to Stop Talking up N.Korea Deal,” Chosun Ilbo, July 9, 2018. ↩ Kim Myong-chol and Pak Chol-gu, “DPRK Perspectives on Ending the Korean Armistice,” NAPSnet Policy Forum Online, May 7, 1997. ↩ Will Ripley, “When It Comes to North Korea, Who’s Really Being Deceptive?,” CNN, November 14, 2018. ↩ Lewis, “The Real North Korea Summit Is Inside the Trump Administration.” ↩ Kuni Miyake, “Is John Bolton Our Last Hope?,” Japan Times, July 8, 2019. ↩ Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran,” New York Times, May 28, 2019. ↩ Kim Jong-un, “Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un Makes Policy Speech at First Session of 14th SPA,” Rodong Sinmun, April 13, 2019. ↩ Lee Je-hun, “Kim Jong-un Sets Timeline for Third Summit with US,” Hankyoreh, April 15, 2019. ↩ “S. Secretary of State Slammed,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs DPRK, April 18, 2019. ↩ Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “Why North Korea Is Testing Missiles Again: Is a Much Larger Escalation on the Horizon?,” Foreign Affairs, May 16, 2019. ↩ Simon Denyer, “North Korea’s Kim Receives ‘Excellent Letter’ from Trump, State Media Says,” Washington Post, June 23, 2019; Lee Je-hun, “The Resumption of Trump and Kim’s Correspondence Diplomacy,” Hankyoreh, June 24, 2019. ↩ Isabel Oakeshott, “Britain’s Man in the US Says Trump Is ‘Inept’: Leaked Secret Cables from Ambassador Say the President Is ‘Uniquely Dysfunctional and His Career Could End in Disgrace,’” Mail on Sunday, July 7, 2019. ↩ David Smith, “Trump Hails ‘Good Man’ Boris Johnson and Says of UK: ‘They Like Me Over There,’” Guardian, July 23, 2019. ↩ “Sergey Lavrov’s Interview with the Newspaper Argumenty i Fakty,” Saker, July 17, 2019. ↩ Simon Denyer and Carol Morello, “North Korea Threatens to Suspend Denuclearization Talks with the United States,” Washington Post, March 15, 2019. ↩ Amie Ferris-Rotman and Simon Denyer, “Putin: Kim Jong Un Needs International Security Guarantees to Give Up Nuclear Arsenal,” Washington Post, April 25, 2019. ↩ Gregory Elich, “How Real Is the Trump Administration’s New Flexibility with North Korea?,” Counterpunch, July 12, 2019. ↩ Andrew Salmon, “Kim in Russian Far East for Putin Pow-Wow,” Asia Times, April 24, 2019. ↩ Ellen Nakashima, Gerry Shih, and John Hudson, “Leaked Documents Reveal Huawei’s Secret Operations to Build North Korea’s Wireless Network,” Washington Post, July 22, 2019. ↩ Yu Yong-weon, “Korea Threatens Seoul Over Purchase of Stealth Fighters,” Chosun Ilbo, July 12, 2019; Yi Whan-woo, “North Korea Criticizes Seoul over Military Drills with US,” Korea Times, July 16, 2019; Yu Yong-weon, “Korea to Build Light Aircraft Carrier,” Chosun Ilbo, July 23, 2019. ↩ Kim Hyung-jin, “North Korea Urges South to Stop Mediating between North, US,” AP, June 27, 2019. ↩ Seong Yeon-cheol, “Moon Meets with S. Korea Business Community for Ways to Respond to Export Controls,” Hankyoreh, July 11, 2019. ↩ Lee Min-hyung, “Washington Unwilling to Actively Mediate Seoul-Tokyo Trade Friction,” Korea Times, July 17, 2019; “Korea Cannot Hope for U.S. Support in Spat with Japan,” Chosun Ilbo, July 16, 2019. ↩ Lee Je-hun, “US Federal Court Approves Request to Sell Seized N. Korean Cargo Ship,” Hankyoreh, July 22, 2019. ↩ The Sigley affair, where an Australian student was expelled rather than imprisoned over some misdemeanor, suggests that the North Korean authorities have learned a lesson. Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Accuses Expelled Australian Student of Spying,” New York Times, July 6, 2019. ↩ Doug Bock Clark, “The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage,” QC, July 23, 2018. ↩ David Nakamura, “Beyond ‘Freedom’s Frontier,’ Trump Scores His Biggest Live Show Yet in North Korea,” Washington Post, June 30, 2019. ↩ Seung Min Kim and Simon Denyer, “Trump Becomes First Sitting President to Set Foot into North Korea,” Washington Post, June 30, 2019. ↩ Rachel Siegel, “Democratic Presidential Contenders Slam Trump for His Meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,” Washington Post, June 30, 2019. ↩ Michael Crowley and David E. Sanger, “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” New York Times, June 30, 2019. ↩ Bruce Cumings, “Wrong Again,” London Review of Books 25, no. 23 (2003); Jeffery Lewis, “That Secret Iranian ‘Nuclear Facility’ You Just Found? Not So Much,” Foreign Policy, March 3, 2015; Jeffrey Lewis, “David Sanger: Two Time Loser on Kilju and Kumchang-ri?,” Arms Control Wonk, May 21, 2005. ↩ David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception,” New York Times, November 12, 2018. ↩ Kim Jong-gu, “An Open Letter to the NY Times,” Hankyoreh, December 4, 2018. ↩ Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Offers U.S. Deal to Halt Nuclear Test,” New York Times, January 10, 2015. ↩ Chris Buckley and Somini Sengupta, “S. and South Korea Rebuff China’s Proposal to Defuse Korea Tensions,” New York Times, March 8, 2017. ↩ David E Sanger, “Rex Tillerson Rejects Talks with North Korea on Nuclear Program,” New York Times, March 17, 2017. ↩ Siegfried S. Hecker and Beth Duff-Brown, “Interview with Siegfried Hecker: North Korea Complicates the Long-Term Picture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 5, 2013. ↩ Geoffrey Fattig, “How the U.S. Could Provoke a New Korean War,” Foreign Policy in Focus, December 11, 2017; William Perry and Yi Yong-in, “Former US Secretary of Defense Favors “Three Nos” on North Korean Nukes,” Hankyoreh, October 3, 2016. ↩ Siegfried S. Hecker et al., “Report on North Korean Nuclear Program,” Center for International Security and Cooperation, November 15, 2006. ↩ Dan Balz, “Democrats Are Now Left with One Option to End Trump’s Presidency: The 2020 Election,” Washington Post, July 24, 2019; Marc Fisher, “On Mueller’s Final Day on the National Stage, a Halting, Faltering Performance,” Washington Post, July 24, 2019. ↩ Crowley and Sanger, “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea.” ↩ Peter Baker, “Trump Names Robert O’Brien, a Hostage Negotiator, as National Security Adviser,” New York Times, September 18, 2019. ↩ Karen DeYoung, Josh Dawsey, and John Hudson, “John Bolton’s Turbulent Tenure Comes to a Trumpian End,” Washington Post, September 10, 2019; Robert O’Brien, “The Korean Crisis Demonstrates the Need for a Strong United States Navy,” Daily Caller, November 29, 2010. ↩ Robert C. O’Brien, While America Slept (New York: Encounter, 2016). ↩ John Wagner and John Hudson, “Trump Taps Robert C. O’Brien to Replace John Bolton as National Security Adviser,” Washington Post, September 18, 2019; Josh Rogin, “Trump Is Expected to Tap North Korea Envoy for Deputy Secretary of State,” Washington Post, September 17, 2019. #Trump #KoreaPeace #KimJongUn #DPRK #SouthKorea #NorthKorea

Maternity hospital in Pyongyang (KEEP) by Korea Peace Now! | November 23, 2019 On October 30th, The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea was released by Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing to End the War, a global campaign to educate, organize, and advocate for a Korea peace agreement, led by Women Cross DMZ, Nobel Women’s Initiative, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Korean Women’s Movement for Peace.  The Executive Summary is below, and the entire PDF of this important and illuminating report can be downloaded here. Executive Summary North Korea is one of the most sanctioned countries in the world. While sanctions used to target mostly the country’s military and elite, they have evolved in recent years into an almost total ban on North Korea-related trade, investments, and financial transactions. Several UN agencies have raised alarm at the impact on the population, with growing calls for humanitarian and human rights impact assessments. To better assess this issue, the Korea Peace Now! campaign commissioned the present report from an international and multidisciplinary panel of independent experts, including some with extensive humanitarian field experience in North Korea. The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea represents the first comprehensive assessment of the adverse consequences of these sanctions, drawing on often neglected information from UN agencies on the ground as well as the authors’ combined expertise in public health, law, economics, history, and gender studies. In particular, the report highlights the case of women as one of the vulnerable groups differentially affected by the sanctions. The authors examined the humanitarian, developmental, and gendered impact of sanctions. K E Y FINDINGS : Sanctions are impeding the ability of the country and of international aid organizations to meet the urgent and long-standing humanitarian needs of the most vulnerable parts of the Although the UN Security Council has repeatedly stated that the sanctions are not intended to have adverse humanitarian consequences, its case-by- case exemptions mechanism is insufficient to prevent this outcome in practice. Life-saving aid is being fatally obstructed by delays, red tape, and overcompliance with financial sanctions. Sanctions are also impeding the economic development of the UN and unilateral sanctions have resulted in the collapse of the country’s trade and engagement with the rest of the world, thereby undermining and reversing the progress that North Korea had made in overcoming the economic crisis and famine of the 1990s. Sanctions destabilize North Korean society in ways that have a disproportionate impact on women, resonating with patterns observed in other sanctioned countries. The resulting economic pressure tends to exacerbate rates of domestic violence, sexual violence, and the trafficking and prostitution of women. Sanctions also affect North Korean women differentially due to the dual social expectation that they be the primary caretakers of their families and communities, and workers fully integrated into the economy. Thus, sanctions doubly burden women through their adverse humanitarian and developmental consequences, especially when they impact their livelihood by targeting industries that have high ratios of female workers. The report concludes by raising concerns that the sanctions in their current form may not be reconcilable with international law, especially humanitarian and human rights norms. K E Y  RECOMMENDATIONS : Resolve the security crisis that led to the current situation in accordance with international law. Lift all sanctions that are in violation of international law, in particular of the UN Charter and of applicable human rights and humanitarian norms. Adopt urgently, in interim, all measures available to mitigate and eliminate the adverse consequences of sanctions on the humanitarian and human rights situation in North Korea. Conduct gender-sensitive humanitarian and human rights impact assessments of sanctions currently in place. Ensure women’s equal and meaningful participation in peace and security negotiations and processes, in accordance with UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Take into account gender considerations and the rights of women in all deliberations concerninng sanctions on the DPRK. Download the entire The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea report here. #DPRK #Sanctions #KoreaPeaceNow #NorthKoreanWomen #WomenCrossDMZ #NorthKorea

Demonstrators protest US demands for increasing South Korea’s financial contribution to stationing US Forces Korea on Nov. 18, when the third round of negotiations for the 11th Special Measures Agreement on defense cost-sharing were held in Seoul. (Park Jong-shik, Hankyoreh staff photographer) By Han S. Park | December 1, 2019 | Originally published in Hankyoreh. The US is strongly pushing for South Korea to pay a bigger share of the cost of keeping US troops on the Korean Peninsula. Washington is reportedly asking for around 6 trillion won (US$5.14 billion), five times the total amount of Seoul’s current contribution. That figure appears to include the cost of deploying American strategic assets from bases outside the Korean Peninsula, such as Guam and Hawaii. That also suggests that the US could ask South Korea to send troops or provide financial support for operations in the South China Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. The American demands prompt several considerations, the first of which is the issue of the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) of the South Korean military. The US is demanding an onerous defense contribution from South Korea, even though it still hasn’t given up OPCON. That’s much the same as a shopkeeper demanding that a customer pay for goods they haven’t even received. It doesn’t make sense for South Korea to pay a cost-sharing contribution without regaining OPCON. If South Korea is to respond wisely to the US’ unfair demands, it needs to take a big-picture view of this issue. In geopolitics, the most important yardstick in determining a state’s actions is the “national interest.” That’s the source of the US’ excessive demands for more defense funding. One aspect of the US’ national interest appears to be the containment of China through its Indo-Pacific Strategy; another aspect is the maintenance of American hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region. But the US’ national interest is completely at odds with the national interest that South Korea ought to be pursuing. South Korea is an economic partner of China. But if South Korea is enlisted to pursue the US’ national interest, and in doing so adopts a hostile military stance toward China, China will hardly turn a blind eye to that. Some may think that the US will help South Korea, but did the US provide any help when China was exacting economic retribution on South Korea over the THAAD missile defense system? Furthermore, South Korea’s national interest doesn’t lie in pursuing hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. Those who view the South Korea and the US as being “blood brothers” will reject this argument. But an alliance can only exist when it conforms to each ally’s national interest. It’s particularly important to bear in mind that the domain of geopolitics is ruled by the laws of the jungle, and that a country that goes against its own interest is headed for destruction. Getting entangled in US’ military affairs does not benefit S. Korea South Korea should view American requests for a military presence at the Strait of Hormuz through the lens of its own national interest, not that of the US. The Middle East is a powder keg that not even the US is capable of defusing. Is South Korea prepared to get entangled in the Middle East conflict if it sends ships to the Strait of Hormuz? This past August, Iran gave South Korea official notice that it doesn’t want a South Korean military presence in the Strait of Hormuz. Political leaders who are devoted to South Korea’s national interest shouldn’t take Iran’s position lightly. If South Korea is to establish a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula without being swayed by the powerful countries that surround it, it needs to conclude a peace treaty or a nonaggression pact with the North. Since South Korea is allied with the US and North Korea is allied with China, the US and China would also need to take part in such a treaty. That process could be initiated through a meeting between the leaders of South and North Korea. I think this is the ideal time for that, because there are no political or historical grounds for the US or China to oppose the conclusion of an inter-Korean peace treaty. Even more importantly, an inter-Korean peace treaty could enable North Korea and the US to resolve their chronic hostility and to establish normal diplomatic relations. If the Korean Peninsula, which is the last bastion of the Cold War, is finally turned into a zone of peace, wouldn’t that offer the world a new model for peace? Han S. Park is professor emeritus at the University of Georgia.  Dr. Park has focused his research on the issues of human rights, sustainable development, and East Asian politics. Included in his extensive list of publications are Human Needs and Political Development (1984), China and North Korea (co-authored, 1990), North Korea : Ideology, Politics, Economy (edited, 1996), North Korea: The Politics of Unconventional Wisdom (2002), and North Korea Demystified (2012) #USMilitaryinSouthKorea #KoreaPeace #SouthKorea #USFK #USSouthKorearelations

By Tim Shorrrock | February 9, 2020 | Originally published in The Nation.com On February 9, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite will be the first Korean film to ever compete for an Academy Award. In a history-making sweep on January 13, it received six Oscar nominations, including one in the prestigious Best Picture category. Last Sunday, the Screen Actors Guild gave Parasite’s acting ensemble its top award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, selecting it above the legendary lineups for The Irishman, Bombshell, Jojo Rabbit, and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. For Bong, Parasite’s manic and innovative director, it was overdue recognition. His brilliant exposure of the deep class fissures in South Korea has struck an evocative chord in America—and demonstrates that foreign cinema can penetrate the American psyche. “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” he said after Parasite became the first Korean film to win a Golden Globe. Parasite’s success in the US market is a little surprising, in part because most Americans and the US media show little interest in South Korea’s internal dynamics and complex domestic politics. Yet, despite some criticism, including in this magazine, of Bong’s satiric take on inequality, the film has taught many viewers that there’s an intriguing and even revolutionary side to South Korea outside of K-Pop and the DMZ. Now, if only someone could make a film to correct the myths and assumptions that have driven American policy on the Korean Peninsula for decades and led to the latest breakdown in the Korea peace process that began with such promise in the winter of 2018. Just as the South is often stereotyped as a model capitalist economy that would not exist without the beneficent presence of US troops, North Korea is universally viewed in Washington as a kind of Forever Enemy ruled by an irrational family dynasty that, for no apparent reason, hates the United States and belligerently threatens its friends and allies with nukes. Why they built these weapons is rarely addressed. And the roots of the conflict—the division of Korea in 1945 at the hands of the United States and a war that has never formally ended—are generally ignored. For example: The Great Successor, the acclaimed biography of Kim Jong-un and the nuclear crisis by Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield, doesn’t even mention the fact that the United States first introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s and, after withdrawing them in 1991, still maintains a powerful nuclear force in Northeast Asia. Some commentators dismiss Kim’s fears of the United States—which laid waste to his lands during the Korean War—as sheer fantasy. “Like all dictators, Kim thrives on conflict with the outside world, especially the U.S., which the hermit kingdom’s state-run media likes to call the ‘savage enemy,’” The Dallas Morning News recently proclaimed, as if Kim’s weapons program was due simply to his need for an enemy. To buttress its case, it threw in a quote from B.R. Myers, whose 2010 book The Cleanest Race is, in my view, one of the most distorted books ever written about the North: “Without the U.S., without that enemy figure, [North Korea] really has no reason to exist.” It’s as if the United States is an innocent bystander, just doing its darndest to maintain the peace against a belligerent foe that never lets up. That ahistorical approach also pertains to Pyongyang’s diplomacy with Trump. The consensus in Washington’s think tank world is that Kim’s reluctance to immediately get rid of all his nukes after his 2018 summit with Trump—and his testing last year of missiles that could potentially hit US bases in South Korea, Japan, and Guam during a war or to ward off an attack—are proof of his aggressive intent and his insincerity about seeking peace. Even though no formal agreements have been reached on denuclearization or improving US–North Korea ties, Kim is just “playing” Trump by building up his military forces, the thinking goes. “All these advances, made during a period when the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington was supposedly never better, show that Kim is not interested in disarming,” Eric Brewer, a nuclear analyst and former national security official at the corporate- and contractor-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote this month in a typical comment. For the most part, the media seem to agree, and the American people follow. According to a poll conducted in November by The Economist, 56 percent of Americans consider North Korea to be an enemy of the United States, up from 51 percent in August. Many Democratic leaders are in the distortion game too. “Look, we gave [Kim] everything he’s looking for,” Joe Biden declared at the last Democratic debate on January 14 in explaining why he would refuse to meet with the North Korean leader without preconditions. “The president showed up, met with him, gave him legitimacy, weakened the sanctions we have against him.” Biden also claimed that he would somehow pressure China—which has lately been working with Russia to win support in the UN for a proposal to ease sanctions on North Korea—to force its ally to disarm. None of this was remotely true, but Biden’s claims weren’t challenged by any of his fellow candidates or the press. Thankfully, there is a South Korean who can, as Bong Joon-ho and his ensemble did in Parasite, cut through the fog. Moon Chung-in is a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University and a key adviser to President Moon Jae-in on national security and unification issues. An erudite, affable man well-known to US policy-makers, Moon travels frequently to Washington to unofficially convey South Korea’s views. He’s been to Pyongyang several times, most recently in September 2018, when he accompanied President Moon to his exuberant summit with Kim Jong-un, where a major deal was struck to lower military tensions. There, “I saw the great possibility of peace,” Moon Chung-in said during his latest visit to DC in January. As a result of the North-South agreement in Pyongyang, “there’s been no clashes on the DMZ” since then. The “only violation” of the agreement came in early 2019, he said, when Kim Jong-un ordered a military exercise deploying short-range missiles. But for the North, he said, Trump’s refusal to budge on sanctions as a way to get a deal with Kim is at the heart of their dispute. “For Pyongyang, Washington’s call for dialogue is nothing but a fig leaf to hide its intention to isolate, contain and strangle the North through sanctions and maximum pressure,” he wrote in The Korea Times. “A catastrophic turn does not appear imminent, but time seems to be on nobody’s side.” In public remarks, he also pointed out that the North is increasingly irked by the criticism of its intentions from US politicians. “Their concern is how American political stakeholders take advantage of North Korea for personal political gain.” Here’s the problem, from the South Korean’s perspective: Since the first summit in Singapore, the Trump administration, despite pleadings from Seoul, has refused to lift sanctions on the North, even ones that could have helped President Moon carry out economic projects that he and Kim agreed to at their summit in Pyongyang. The lack of progress in the inter-Korean peace process, and South Korea’s own military buildup, have greatly angered Kim and the North Korean leadership, who in the fall of 2019 resumed their harsh public criticism of the South and the United States. The tensions were quite apparent on January 1, when Kim delivered a New Year’s statement and warned his nation to prepare for more hard times ahead. “The present situation warning of long confrontation with the U.S. urgently requires us to make it a fait accompli that we have to live under the sanctions by the hostile forces in the future,” Kim said in remarks carried by KCNA, the state media outlet. Flanked by hundreds of cadre from his ruling Korean Workers’ Party, Kim talked mysteriously of a “new strategic weapon” he might deliver in the future—but left the door open for dialogue if the United States makes a fundamental change and stops treating North Korea like an enemy. “If the US persists in its hostile policy towards the DPRK, there will never be the denuclearization on the Korean peninsula,” Kim warned, using a phrase that North Korea has been repeating for years, if not decades. His phrasing was repeated word-for-word this week in Geneva, when Ju Yong Chol, one of Kim’s diplomats at the UN, warned that if America’s “hostile policy” continued, the North would have “no reason to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment that the other party fails to honor.” Chol added: “If the United States tries to enforce unilateral demands and persists in imposing sanctions, North Korea may be compelled to seek a new path,” which US officials and generals believe could include reviving the tests of long-range missiles that were suspended in 2017. Unfortunately for the North, Dr. Moon said, many US policy-makers ignore the term “hostile policy,” claiming that Kim’s use of it is just “habitual.” In doing so, he pointed out, they miss a chance to understand how an actual deal might be cut with North Korea under the right conditions. “‘Hostile policy’ is quite seriously meant,” he told a conference on January 6 organized by the Center for the National Interest, a conservative think tank in Washington. They believe the policy “threatens the security of North Korea and hampers the North Korean people’s right to exist.” During the Q&A, I asked Moon to explain what he made of the term, and he provided the most specific explanation I have heard in years of covering the issue. “North Korea has been very clear,” he replied. First, they mean the “elimination of sanctions,” which to them is “the most important indicator of the hostile policy from the United States.”Second, political matters: “Normalize. Make [diplomatic] ties. Set up liaison offices, set up embassies with each other. That would be their most important indicator of ending the hostility.”Third, the military side: “A non-aggression treaty, signing a lasting peace treaty. Obviously suspending joint military exercise and training” with South Korea “and not deploying strategic weapons on the Korean Peninsula.”Finally, the North wants the United States to help make it “a normal country in the international economic system.” That means “not only lifting sanctions but allowing North Korea to be a member of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Asia Development Bank, and to let North Korea engage in normal trade and financial transactions and allow international investment into North Korea. It’s all very clear.” Obviously, meeting those demands would require a major shift in policy on the part of the United States, with North Korea no longer seen as a permanent enemy. For the North, they are an essential part of any deal, just as long-term denuclearization is for the United States. That, Moon explained, should underscore why Washington can’t insist on “permanent and irreversible” denuclearization in North Korea—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s favorite phrase—before making any moves to reduce the sanctions. “That won’t work,” Moon said. “It’s why North Korea says you must ‘permanently and irreversibly’ withdraw your hostile policy” before it will come back to the table. “They’re using your own words,” he said with a chuckle. “So there’s a complete parallel between Washington and Pyongyang.” And that’s why, in his view, both sides “need to be more flexible and realistic.” In his address to the center, Moon indirectly confirmed reports in my last dispatch for The Nation that a US–South Korea military buildup over the past two years may have damaged prospects for a settlement by aggravating the North. Since Moon Jae-in took power in 2017, he explained, the president has emphasized “peace-keeping,” by which he means “suppressing the possibility of war through deterrence and strengthening the US military alliance.” This policy emerged as a result of the tensions during the “nightmarish” year of 2017, when war appeared imminent, as well as from military decisions made by “previous governments” with the United States. As a result, South Korea has acquired advanced US weapons, including F-35 fighter jets and high-altitude Global Hawk drones, as I described in my Nation story. Meanwhile, in 2020, South Korea will spend 53 trillion won—about $46 billion—on its military, “slightly larger than Japan,” Moon said. “Contrary to what conservatives in South Korea claim, we have been cooperating with the United States 100 percent.” But North Korea is “very angry about that,” he said. “We see the idea of peace-keeping as defensive,” but Pyongyang “doesn’t see it that way.” As a result, “peace-keeping has been sort of backfiring.” But, while South Korea and the United States have worked in tandem to maintain their military readiness, the “peace-building” aspect of President Moon Jae-in’s policies has fallen by the wayside. When President Moon launched his initiative in 2018, he envisioned that the United States and the two Koreas could sign a declaration ending the Korean War and transform the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting into a “viable peace regime,” the professor said. But the Trump administration has showed no interest in ending the war or signing a peace treaty, so that plan has gone unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the hard line on sanctions “has prevented South Korea’s engagement with North Korea,” said Moon Chung-in. Projects halted included plans to restore cross-border rail links, reopening the Gaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ, and making it possible for South Koreans to visit Mount Kumgang in the North once again. As a result, Moon said, “inter-Korean relations are completely frozen.” That, in turn, has created a serious political dilemma for South Korea in its cooperation with the United States. “If the US fails to reopen negotiations with North Korea” and settle its conflict with Kim, “it can’t make a breakthrough.” And because South Korea is a democracy, “President Moon’s supporters say South Korea must take an independent stand.” With some prescience, he added that President Moon “doesn’t want to be passive. He wants to be a mediator, a facilitator, and arbitrator, and a pacesetter of the Korean destiny.” That process has apparently started. On January 14, President Moon declared in a press conference that he would henceforth stress cooperation with the North over the negotiations between the United States and Pyongyang. “Rather than only watching North Korea–US dialogue, we need to cooperate with North Korea on as many things as possible,” he told reporters at the Blue House. “Since inter-Korean relations are a Korean matter, we need to take more of the initiative in developing them.” As the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh noted, “the gist of these remarks is that inter-Korean relations should be the driver of the peace process on the Korean Peninsula.” Moon’s speech sparked an extraordinary dispute when Harry Harris, the US ambassador, told foreign reporters in Seoul that South Korea must consult with Washington on any plans for cross-border engagement with the North “in order to avoid a misunderstanding later that could trigger sanctions.” In response, Lee Sang-min, a spokesperson for the Unification Ministry, reminded Harris that South Korea is a sovereign nation that “dictates its own policies” toward the North. This week, the State Department backed Harris, saying his views “represent” those of President Trump. But the Moon government appears determined to press on, even within the confines of the US and UN sanctions. On Tuesday, Lee Soo-hyuck, the South Korean ambassador in Washington, said Seoul is especially hopeful that the cross-border railway project can be revived. “I believe the project we should push for most urgently, and is doable, is connecting the railway network between South Korea and the North because it will take the longest [time] to complete,” he told reporters. “The overarching principle of the projects the government is pushing is that we should do the most we can within the framework of international sanctions.” Despite the differences, Moon Chung-in says it’s imperative for the talks between the three parties—Seoul, Pyongyang, and Washington—to get back on track. “South Korea has heard North Korea’s grievances,” he said in Washington. “It’s time for North Korea to come back to the table and settle” and for both sides to come up with innovative solutions. In his view, that might involve the United States’ adopting a “nuclear arms control paradigm” toward the North, signing a peace treaty, and eventually negotiating a “phased US troop withdrawal” from the South as well as an international fund to support North Korea’s denuclearization. “We need creative diplomacy,” he said. Perhaps the best antidote to the gloom is the sense of humor and humanity that both Dr. Moon and Parasite’s characters adopt toward their brethren to the north. There’s a hilarious scene in Bong’s film when one of his characters mimics the rapturous voice of Ri Chun-hee, North Korea’s famous anchorwoman, who is often chosen to deliver the supreme leader’s most momentous announcements to his people. But this gentle ribbing shouldn’t necessarily be seen as criticizing the North, Bong said in an interview last year. “There are a lot of comics in South Korea who make sketches on [North Korean] topics and it’s something that’s very common in South Korea,” he said. In other words, laughing about their situation is one way Koreans cope with the stress of division and war. But perhaps the deeper meaning is about survival in a city divided along class lines and a country split into rich South and poor North. “I think the [Parasite] story is about coexistence and how we can all live together,” Song Kang-ho, the beloved character actor who plays the family patriarch, said in receiving the cast’s SAG award last Sunday. A little laughter—and a lot of truth—about America’s dark fears of the North might go a long way in Washington too. [Since this was printed, Parasite won four Oscars at the Academy Awards February 9th – Best Original Screenplay, Best International Film, Best Director and Best Picture – a historic achievement and the first for Korean filmmaking.] Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing and a Korea Policy Institute Associate.

By Ramsay Liem | July 25, 2020 For many Americans July 27th is another passing day.  Like the Korean War, itself, the armistice signing is largely forgotten or was never really known.  But for others, Koreans who survived the war and now reside in the United States, forgetting is more complicated. July 27, 2020 marks the 67th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, a temporary halt in combat that left the warring parties in a state of limbo subject at any moment to renewed fighting.  It defines the current state of relations between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) key parties to the un-ended Korean War.  Absent a peace agreement the armistice maintains a tenuous hold on mutual U.S. – North Korean hostilities that erupt periodically as in the current U.S. alarm over the North’s nuclear program and North Korean anger over comprehensive U.S. sanctions and threats of renewed U.S.-South Korean war games. But for many Americans July 27th is another passing day.  Like the Korean War, itself, the armistice signing is largely forgotten or was never really known.  But for others, Koreans who survived the war and now reside in the United States, forgetting is more complicated.  Years ago, I began one of the first projects to interview these elders about their personal and family histories and collaborated with scholars, artists, and filmmakers to create public memory spaces for healing, public education, and reconciliation.  Some of the most paradoxical memories that people shared were about the original armistice day, July 27, 1953. H. Kim: “I did hear news – of course I heard. But I heard it carelessly. Because it was hard to live, very very hard, I didn’t remember everything.” (italics added) A. R. Menzie: “The signing of armistice, we didn’t even know the war ended… These non-remembrances were extremely perplexing.  I expected great relief and joy over the end of horrific fighting that caused massive civilian casualties – like the sentiments people expressed when recalling an earlier date, August 15, 1945 when Korea was liberated from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. H. Kim: “I was so happy, um.. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy when Independence    Day came and you know, I didn’t eat for days and…I was out in the streets, rejoicing.” T. Kim: “1945, August 15 [liberation from Japanese colonization], so that was big, big event, but armistice signed in 1953. I—I don’t think that was big event because nobody really knew.” But the first Korean War armistice day was just another twenty-four hours of an endless purgatory of capricious death, ruined livelihoods and futures, and unfulfilled hopes for post-colonial nation building upon liberation from Japanese colonialism. M. Lee: “There is no conception [that] the war is over, cease-war or not, there is no such conception at all. Just everything is broken…” For others, the truce negotiations and Armistice Day were perpetrators of family separation.  J. Chun was a teenager living in Kaesong in southern Korea when war broke out.  One day he begged his mother to let him find his father who had gone to a nearby town looking for more secure shelter.  Unknown to him his father was returning to Kaesong just as he set out and they missed each other. A short time later the armistice talks began in Kaesong and a cordon was drawn blocking civilian movement into and out of the city. “That’s the end of it…I cannot see my father and my family anymore. He couldn’t get out, I couldn’t get in.” Mr. Chun survived on his own only to suffer a second blow from the armistice negotiations. As part of the agreement, the border between North and South Korea was redrawn.  His hometown of Kaesong, originally in the South, suddenly became part of the North making it permanently inaccessible to him.  It was the nail in his coffin.  Yet, twice victimized by the war, he, like others, could barely recall armistice day, just another moment of enduring hardship. “Wow, I don’t…I don’t…’53…I don’t remember right now.  I’m not sure where I heard about that.” This story and others like it open a window into a forgotten war and its painful truths: scorched earth warfare by U.S.-led United Nations Forces that nearly erased life and property in northern Korea, destroyed irrigation dams threatening the starvation of millions of North Koreans and constituting a war crime, and an outright confession that “over a period of three years or so… killed off — what — 20 percent of the population.” (Air Force General Curtis Lemay).  This unrestrained violence occurred a mere 5 years after the U.S.-led partitioning of Korea at the close of WWII.  A matter of convenience for the allied forces, the United States installed an occupying military government in the south ruling the ‘liberated’ Korean people for three years.  The partition exacerbated right wing – left wing animosities among Koreans and heightened the likelihood of all-out civil conflict.  Eighteen months of North – South border clashes erupted in all-out war on June 25, 1950 abetted in the south by U.S. led UN forces and in the north by China and to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. After the armistice signing the United States introduced tactical nuclear weapons into the South in 1958 in direct violation of Article II, A, 13, d. of the agreement, marshalled decades of steadily hardening sanctions against the North, and established a permanent troop presence in the South and until recently, conducted the largest annual war games in the Asian theater.  The United States currently holds wartime control of U.S. and South Korean troops under a Combined Forces Command. Collective loss of this tortured history has consequences.  Forgetting lends truth to the popular narrative of North Korea as a failed, paranoid state ruled by a bizarre, ruthless family dynasty with irrational hatred toward the United States and her allies.  In its most recent iteration North Korea has been cast as finally acquiring the nuclear capability to decimate the U.S. mainland.  This prospect is Indeed alarming but nowhere in this scenario is there any recognition of nearly seven decades of mutual U.S.-North Korean hostility. The U.S. administration’s ultimate response in spite of the unprecedented Trump – Kim summits has essentially been “take it or leave it” – full disclosure and dismantling of WMD systems before sanctions relief.  But insisting on capitulation in an un-ended war of bitter mutual hostilities amounts to demanding surrender.  After sixty-seven years of abject failure in this approach to North Korea, the futility of this stance should be abundantly clear.  Policy makers and the public at large need to take note of July 27th, be reminded of the tortured history it signifies, and rediscover the Korean War Armistice Agreement and its call for negotiations forthwithto replace the truce with a peace settlement.  It is the only option for ending America’s longest war. Ramsay Liem is a Korea Policy Associate, and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Visiting Scholar, Center for Human Rights and Social Justice, Boston College. He is the executive producer of the award winning documentary film, Memory of Forgotten War co-directed with Deann Borshay Liem. He serves as the president of the Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation, which promotes awareness of U.S./Korea relations in support of peaceful reunification. He works with the Present Collective, a group of artists, scholars, and activists.

An Interview with Bruce Cumings in the Seventieth Year of the Korean War | July 27, 2020 To mark the seventieth year of the Korean War, KPI sat down with KPI associate and University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings on May 23, 2020. Professor Cumings’s landmark account of the Korean War’s origins and his lifetime of scholarship on both the war and North Korea have fundamentally transformed the contours of public discourse on U.S.-Korea relations. More than challenge first-shot accounts of the Korean War’s June 25, 1950 start-date, Professor Cumings’s research has pointed to the critical fact that the war is not over. In this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Cumings reflected on his own intellectual itinerary, some of his key scholarly findings, the political policing of Korean studies, as well as the perils and possibilities of the Trump administration’s stance toward North Korea. KPI: Given that it has been seventy years since the Korean War officially began, we wanted to ask you to cast a glance back on your own interest in the war. What was it about your first experience in Korea that sparked your interest in Korean history and the Korean War? Cumings: Well, I joined the Peace Corps in 1967 wanting to serve my country in that way rather than go to Vietnam, and I arrived in Seoul in October of 1967 after thirteen weeks of training in a godforsaken place called Blue Knob, Pennsylvania, which had once been a radar station of some sort. The Peace Corps put us up there to see if we could rough it because Korea at that time was a poor country, and many of my friends and colleagues went to small villages where there really wasn’t much including indoor toilets and things like that that made a huge difference to a lot of people. I was in Seoul on a relatively easy tour living with a family of school teachers in a home in Seogyo-dong, which is near Donggyo-dong, where Kim Dae-jung had a house that was very similar to this teacher’s house. The husband eventually became a high school principal, but at the time he was just a teacher, and they had a middle-class existence for Koreans. I taught English conversation to 60 students in 10 classes, 600 students all wearing black military uniforms. This experience was not particularly enlightening, but Korea itself was absolutely fascinating. I had been interested in China but hadn’t really done any courses before going to Korea. I just got diverted, and here I am, fifty years later. I had one experience that was perfect for what ended up being my career. In January of 1968 guerillas said to be from North Korea tried to assassinate president Park Chung-hee and got all the way to the gates of the Blue House before they were killed. They came right through my neighborhood, which was north of the Blue House, and they weren’t sure how many came down so they were chasing them for weeks after that with flares all night long, soldiers in pillboxes right on the main streets. It went on for a month or six weeks and these soldiers had glassy eyes like they’d killed a lot of people. I don’t know if they had or not, but they were very fearsome looking people, and the police would come on the bus they took to go down, and check people’s IDs. I just got a very strong sense of the Korean War not really ending, but just being in suspension. Americans are talking about other wars, mainly in reference to Afghanistan, Iraq, and maybe Syria, but one point I’d like to get across is that Korea is the true forever war. It’s just an armistice holding the peace. Relations between North Korea and the U.S. remain pretty terrible. I used to tell my students that I was pretty sure that Korea would be reunified in my lifetime, but my lifetime is dribbling away while the chances for reunification don’t seem to be all that strong. But the main point is that another war could break out at any time. That has been true for seventy years. It really is our first and longest lasting forever war. "Korea is the true forever war. It's just an armistice holding the peace." KPI: What do you see as a lasting effect of the diplomatic initiative between North Korea, the United States, and South Korea that came to an abrupt closure in Hanoi? Do you see any lasting changes of that might bode well for Korea in the future? Cumings: Quite a bit of trust has been built up in South Korea with President Moon being quite consistent in calling for talks, diplomacy, trying to push the U.S. to engage in diplomacy with North Korea. I don’t know if that will last. He might be replaced by a right-wing president in two years, and we would be back where we started. The Trump administration messed up almost as bad as one can imagine. I give Trump credit for reaching out to Kim Jong Un and meeting with him three times, going against the standard advice of all the so-called Korea experts in Washington. But the Hanoi meeting was a disaster, and Trump allowed himself to be basically taken for a ride, not by Kim Jong Un, but by John Bolton. Bolton raised issues that had not come up before including North Korean chemical and biological weapons, which they’ve had for decades. I mean everybody knows that they’ve had those for decades. They’ve never used them. I don’t know if they test them. I’m not sure they have biological weapons, but they have a huge chemical industry. I’m sure they have chemical weapons. Lots of countries including the U.S. have chemical weapons. Bolton brought that up. He brought up human rights issues. He basically brought up the laundry list that exists in Washington whenever you want to abort negotiations with North Korea: you just start going from one issue to another. Trump didn’t help matters by getting up and leaving in the middle of the meeting, which as bad as it gets when it comes to diplomacy with any Korean entity, but certainly with North Korea. And, of course, there’s been nothing since. I do give North Korea’s credit for—how can I put it—just being quiet: not blowing off atomic bombs and lifting long-range missiles. They basically kept to a moratorium on those things that they informally agreed to with Trump right at the beginning. Nothing is going to happen now, with the election coming up in November. What Trump’s relations with North Korea show is that there’s a hard core of career officials in Washington who don’t want summit meetings with Kim. They just want to squeeze North Korea, which they’ve been doing. Trump flips from one thing to another. He’s not really a serious president. I mean he’s not able to fixate on anything for any length of time. But there were high hopes, and right now I don’t have very high hopes for Trump and North Korea. KPI: Could you to speculate what the possibilities are for U.S. foreign policy toward North Korea if Trump is reelected, on the one hand, and if Biden is elected, on the other? Cumings: If Trump is reelected, he’s likely going to revive meeting with Kim Jong Un. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. I don’t have any idea whether he’s ready to make arrangements, agreements, or concessions that would actually bring North Korea and the U.S. together. For what it’s worth, I think the U.S. ought to get rid of all these stupid obstacles in the way of relations with North Korea and normalize relations with the country. President Moon would support that completely. Stop embargoing and have a normal relationship with North Korea, which would bring North Korea out of its isolation. Trump could do that, but I don’t think he has a deep enough understanding of the Korean situation to do something like that. He was so happy to bask in the glare of world attention in his meetings with Kim Jong Un, but like so much else with his administration, there wasn’t ultimately much substance to it. With Biden I think you’d get a repeat of the Obama administration where embargos would be kept on North Korea. There would be meetings to try and get them to give up their missiles and A-bombs, and unless the U.S. is willing to offer serious concessions to the North, I don’t see why the North would give those up. The Obama diplomacy basically ended on Leap Day in 2012 when North Korea said to the U.S. that they were going to put up a satellite. Now a rocket with a satellite on its nose is a lot different from a military ICBM with a bomb in its nose, and the North Koreans felt they had gotten across to the U.S. that putting up the satellite did not violate their agreement to stop testing long-range missiles. The U.S. accused them of reneging on the Leap Day agreement, and, poof, there went Obama’s attempts to have diplomacy with North Korea. I imagine Biden would hire some of the same people that Obama did, and we’d be continuing in a stalemate situation. Biden is no maverick like Trump. With Trump you do occasionally get something that’s really new like his meetings with Kim, but I can’t see Biden doing that. I think he’s going to be elected though. Mainly because of the coronavirus catastrophe in this country. “With Biden you’d get a repeat of the Obama administration where embargos would be kept on North Korea. There would be meetings to try and get them to give up their missiles and A-bombs, and unless the U.S. is willing to offer serious concessions to the North, I don’t see why the North would give those up.” KPI: It was like the tale of the emperor wearing no clotheswhen Trump stated that the war exercises between the United States and South Korea were indeed provocative. At least rhetorically, his concession went against the orthodoxy of the establishment. One of the things that has characterized the Trump era is his disdain for the rhetoric of human rights. If the high-water point for the North Korean human rights industry was the George W. Bush era, we witnessed that industry persist into the Obama era, only to be almost entirely discarded during the Trump era. What do you make of the future of the North Korean human rights industry? Cumings: You’re right that Trump has not sided with human rights activists anywhere on the globe. He’s got a very difficult problem before him today with China putting the clamps on Hong Kong, which had major demonstrations all last year. That’s going to be a very tough one for Trump to finesse. He would rather meet with a dictator—whether it’s Kim Jong Un or the Egyptian leader or someone else—than put American prestige behind human rights campaigns. In the case of North Korea, the human rights issue has been there since the war, but the human rights program has never had much of an impact on North Korea. The primary impact came with NGOs that came into North Korea in the late 1990s during the famine era. They got around the country, and we got much better data on what was going on with the economy. I don’t know that North Korea was happy to have that help but they had to have it, so progress was made at that time in our understanding of North Korea. To pressure North Korea from the outside on human rights issues is an admirable task, but this is a country that can really batten down the hatches. When the coronavirus struck, they just shut the country off. They wouldn’t allow foreigners to come in. I’ve always thought that the human rights situation in North Korea would get much better the more it was open to the world economy. That’s what I thought about China too. It went for thirty years or so with more and more opening and more and more freedom, but Xi Jinping has shown you can be the second largest economy in the world and you can still crack down on your own people. I’ve never thought that external pressure would make much of a difference on North Korea because that’s what they’ve been dealing with for seventy years. KPI: North Korean human rights are a cottage industry of basically renovated cold warriors and Korean American evangelicals. During the post-9/11 moment, it was clear that the human rights industry had no investment whatsoever in humanitarian policies toward North Korea. Figures like Erich Weingartner have noted the non-intersection between human rights and humanitarian approaches to North Korea and people like David Hawk have revealingly stated that these should not be intersecting tracks at all. Insofar as post-9/11 human rights activists pushed for U.S. intervention, including through military means and heavier sanctions, they were actually advocating for adverse humanitarian circumstances within North Korea. Cumings: I think you’re right. I don’t have much contact with these groups because they don’t contact me. I think they think I’m pro-North Korean. Particularly the evangelicals are skating on very thin ice in pressuring North Korea. Pyongyang, at one point, was called the Jerusalem of the East, and Kim Il Sung was born in the outskirts of Pyongyang. The North Koreans are extremely sensitive to Christianity in general, and evangelicals in particular. I’ve read some of their [evangelical] stuff over the years, and my impression is they would like to take over the country and arrest every high communist official and put them in prison if not execute them, and when Christian groups occupied Korea during the fall of 1950, they carried out some horrible atrocities. North Koreans as a people have every reason to fear evangelicals, particularly those tied up either with the South Korean government, when you have a right-wing government there, or with American church groups and the U.S. government. It’s hard for Christians to take it when an entire country and its leadership rejects proselytizing and all of that. In the late 1940s the North Koreans prohibited Christian churches from taking part in politics, although not their political parties, and they left them alone. There’s a bunch of Jesuit priests who were in Wonsan until 1950 and the U.S. debriefed them when they came to the south, and they said there was religious freedom but not freedom for religious groups and churches to be political. After the war, with the saturation bombing that the U.S. carried out for three years, North Koreans identified that terrible violence with the U.S. being a Christian country. It’s perfectly understandable that they would develop a grudge along these lines so that even seventy years later, you have a deep antipathy towards Christian, particularly Christian, activists. KPI: What was the role of figures like Harold Noble and the children of American missionaries in the development of U.S. intelligence about and war policy toward Korea? Did Christianity inform the anticommunism of U.S. policy in any significant way? So many China hands were the children of missionaries. Were there children of missionaries who were Korea hands in any commensurate way? Cumings:  I’ve met at least two, if not three, generations of Underwoods who served in the occupation. I actually quoted an Underwood who spoke about how the Korean national police and certain Japanese were not being turned into democrats by the American occupation, and he was naïve enough probably to believe that—either that or it was a public relations release. I don’t know that the Underwoods were ever involved with American intelligence, but probably they were because they could speak Korean after a fashion. When Lyndon Johnson came to Korea in 1966, one of the Underwoods translated for him. I don’t know whether it was the same one from the occupation or his son. He made a horrendous gaffe by referring to the North Koreans coming down with honorifics—instead of wasseoyo, ohshosseoyo. I don’t know how many Koreans told me that; they thought it was such a huge gaffe. He may have been involved with American intelligence, but Harold Noble definitely was. My good old friend and advisor Frank Baldwin, who was at Columbia when I was a graduate student, wrote a book based on Harold Noble’s diaries called Embassy at War about the first few weeks of the war after the North Koreans invaded. It’s a remarkable book because he’s got Syngman Rhee running away, and they can’t find him. They’re looking for him in Daejeon and he’s down in Mokpo. It took them two weeks to find the president of South Korea, and everybody was making it to the south to make Jeju Island into Taiwan so they would have a refuge. Most of them, though, the majority of the officers were making plans to go to Japan. So much for all the evil Japanese. Most of them had served the Japanese in one way or another, so the book has a lot of very interesting details like that, but Frank—and if he hears this I’ll apologize—is in his mid-eighties. He basically went to Korea ten years before I did, and he’s got a—still I think—a serious Cold War outlook on the whole thing, but he’s a great guy and that book is fascinating. Harold Noble is an interesting character. I don’t know about his religious activities, but he was definitely a missionary or related to missionaries. I don’t think there were a commensurable number of sons and daughters of missionaries who then went into Korean Studies or into the government to advise the government about Korea compared to China. KPI: Are there aspects about the Korean War, which is paradoxically commemorated in the United States as the “forgotten war,” that the American public should know? Cumings: They should know that the first time the “forgotten war” was used was in October 1951 in U.S. News and World Report, and Martha Gellhorn, a great journalist, particularly of wars, wrote that the Vietnam War was also a forgotten war. Korea is more of a forgotten war in the sense that it was not a matter of amnesia and forgetting so much as never knowing. The Korean War was fought for three years while Joe McCarthy was at his height. Actually the start of the Korean War gave McCarthyism a lift after several months of being fallow. McCarthy wasn’t denounced until 1954. What that meant was that any American who chose to protest the war could easily go to jail, lose their job, or be hauled up in front of a committee like the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then McArthur instituted censorship a few months into the war so you have some very interesting reporting in the summer of 1950 in the mass of magazines who see this war as a very different war from World War II. Once the censorship clamps down, people get a lot of bull, but they don’t get much news. There weren’t any TV cameras to run around with the troops like there were in Vietnam. During the Korean War, you had fifteen minutes of nightly news, and you had newsreels, sometimes in a Saturday matinee movie theater, but basically the war was going on without being reported in a serious way, so when you want serious investigative reporting, you have to go to British reporters like Reginald Thompson whose book called Cry Korea is one of the best books ever written about any war, but certainly about Korea. It’s a harrowing account of racism and rapes and massacres. That’s what Americans should have been getting from their own reporters. Just to give you an example, the U.S. attacked gigantic dams in North Korea from the air in May and June 1953, and one of those breaches of a dam led to a flood that went 27 miles downstream. The New York Times reported war coverage on the front page in several different fonts–larger to smaller to tiny—and they reported the attacks on the dams in those tiny fonts with no article in the paper and certainly no editorial comment. Those were war crimes recognized as such in protocols signed by the U.S. in 1949. It was a horrendously brutal war that went on outside the purview of most Americans and most GIs. By April or May of 1951 the war was confined primarily to the area that was the DMZ not the air war that was pounding North Korea for two more years, but the average American soldier was engaged in trench warfare, and really had no idea why he was there what the war was about. All he knew was that there were a hundred Chinese or North Koreans over the next hill. The Korean War is a very curious war. It’s a lot like Vietnam, but without people knowing it and without attention, and it’s a lot like other American wars—the three-year war in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century is another good example. It never ceases to amaze me. I get questions from people that are so basic. It’s really just an unknown war. KPI: You have observed that early on, the United States restrained a South Korean president from trying to go to war with North Korea. Since the Syngman Rhee era, we’ve had U.S. presidents trying to restrain South Korea from making peace with North Korea. There is a lot of discussion in South Korea as to what Moon Jae-in should do next, given that the United States is the big elephant in the room. What do you see as the future of the alliance? Are peace on the peninsula and the continuation of this alliance compatible in any way? Cumings: Let me backtrack a bit to President Rhee. It’s terribly important that in 1949, from May through December, South Korea attacked across the border much more than North Korea. The majority of attacks were by South Koreans particularly when Kim Sok-won was the commander of the parallel in the summer of 1949 through October. He had been chasing Kim Il Sung in the hills of Manchuria on behalf of the Japanese. Just think about the conflict situation where you have Kim Il Sung in the north and Kim Sok-won in the south. It’s remarkable that people are surprised by a civil war breaking out, but it goes way beyond that because several officers, all of whom served the Japanese, were supervising these attacks, and in the first week of August of 1949, it very nearly was a war. What you find is that the American ambassador was restraining Rhee, and the Soviet ambassador was restraining Kim, and saying, “There’s going to be a civil war if you retaliate or take this any further,” up to the last South Korean attack in December. They were basically always trying to get a vantage point on a mountain or a hill to look into North Korea. Syngman Rhee was told by an American intelligence officer, Preston Goodfellow, that if he stopped attacking and the North attacked in an unprovoked way, the U.S. would back him. There’s no question about it. I went through all of Goodfellow’s papers. What you had was North Koreans not wanting to fight in the summer of 1949 and then getting a lot of troops back from China where they were bloodied fighting alongside the Chinese communists. They stick them just north of the border and they decide to settle the hash of the South Korean regime, but because of the hiatus of six months from January to June, this is seen as a heinous aggression, as if it were crossing a national border. One of the things about the Korean War that I will go to my grave fighting is the idea that it started on June 25th. June 25th was a kind of day, a denouement to a period of escalating conflict on Jeju island, on the border, in the mountains. One of North Korea’s problems was—just about everybody in the world thinks I’m full of shit—that it attacked a democratic ally of the U.S. that was [perceived as] blameless. I hear it all the time. I’ve heard it my whole career. It’s a matter of history being important, and people like Ambassador Muccio and Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, knowing that history yet putting something over the American people. Acheson actually refers to, in 1950, guerrilla fighting going on in 1948, 49, in Korea. If I were President Moon [Jae-in], I would have no idea what the future holds with the U.S. I was watching MSNBC this morning and someone said that there are five or six allies that are standing there laughing themselves silly at all the Trump administration is doing in terms of foreign policy. His diplomacy is in complete disarray. You don’t know who’s in charge really because Trump won’t read. He will not read his intelligence briefings. He doesn’t even like to listen to oral briefings. He just wants to watch Fox News and decide what to do. But if you ask me to handicap the war with North Korea all the way to normalization of relations with North Korea, I would say we might have another summit or two and, if Trump is reelected, basically be in the same place we are today four years from now. I don’t think Kim wants a war. Trump may have learned enough, at least enough about Kim Jong Un, to try to avoid that from happening, but I don’t know any time in my career or anybody else’s where things are harder to predict than they are right now. I mean I know what would happen if Biden gets in: we’ll have the same old rigamarole of sanctions and embargos on the North focusing only on their A-bombs and missiles. “One of the things about the Korean War that I will go to my grave fighting is the idea that it started on June 25th. June 25th was a kind of day, a denouement to a period of escalating conflict on Jeju island, on the border, in the mountains“ KPI: Could we ask you to reflect back on your career? You had KCIA agents in the 1970s in your classes, you were barred for some time from going to South Korea during the period of military dictatorship, and your book was also banned. The policing of the academy with regard to Korean studies is not over in some significant respects. Cumings: It’s a lot better now than it was then because we had KCIA people all over the place. My first publication that the Korean government didn’t like was about the Yushin constitution in 1972. When I was trying to get tenure and publish my book and had a baby girl, I didn’t go to Korea. About 7 years later, I went to the consulate in Seattle, got a visa, and thought everything was fine. I got to Tokyo and my name was on a list and my picture, and this Japanese United Airlines guy looks at me like he’s seen a ghost and says, “I’m sorry you’re barred from going to Korea.” I did not have a visa from 1972 to 1985 when Kim Dae Jung got me a regular visa. I went to the embassy in Tokyo and said, “What’s going on here?” Frank Baldwin who speaks fluent Japanese was in Tokyo and he came with me. We were taken to the cultural attaché who spoke perfect English because he taught for 17 years at Bethany College in West Virginia. Well, he turned out to be the brother-in-law of Kim Jae-gyu, the assassin of President Park. We had a nice chat for two or three hours, and he says, “Don’t worry I’ll take care of you everything will be fine. I’ll give you a visa.” Finally, he gave me a visa for three days to buy books, see friends, eat jjajangmyeon, and one or two other things. I went to my favorite yogwan, the Sajik Gongwon Yogwan, right next to Sajik Park. The next morning I got up at 5 a.m. I was jet-lagged and started walking around the city. Four or five guys came looking for me at about 8 a.m., and they lost me so they were calling the Fulbright office. They were calling various people to find out where this evil person was. Eventually I bought my books in Insadong. The head of the Fulbright program had put them in his diplomatic pouch. I saw some friends and I went to the airport. All through the seventies the KCIA was spreading money around American universities, starting with Harvard, Columbia, and Hawai‘i especially where they built a pavilion for Korean Studies instead of producing a good dissertation. Jim Palais, my mentor at Washington, and I tried to call attention to this, and most of our colleagues took the money and laughed at us—not to our faces, but I know they were laughing behind our backs. In 1985 I went back with a foreign delegation to try and protect Kim Dae-jung from what happened at the Manila airport where Aquino was murdered. I knew the Koreans wouldn’t do anything like that but on that visit, I got a visa, and then I came back a few months later. Even though I had a regular visa, I was tailed everywhere by not only these guys in tan jackets, but they had a car to follow me, and they just wanted to know everywhere I was going—a very good example of the complete waste of time and money by a dictatorial regime that had too much of both. They were just wasting their time running around after me, and I actually shook them off because I know that part of downtown Seoul very well, and I know you can go into the Bando arcade and come out one of the different entrances and there’s usually a cab there, and I just ran through the arcade quickly and came out a door and got in a cab and took off, and I lost them. It’s so absurd because I was an American. I knew they weren’t going to do anything serious to me, but it still stuff that’s in my memory like it just happened yesterday. “All through the seventies the KCIA was spreading money around American universities, starting with Harvard, Columbia, and Hawai‘i especially where they built a pavilion for Korean Studies instead of producing a good dissertation.” KPI: What about having KCIA in your classroom? Cumings: I taught a summer course at Washington in 1973. Kim Dae-jung came through, and I interviewed him with the class, just set him up in front of the class and started talking to him. When he was indicted in 1980 for sedition for Gwangju, they cited a transcript of what he said in my class. The government had it. It was a small class. It could have been eight or nine people. Somebody was there taking down what was going on. KPI: In the late eighties, Lee Young-hee, a well-known South Korean intellectual, visited UC Berkeley. The impact of your work on a whole generation of Korean intellectuals and people’s understanding of the Korean War in this country is not to be underestimated. During that era in Korea, people were reading anything they could get to shed some light on contemporaneous circumstances, and that generation of intellectuals latched onto your work. Chun Doo-hwan probably was not off the mark in saying, “Hey, follow this guy!” Cumings: I was being ducked on in Korea by the regime from 1972 onward, and my book didn’t come out until ‘81. I had a couple of articles here and there but it wasn’t until the second volume came out in 1990 that I dealt with 1950. I didn’t say a word about it in the first volume but, in 1986 Chun Doo-hwan’s people were running around telling everybody that I said that the South had started the war, and I guess is the worst thing they could say about somebody. I get agitated thinking about that period because things were coming up that I couldn’t believe. I mean John King Fairbank and [Edwin] Reischauer took money from an organization in Korea that Congress described as a front for the KCIA. You would think that having Fairbank and Reischauer do that would make an impact, but it didn’t. What I’m saying is that I was hit with things I’d never been hit with before time and time again—a real learning experience. I was lucky to have Jim Palais in my corner because even though he studied with Fairbank and Reischauer, he thought the money they were taking was blood money. KPI: Has there ever been any discernible kind of surveillance or interference from U.S. intelligence or the U.S. State Department regarding your scholarship or your teaching? Cumings: I had been invited to the State Department to lecture, and I always had one or two people in the State Department who wanted to hear my views. I never got a security clearance, but John Merrill was in the State Department from the late seventies until his retirement, and we would have lunch and talk. I felt that the State Department was what it should be. They should be talking to experts about Korea. I never got a sense of interference from the State Department, except that they invited colleagues of mine, diplomatic historians like James Matray to come to Korea in the eighties and denounce me basically [and] give the other side of the story. It’s an absurdity to me because I never learned one thing from James Matray or a couple other of his diplomatic historians, more like subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge, but still it’s just bad that the State Department would do that. It probably was the Information Services [or] USIS. I first went to North Korea in 1981 for a two-week Potemkim village tour, and when I came back, a local CIA guy in Seattle came to see me and he had a name card with just his name and his phone number, and he said, “You wanna tell your government what you saw in North Korea?” And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I told my students,” and I gave him a short report on my visit that I had given to graduate students and actually I gave to John Merrill. Then he said something about “Do you have tenure?” and I said, “No.” I figured out who sent him: a political scientist named Don Hellman who worked on Japan who was one floor above me. Once I saw this [CIA] guy in the elevator two or three times going to talk to Hellman. But then I got my credit report because I was buying this house, and I found out the FBI checked my credit on my bank account shortly after I got back. Then I went to Chicago in 1987, and the KCIA was intimidating people all up and down Lawrence Avenue where the so-called Korea town was at that time. Two FBI guys visited me and said, “There’s a guy in the consulate here who thinks you’re a communist, that you’re an agent of North Korea.” I said to these guys, “What are you talking about? Who are you talking about?” We had a brief discussion and they left. I had my next-door neighbor come in to verify that they had just been there. He interrupted the meeting. Well, I went to a great guy in Chicago who dealt with town-gown university relations and he laughed his ass off when he heard this story. I didn’t think it was quite so funny, but he then got the State Department to kick this Korean CIA guy out of the country. Apparently a lot of people on Lawrence Avenue breathed a sigh of relief because he had been intimidating people in a situation where they voted for president, and the vote had been 50/50. Chun Doo-hwan may have won by one or two points right at that time, so that particular FBI visit made me want to throw up because the FBI is listening to some scumbag from the KCIA and they come to a University of Chicago professor [to] try to scare me. That’s one experience I could have done without. KPI: We wanted to ask you about critical Asianists whom you’ve worked with or whose work perhaps you followed who did an about-face in terms of North Korea, in particular. Cumings: I was very close to John Halliday in the eighties. We did a documentary and a picture book on the Korean War together. I’ve seen John in the last few years. I’ve always enjoyed his company, but he got married to Dr. Jung Chang and did a book on Mao that is just a disgrace. It’s just awful, and that makes it rather hard to have a close relationship. Aiden Foster Carter saw himself as a protégé of John Halliday, and Aiden has been all over the map ever since I first met him. I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint his politics or a turning point, but he and Gavin McCormack thought it would be cool to attack me right after the Berlin Wall fell in the New Left Review, claiming they knew how the war actually started and I was retrograde because I didn’t know that. Of course the documents came out two or three years after my book came out. I haven’t spoken to Gavin McCormack in fifteen or twenty years. Although Gavin does quite good work, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, people suddenly wanted to run away from any sense that they might be sympathetic to North Korea, which they all had been by the way. Gavin would refer to the democratic forces in Korea and I would say, “What are you talking about?” He was talking about the North. Let me just say one more thing about Aiden Foster Carter. In the early mid-nineties he was writing that North Korea was going to collapse. I saw two or three pieces along these lines so I finally emailed him and I said, “Are you clairvoyant? What gives you the notion that North Korea is going to collapse?” And he publicly, about seven or eight years ago, said I was right about North Korea not collapsing, which I give him credit for. KPI: Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, released Korean War documents disclosed that Kim Il Sung had been in conversation with the Chinese and the Russians. It seems unsurprising that he conferred with allies before deciding to push across the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950. That he did so does not mean that he was a puppet of the Russians. Can you explain the hullabaloo about the release of those documents? Cumings: The documents that came out after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Yeltzen personally brought to Seoul, basically reinforced the official story that Washington had always argued—that this was, if not Stalin’s war, a war that Stalin backed. I had assumed for years that American intelligence had access to these documents through their own intelligence. They had tapped into Soviet codes in the 1940s in the so-called Venona papers, and then those abruptly stopped in 1949. There wasn’t anything particularly surprising there, but I had just read so much North Korean stuff that I saw them as independent actors. I had argued that they had been in the thirties. Even though they had been under some Chinese commander’s alleged command, they did what they wanted with their guerrilla activities, and they basically did what they wanted while Soviet troops were on the ground in the late 1940s. I erred in giving them too much leeway. This was my own fault. I have intelligence documents showing that Soviets pulled back their submarines from Dalian and other places the minute the war began and that they pulled their advisors back. They clearly wanted to signal to the U.S. that they weren’t going to fight for North Korea, and I may have taken that stuff too far, but I just felt that the North Koreans were itching to take care of the officer corps in the South Korean army and the national police who, almost all of them, had served the Japanese. That was the core of the civil war between the North and South Korean leadership. When you look at those documents, they show Soviet restraint on North Korea right through January 1950 when Stalin decides to authorize not a general invasion but an attack that would maybe take Kaesong and maybe Seoul. If they got lucky, maybe the South Korean divisions would collapse, which is what happened. The question is why did Stalin change his mind? I can’t prove this, but I think it had everything to do with NSC 68, the most important Cold War document that the U.S. was developing, which called for tripling defense expenditures and a worldwide anticommunist policy backed by enormous resources, not just for the Defense Department, but for the CIA and other things. Stalin would have gotten those documents from Kim Philby and Guy Burgess and [Donald] Maclean. Philby was right there in Washington, meeting with the head of counterintelligence and the CIA every week in 1949 and ‘50. I think he decided there’s a boil developing with the U.S. going all out on the world scale, and we need to answer that boil and we don’t want to do it in Germany or Poland or along the central front because that would be World War III. Let the Americans get bogged down with a war they can’t win in Korea. They win it—so what? Stalin is on record in the fall of 1950 saying, “Korea goes–so what? No big deal.” He told that to the head of KGB. If the North Koreans win, that’s a big gain for the communist camp, but the ideal would be to get the U.S. bogged down and hemorrhage blood and treasure for three years without winning in a peripheral area from Stalin’s viewpoint, and lo and behold, that’s what Stalin died witnessing. For historians who work in secret documents, you have to see the whole flow of things rather than the ten documents that Nelson had under his wing, but I know why people got all bent out of shape when those documents came out. It’s because “Yay, South Korea’s going to win. North Korea’s finished.” That also proved to be false. KPI: There may have been a period of time when the North Koreans were looking for a strategic moment to take action, but they were clearly preparing a way to do it, and they were ramping up their military. It seems likely that they were expecting less an enthusiastic send-off from Stalin than a nod. It would have been the reasonable thing to do to get some assurance that the Soviets were not going to stop them. From the point of view of the North Koreans, Kim Il Sung had to deal with Stalin, and from the South Koreans, and Syngman Rhee had to deal with the U.S. Cumings: That’s exactly right. The question was who would succeed in getting big power backing in the first six months of 1950. The U.S. was smart not to back Syngman Rhee if he wanted to attack, which he was saying all the time; he told John Foster Dulles that before the war started. Acheson played this beautifully. The onus would be on the communists for starting this war. Acheson kept Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek and other people in South Vietnam off balance before the Korean War so he wouldn’t be saddled with Chiang Kai-shek trying to attack the mainland again, or South Korea attacking North Korea. Stalin wasn’t stupid either. The war probably ended up just about the way he wanted it. He was a ruthless person and would have been happy to get rid of Kim Il Sung because he saw him as a nationalist and the whole regime as a bunch of nationalists. The North Koreans lose, we get rid of an obstreperous ally. If they win, good. Best of all: the U.S. gets bogged down. Stalin wins no matter what. KPI: Well, seventy years later, we’re still all bogged down. What do you think are the necessary conditions for ending the Korean War? Cumings: At two points we were getting close. One was during the Clinton administration when the Four Power talks were happening in 1997, 98, specifically to get a peace treaty or a peace agreement. Two years of important diplomacy developed between the Clinton administration and Pyongyang—the two best in history. I thought we had a good chance to get a peace agreement then. The other moment is Trump. He was talking about a peace agreement. You have to say, “agreement,” because the Senate isn’t going to pass it as a treaty. It would be so easy for Trump to call an end to the Korean War with a peace agreement, and he would get a lot of credit for it. Trump doesn’t know anything. He found out that Lincoln was a Republican and was talking about it to everybody: “Did you know Lincoln was a Republican?” And then he found out the Korean War wasn’t over yet. This was before the first summit. He said four or five times, “Hey, the Korean War—can you believe it it’s not over yet?” He really got a bee in his bonnet about the Korean War and then it didn’t work out.

Good morning. My name is Thomas Kim. I am a professor of politics and international relations at Scripps College, and the Acting Executive Director of the Korea Policy Institute. KPI is currently being put together as a research and educational institute modeled as a joint academic/community partnership that will provide educational resources and timely analyses of current events to U.S. policymakers, media, and the American public. Conceived by Korean Americans who have so much at stake in the outcome of policies toward Korea, KPI seeks to draw upon the wealth of untapped knowledge and experience within Korean American communities in order to support the development of pragmatic, well-informed U.S. policies toward Korea. I’d like to thank Congressman Kucinich and his staff for the invitation to speak today at this briefing on the ongoing reunification of divided Korea. I will focus my remarks on the legacy of the Korean War up to the historic summit between Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and Kim Jong Il of North Korea that took place in June of 2000—a summit which led to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Kim Dae Jung and more importantly, opened up a new era for Korea. Unfortunately, the promise of this new era is burdened by our collective inability to reconcile our past. The Korean War is the signal event of this past, marking Korea and Koreans everywhere in ways large and small, anticipated and unknown. It is not simply a historical event to be studied, but rather, something whose reach extends everywhere in contemporary Korean politics and society, and in the lives of Korean communities, be they on the Korean peninsula or here in the U.S. Today, over 50 years after the shooting stopped, the diplomatic inability to end the Korean War means that there continue to be approximately 10 million people separated from their families. Until the historic June 2000 summit opened up significant relations between North and South, it was not unusual to see South Koreans coming here to acquire U.S. citizenship so that they could go to the North to visit their families. Until recently, every year dozens of elderly South Koreans, in despair that they would not see their loved ones across the demilitarized zone before they died, would travel northward as far as they could go before committing suicide. We in the U.S. must try to comprehend that the continuing division of both family and nation are deeply personal scars that mark the collective psyche of the Korean people, be they in the North, the South, or here in the U.S. The Korean War has had a tremendous influence in sustaining the political and military structure of the peninsula. Most of the war was fought in the north, and it is not an exaggeration to say that every single North Korean alive at that time probably lost a family member in the war. While America may have forgotten about the war, North Korea has not. The North Korean state has, for decades, emphasized the threat posed by the U.S. military as a way to build popular support, and today, North Korea’s “military first” policy is predicated on the idea that the militarism of the United States continues to be the single greatest threat to Korea’s self-determination. The peaceful, diplomatic resolution of the Korean War and the normalization of relations between North Korea and the U.S. would thus promote a significant redistribution in North Korean resources away from its military, and would force the North Korean government to change a tune that is over half a century old. In the south, the outbreak of war in 1950 gave the government an identity and legitimacy at a time that it had very little. After the armistice, the omnipresent threat and demonization of North Korea allowed South Korean dictators, backed by the military, to consolidate their power. Under the guise of national security against the North, the South Korean state systematically crushed social movements pushing for political, economic, and social rights. The rapid industrialization of South Korea that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s can be tied directly to severe repression of and violence toward working class, student, and other would be civil society movements that sought to democratize the nation. South Korea’s first genuinely open election in 1987 came over 50 years after the U.S. military came to Korea, and 7 years after the Gwangju Uprising planted the seeds for today’s shift in South Korean attitudes toward the U.S. government, especially among the younger generations. The inability to finally end the Korean War also justifies the continuing presence of roughly 34,000 US troops in about a 100 military installations and bases in South Korea. No doubt successful diplomatic efforts to end the war would lead to a renewed conversation about the appropriate role of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula and, more broadly, in Northeast Asia. The role of U.S. troops in Korea is one of many conversations that South Koreans are already engaged in today. The open and dynamic dialogue occurring now comes on the heels of a long and palpable silence in Korean communities—a silence that was the legacy of government repression of democracy and dissent in the name of national security. This silence is now being openly confronted by South Korean scholars, politicians, activists, and former victims who are critical of the ways in which South Korean dictatorships wrote the history of modern Korea to advance their personal and political objectives. This silence is also—finally—being confronted here in the U.S. by Korean Americans. Just as it did for Koreans in Korea, the historic summit meeting between the leaders of North and South has generated a wave of excitement and activity in Korean American communities wanting to take part in the historic process of reunification. Since division and war, there have always been Korean Americans working to unite Korea, and this past year was no exception. A Korean American delegation went to Pyongyang to mark the 5th anniversary of the historic June 2000 summit, and a different delegation went to Seoul to mark the 60th anniversary of independence from Japanese colonialism. The Korean American business community has been closely tracking recent events in Korea while keeping an eye on U.S. foreign policy, concerned that an instable security environment not only threatens their family and friends, but also their investments in transpacific trade. Forward thinking Korean American entrepreneurs, anxious not to be left behind the unification curve, have visited Pyongyang in an effort to build sustainable and profitable economic bridges. Perhaps most important is that one can sense the beginning of a dramatic cultural shift occurring right now in Korean American communities. Just five years ago, even as a professor who specializes in politics and teaches about Korea, I could not openly discuss the legacy of the Korean War within the Korean American community. Five years ago, I could not tell you as I am telling you now that I am looking forward to visiting North Korea this year. And most importantly, five years ago, it would have been impossible to talk seriously about unification as we are doing right now. But today, I strongly believe that popular support is moving in that direction. Obviously the Korean American community is diverse, peppered with Republicans, Democrats, progressives, conservatives, and independents. Little is known about North Korea, and Korean American attitudes toward Kim Jong Il and North Korea range from deep antipathy to mistrust to open curiosity. But the lack of support among Korean Americans for Kim Jong Il and even outright hostility toward him must not be mistaken as support for U.S. policies that jeopardize peace and stability on the Korean peninsula. Indeed, what unites Korean Americans across the board is an absolute refusal to tolerate the outbreak of armed conflict on the Korean peninsula. Even the more conservative older generation is supportive of efforts to send a message to Washington that Korean Americans, irrespective of their political leanings, want to see the U.S. engage in diplomatic efforts that secure the peace. What unites Korean Americans is our deep, enduring hope that one day we will see and visit a unified Korea. What also unites us is our fear that our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, and our family and friends in Korea will be at war with our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, and our family and friends in America, our home. It is critical that any conversation about U.S. foreign policy toward the Korean peninsula understands what unites Korean Americans, how we are looking excitedly toward a new era, and how we still, unfortunately, live in our past. I thank you for your time.

By Tim Shorrock | August 9, 2020 | Originally published in the Nation.com As US denuclearization talks with North Korea have hopelessly stalled and inter-Korea tensions are rising fast, citizen groups on both sides of the Pacific hope to convince the United States to embrace a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. The campaigns to resuscitate US-Korean diplomacy kicked off on July 27, 67 years after US and North Korean generals signed the armistice that ended the fighting but left the country with an uneasy truce. The Korean War “never came to a formal conclusion,” Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ and one of the organizers of the peace treaty initiative, declared on Monday at a “bipartisan round table” on resolving the security crisis in Korea. “It’s important to come together across the political spectrum to show consensus for ending America’s longest overseas conflict.” The forum was cosponsored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative. For South Koreans, changing relations with North Korea is a matter of utmost urgency. They see a peace treaty as the best way to rejuvenate the once-promising reconciliation process initiated by President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong-un in 2018. Those talks broke down in acrimony last year after President Moon failed to persuade the Trump administration to lift US and UN sanctions that have blocked North and South from moving ahead on the cross-border economic projects they initiated at a summit meeting in Pyongyang two years ago. “Peace efforts on the Korean Peninsula are retreating as the hard-won agreements between the two Koreas have not been implemented properly,” 324 Korean civic groups declared Monday, as they launched an international “Korea Peace Appeal” to collect 100 million signatures favoring a treaty by 2023. “Though it is late, the governments of concerned countries should now come forward earnestly and responsibly to end the Korean War.” The coalition was organized by the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of South Korea’s most influential civil society groups, and several other political and religious organizations. Their movement is partly a response to recent events. Over the last two months, Chairman Kim and his influential sister Kim Yo Jong have criticized Moon for his dependence on the United States, while their Foreign Ministry has slammed him as “nonsensical” for trying to mediate a deal with Trump. In June, the North Korean military even blew up the North-South liaison offices in Gaesong, just north of the border, to underscore its anger. A few days later, however, the senior Kim overruled his military and called off plans to deploy more troops along the border. With his diplomacy at issue, Moon has appointed a new national security team to reach out to the North and get the peace process back on track. That’s also the driving force for American lawmakers. A peace treaty “would go a long way to facilitate the peace process,” US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who successfully introduced a resolution (HR 152) to end the Korean War in Congress last year, said in opening Monday’s forum. “If we take the first step of declaring the end of the Korean War, it could incentivize leaders of the Korean Peninsula to take action.” Both Moon and Kim have expressed a desire for a peace treaty or, short of that, a joint declaration by the three governments that the Korean War is over. And the fact that Representative Khanna’s resolution on ending the war has 46 cosponsors in the House reflects growing support for the idea here. But getting the Trump administration or its successor behind a peace treaty could be difficult. Jessica Lee, a senior research fellow in Quincy’s East Asia Program, said that US opposition to a treaty—which extends through the Washington foreign policy apparatus—“comes down to three words—military-industrial complex.” “We have to recognize that the military-industrial complex was born out of the Korean War and really thrives on a world of threats, both real and imagined,” she explained. To make a treaty possible, proponents must build “a domestic constituency that says, ‘No, these endless wars and the profiteering from war has to end.’” Daniel Davis, a retired US Army officer who advised the South Korean military in the 1990s, made a similar argument. “The best thing for American national security is to work towards a peace agreement, because the absence of peace means that we have to continue to put billions of dollars every single year into our alliance with South Korea and for troops in Japan,” he said. “We need to move from a wartime mentality to a peacetime mentality.” Trump, who is in deep political trouble over his handling of the coronavirus epidemic, has shown no inclination to move in that direction or to shake off the influence of John Bolton, the hard-liner he fired earlier this year from his post as national security adviser. In his self-righteous best seller The Room Where It Happened, Bolton made it clear that he despised the very idea of Moon’s engagement policies, which triggered the Trump-Kim talks in the first place. His contempt seems to have rubbed off on Trump, who he claims threatened to withdraw all US troops from Korea unless Moon agreed to drastically increase South Korean payments for the 28,500 US soldiers it hosts. “The whole diplomatic fandango was South Korea’s creation, relating more to its ‘unification’ agenda than serious strategy on Kim’s part or ours,” Bolton wrote in his book. “It was risky theatrics, in my view, not substance.” To the consternation of Korean progressives and the Moon government, he ridiculed Moon for “emphasizing inter-Korean relations over denuclearization.” Bolton was also critical of Moon for seeking an “action-for-action” plan that would allow North Korea to show incremental movement toward dismantling its nuclear capability in exchange for concessions from the United States on sanctions. That never happened, of course. At their second summit in Hanoi in March 2019, Trump, at Bolton’s insistence, balked at an intermediate deal that would have involved the North closing down its large nuclear facility at Yongbyon in return for the lifting of the UN Security Council sanctions imposed on North Korean exports in 2017. “If Trump had made that deal in Hanoi, we’d be much further down the road” toward peace, Davis, the retired US Army officer, told a June event marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War organized by the conservative Center for the National Interest. North Korea, he added, “sees that as a betrayal.” To get a deal, we “must build trust and acknowledge where they’re coming from.” Earlier this month, Trump sent Stephen Beigun, the deputy secretary of state and his chief negotiator on North Korea, to Seoul in hopes of reviving the talks. But the gesture was widely derided as unrealistic. “Unless Biegun is bringing some indication that Trump is ready to give in to North Korean demands to lift sanctions in exchange for very limited moves on the nuclear front, I don’t see much basis for another summit or even for any level of negotiations,” Daniel Sneider, a specialist on US relations with Korea and Japan at Stanford University, told the Korea Times. Beigun didn’t, and the North responded, “We have no intention to sit face to face with the U.S.,” Kwon Jong Gun, a North Korean diplomat, wrote for the state-run Korean Central News Agency just before Beigun arrived in Seoul. In his remarks on Monday, Representative Khanna suggested that Joe Biden might “take up the initiative” with North Korea if he is elected president this fall. Khanna, who backed Senator Bernie Sanders during the primaries, noted that Biden and President Barack Obama “never had Moon as a partner” during the years they were in power. With a progressive president in South Korea driving the peace process, we could “ultimately have an agreement,” he said. “There isn’t a military solution.” So far, except for saying he might meet with Kim under certain conditions, Biden has expressed little interest in changing US policy in East Asia. Judging from his foreign policy team, he is likely to create a hawkish administration, especially on North Korea. During the debates, Biden often referred to Kim as a “thug”—not exactly a recipe for negotiations. But, Khanna argues, if Biden carries out his promise to work more closely with US allies, he might be more attentive to South Korea and Moon, and that could make a difference. To that end, Khanna told the forum that he will be traveling to South Korea after the pandemic to meet with President Moon and offer support for his diplomatic efforts. Clearly, a fundamental shift is needed. Women Cross DMZ and the Quincy Institute will argue in an upcoming report that both Trump’s “maximum pressure” and Obama’s “strategic patience” failed to resolve the crisis, Ahn announced at Monday’s forum. With other peace groups, they will call for a new approach based on a comprehensive peace agreement. “Peace is the precondition for denuclearization and improving human rights, not the other way around,” Ahn said. “Our inability to end this war,” said Quincy’s Jessica Lee, “has really colored the US–South Korean alliance and the possibility of building an enduring peace in East Asia at large.” Tim Shorrock is a KPI Associate, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

By The Korea Policy Institute | July 1, 2020 Jang-hie Lee, Professor at the Law School at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, has formerly served as legal advisor to the Korean Red Cross, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade, and the Ministry of Unification. As a legal scholar, Lee’s work focuses on international human rights law, international organization law, and the law of armed conflicts. On May 28, 2020, Korea Policy Institute (KPI) Executive Board Members spoke with Lee about the United Nations Command (UNC)—a misappropriated relic of a United Nations mandate passed weeks after the official start of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. Initially envisioned as a “unified command” under US leadership, the United States unilaterally changed the “unified command” designation to “United Nations Command” and began operating with the unauthorized use of the United Nations flag and United Nations insignia. Professor Lee speaks of the UNC’s illegality, its efforts to disrupt inter-Korean cooperation, and calls for its dissolution. [KPI] Professor Lee, could you begin by discussing whether the United Nations (UN) considers the United Nations Command (UNC) to be a part of the UN? Is the UNC subject to any UN controls and, if not, what is the legal basis for the UNC’s authority? [Jang-hie Lee] The UNC’s legal basis rests upon a July 7, 1950 United Nations Security Council Resolution 84 (S/1588), which called to create a unified command under the United States. The UN did not have the intention to create a UNC in July 1950, and a proposal to establish a UNC had never been considered. And, the role of a unified command is different from that of the UN Command. The unified command has the authority to direct forces that participated in the Korean War, and is obligated to submit reports to the United Nations. So, in early July 1950, only the unified command had been established, and the unified command did not have the authority to create an agency. The first time the title United Nations Command had been used was July 24, 1950 in Tokyo. The US replaced the unified command with United Nations Command without consulting the Security Council. As former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has noted, the UNC is not an agency under the UN, not a subsidiary agency under the UN, nor a subordinate agency under the UN. The UN has never received reporting or considered a budget for the UNC. [KPI] Given its illegitimacy, has the UNC ever been challenged by the international community? [Jang-hie Lee] Yes, several times. In 1975, the countries that belonged to the communist bloc put forth a resolution for the dissolution of the UNC in the UN General Assembly, and it received a majority vote and passed. Also, around the same time, Western member nations discussed the dissolution of the UNC, but under the condition that the armistice agreement first be replaced with a peace treaty. North Korea has also officially raised the question to the UN, asking about the relationship between the UNC and the UN in 1995. Then UN Secretary-General Ghali responded to North Korea by saying that the UNC is not under UN controls. More recently in 2018, the Deputy Secretary-General of the UN offered a similar response when posed with a similar question. [KPI] Why did the socialist countries call for dissolution in 1975 rather than raising questions about its illegitimacy? Given its origins, why didn’t they say its existence had no basis? [Jang-hie Lee] The Security Council enabled and empowered the US to create the UNC, and did not stop the UNC from appointing a commander-in-chief and using the UN flag alongside sending states’ flags.  Since the Security Council implicitly gave permission to the US, the General Assembly recommended that the Security Council adopt a resolution to dissolve it. That was the logic behind the socialist bloc calling for dissolution. [KPI] The UNC is said to have initiated its own revitalization campaign. Could you speak about the forces driving this effort and why revitalization is being pursued? [Jang-hie Lee] The UNC hopes to rejuvenate because it feels an existential threat. Currently, one US general wears three hats to command the United States Forces Korea (USFK), the Combined Forces Command (CFC) of the US and ROK armies, and the UNC. And, the UNC claims to have three functions. First, endowed by the UN to the unified command, was to deter North Korean forces during and after the Korean War. Second, to manage and maintain the armistice agreement signed in 1953. Third, as noted in General Assembly Resolution 376(V) that passed on October 7, 1950, is to assist Korea’s move towards democracy and reunification. Since the 1990s, with the Cold War nearly coming to an end, there is no longer a need to deter North Korea or a socialist bloc from South Korea. The third role has not been cited much by the UNC. What remains of its functions is the maintenance of the armistice regime, which includes oversight authority of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Also, the transfer of wartime operational control (OpCon) away from the UNC and USFK to South Korea may happen soon. On July 14, 1950, during the Korean War, Syngman Rhee gave wartime as well as peacetime operational control to the UNC. At that time, command control was not directly handed to the UNC, but it was through a joint command of USFK and ROK forces. Peacetime operational control has already been transferred to South Korea in 1994, and OpCon discussions are active. That is why the UNC feels it has to reestablish its presence on the Korean peninsula, and that is why it has been pursuing a revitalization campaign. If wartime operational command is transferred, there is no reason for its presence and they have no influence on the peninsula. The US through the USFK has been aligning itself as “good cop” while positioning UNC as “bad cop”. And, that’s possible because the same person serves as UNC Commander, USFK Commander, and Commander of the Combined Forces’ Command. The UN, then, gets all the bad publicity and the US looks better comparatively. [KPI] What forces are driving the discussion around a revitalization campaign? Are other countries that are participating in the UNC involved or is the impetus coming from elsewhere? [Jang-hie Lee] The US is at the helm of these conversations since they would like to maintain control over the UNC. The other UN member states with troops stationed in South Korea are not interested. UNC forces are actually non-combatant military personnel—a sort of honor guard. They are appointed by the US command, and there are actually only about 100 individuals. Currently, the UNC is a shell of a unit that maintains operational control authority over the military. However, actually, the military control is the Combined Forces Command of the ROK and the US forces. With discussions concerning the transfer of wartime operational control authority to South Korea ongoing, and the very real possibility of losing wartime operational command, the UNC feels their military influence will be reduced or lost along with the transfer. So, they are trying to block or postpone the wartime operational command transfer and, while doing so, they are saying that the UNC still has a role to play on the Korean peninsula. This is why the UNC has been trying to block inter-Korean cooperation or projects that improve inter-Korean relations. Also, with increasing tension between the US and China over the South China Sea, and US efforts to limit China’s influence in the area, losing wartime operational command control on the Korean peninsula becomes more of an issue. The US is concerned that they won’t be able to deter China. What is also not very well known is that the UNC has several rear bases housed in Japan. In 1954, the UNC headquarters was actually in Tokyo, Japan and had been transferred to the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, Seoul in 1957. In 1952, Japan and the UNC entered a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), meaning that at anytime the UNC is in operation, they may use Japan’s roads, railroads, logistics teams, and even the Japanese self-defense army at will. In these regards, the UNC has nothing to do with Korea specifically and more to do with Korea’s geopolitical position in the region. [KPI] Could you discuss how and why the UNC has opposed recent South Korean government efforts to promote inter-Korean cooperation? [Jang-hie Lee] The South Korean government is very uncomfortable with the UNC’s interference with inter-Korean cooperation projects. At best, it creates bad optics for the government. But, they tolerate the UNC’s actions as they stir public opinion. There are three examples I would like to share about when the UNC interfered with inter-Korean cooperation. The first involves the UNC delaying the inter-Korean railroad project, which had been outlined in the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration. South and North Korea decided on dates to conduct field surveys in the lead-up to a ground-breaking ceremony that would inaugurate construction re-linking rail lines that had been severed during the Korean War. With the authority to prohibit access to the DMZ and passage of the Military Demarcation Line, the UNC blocked equipment from entering the survey sites and delayed the process for quite a long time. They eventually granted access and a ground-breaking ceremony took place on December 26, 2019, but the preliminary field surveys were severely delayed. The South Korean media reported on this quite extensively. Another example is when German officials came to South Korea on a diplomatic visit and wanted to visit the DMZ. The Minister of Unification took these international guests himself to the DMZ only to be denied entry by the UNC as they can ban access for non-military-related purposes. A last example I would like to share has been widely covered by the media. In February of 2019, North and South Korea had planned a New Year sunrise-watching ceremony on Mount Kumgang. The UNC prohibited accompanying journalists from bringing video cameras and recording equipment into the area in an attempt to restrict media coverage of the event. The media heavily critiqued this interference and many people questioned the UNC’s intentions. And, the South Korean government did not try to limit that media coverage. Though they are not explicitly encouraging it, I believe the government values this reportage as it stirs public opinions towards certain directions. [KPI] How might the North and South Korean governments respond to changes in the UNC, especially its dissolution?Does the South Korean government encourage or support changes to the workings of the UNC? [Jang-hie Lee] North Korea wants the UNC to disband. Period. In 2019, North Korea officially demanded dissolution. South Korea has not, but the South Korean government has been making quite a bit of mention about citizens’ desires for the transfer of wartime operational control back to South Korea. While they don’t explicitly express it, the South Korean government’s attitude suggests that they agree with popular opinion and would like to go in the same direction. They are very cautious about engaging with this issue. There are also a number of peoples’ campaigns and politicians demanding the dissolution of the UNC. I belong to one such organization called the UNC Issue Campaign. Our campaign oftentimes sends a questionnaire to the Ministry of National Defense asking when the UNC will be dissolved. The Ministry of Defense always provides pre-set default answer, returning often to the theme of not foreseeing dissolution anytime soon and not planning to expressly ask for it. However, there is always this difference in tone with the South Korean government’s actions and it’s important to read between the lines. [KPI] As a legal scholar, what approach would be most promising to open up the needed political space for advancing peace on the Korean peninsula? [Jang-hie Lee] Ultimately, it would be the dissolution of the UNC. Then, after that, it would be to work towards a peace agreement. More immediately, as the UNC Issue Campaign I am involved is pursuing, we should prohibit the illegal use of the UN flag. There are regulations that determine how and under what circumstance a UN flag may be used. While the unified command had been authorized to use the UN flag, the UNC of course has not. Right now, however, there are bases in Korea flying the UN flag and the US uses the UN flag wherever US forces go. The UNC Issue Campaign feels this needs to be the first step. For peace on the Korean peninsula, we don’t think the UNC has to be immediately dissolved. The UNC, as one of the signatories of the armistice agreement, would first have to transfer power invested in it to the South Korean government in order for Korea to reach a peace agreement or a peace treaty. Then, the South Korean government would legally become a party of the armistice, which would help clear the legal hurdles involved in negotiating a peace treaty. But, the ultimate goal from a legal perspective would be to dissolve the UNC. #KoreaPeace #KoreanWar #UNC #UnitedNationsCommand

On June 22, 2020, in a historic first, the membership of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) unanimously passed a resolution calling for an end to the Korean War. As the nation’s largest Asian American Studies organization, AAAS emerged indirectly out of the Third World Liberation Front movement that opposed U.S. interventionist war in Vietnam and called for the transformation of education to reflect the perspectives of Third World peoples. The passage of this resolution was over two years in the making. Whereas AAAS protocols require a minimum of 8 sponsors and 50 member signatures for resolutions to be proposed, the Resolution Calling for a Decolonizing Peace and a Formal End to the Korean War had 12 sponsors and 81 signers. Initiated by activist-scholars, this resolution is tied to a three-year 2020-23 Teaching Initiative to End the Korean War and a public open-access syllabus that will be housed on the Korea Policy Institute website. For more information on the Teaching Initiative, please contact endingkoreanwar@gmail.com. AAAS resolution calling for a decolonizing peace and a formal end to the Korean War Whereas progressive Koreans within the diaspora, including in the United States, have long organized for a peaceful resolution to the Korean War and, alongside many Asian and Pacific Islander peoples, have waged grassroots struggles against U.S. war and militarism; Whereas the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) seeks to advance a critique of U.S. war and empire; foster scholarship, innovative pedagogy, and public awareness about the far-reaching impact of U.S. militarism and racial violence in Asia and the Pacific; and support people’s anti-imperialist struggles for liberation and self-determination; Whereas the root of the current conflict on the Korean peninsula is the unresolved Korean War, an asymmetrical war of U.S. aggression precipitated by the 1945 U.S. decision to divide Korea at the 38th parallel without consulting the Korean people and undermining the Korean people’s long struggle against Japanese colonial rule and historic efforts to realize democratic self-governance; Whereas the United States, the primary Korean War belligerent and the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator and detonator, has refused to sign onto a permanent peaceful settlement, despite the temporary July 1953 armistice recommendation that the major signatories–the United States, North Korea, and China–negotiate peace terms within three months’ time, in contrast to North Korea’s numerous requests to end the Korean War; Whereas without a peace agreement, war can resume at any time in Korea, which stands to destroy the lives of 80 million people on the peninsula in addition to many other Asian and Pacific Islander peoples, and in this era of a nuclear-armed North Korea to inflict catastrophe within the United States and on a planetary scale; Whereas the ongoing state of war and division in Korea has exacted a massive human toll by keeping millions of families separated, including roughly 100,000 Korean Americans, by authorizing an exploitative system of international adoption, by subjecting the peoples of Korea and the region to the constant threat of nuclear war, and by perpetuating an arms race that diverts resources from human needs and justifies the proliferation of garrison states; Whereas U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific exploits the pretext of a menacing North Korea and the sub-imperial complicity of regional client-states, as in the South Korean deployment of over 300,000 soldiers to fight alongside U.S. forces in the U.S. war in Vietnam and in the strategic incorporation of sites like Diego Garcia, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Hawai‘i, and Okinawa into its “forward-deployed” posture against North Korea; Whereas the Korean War, as a structure of permanent war, exacts an imperial toll, justifying monstrous trillion-dollar “defense” budgets–in 2015, 54% of the federal discretionary budget–enabling the United States to wage endless wars and maintain troops abroad, the contamination, resource exploitation, and seizure of Indigenous lands, and the militarization of poor, non-white peoples within its army, correlating to unemployment, austerity programs that deny access to decent education, healthcare, and housing, and the militarization of the police; Whereas the Korean War, the longest-running U.S. conflict, enabled the United States to consolidate its global military-imperial dominance, inaugurating the U.S. military-industrial complex and justifying its base expansion, while continually justifying U.S. power projection in the region, its encirclement of China, and the ever-expanding U.S. military budget; Whereas contrary to U.S. government and corporate media claims, U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea continue, rehearsing the collapse, invasion, and occupation of–as well as nuclear first strikes against–North Korea, according to the Pentagon’s operation plans; Whereas the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula must be understood as imposing a commensurate obligation on the United States, given its history of repeatedly threatening North Korea with nuclear decimation and in violation of the 1953 Armistice deploying nuclear warheads to South Korea from 1958 to 1991, thereby requiring the elimination of all nuclear threats to the peninsula; Whereas only a genuine peace agreement among the main parties to the Korean War, reflective of the Korean people’s struggle for decolonization, self-determination, liberation, and reunification, can reduce the risk of nuclear and conventional war in Korea; Whereas the leaders of North and South Korea at the historic summit at Panmunjom on April 27, 2018 “solemnly declared before the 80 million Korean people and the whole world that there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun,” and pledged to work together for independent unification, and in September 2018, signed an historic military agreement to cease all hostile acts and have taken concrete steps to transform the so-called demilitarized zone (DMZ) into an actual peace zone; Whereas, since the historic 2018 summit between North Korea and the United States, diplomacy has stalled, escalating threats of war, intensifying the possibility that the Korean War’s seventieth year could give rise to the end of North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and resumption of full-scale U.S.-South Korea war exercises; Be it resolved, on the Korean War’s seventieth year, that AAAS: Supports the Korean people who have long fought for peace and the self-determined unification of the Korean peninsula and considers ending the Korean War a necessary step in the decolonization of South Korea; Enacts solidarity with the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, and North America who have long waged anti-militarism struggles against the projection of U.S. war power in and militarized expropriation of their homelands; Calls on the United States to abolish its seven-decade policy of hostility and sweeping sanctions that isolate North Korea and aim to inflict widespread humanitarian catastrophe on its people, formally end the Korean War, and replace the 1953 Armistice Agreement with a permanent peace agreement; Demands that the United States stop all military exercises that deploy or introduce its strategic assets on the Korean peninsula, abolish its nuclear umbrella over South Korea, Asia, and the Pacific, and meet its own obligations to create a nuclear-free world; Initiates critical reflection on and collective action regarding the complicity of U.S. universities within the military-industrial complex and our role as socially engaged scholars to analyze the structural moorings of our own conditions of possibility; and Encourages students and scholars to engage in a three-year research and teaching initiative, starting Fall 2020, that emphasizes critical approaches to and collective inquiry about the Korean War, with a focus on the racial, sexual, colonial, and sub-imperial violence of U.S. war power as well as peoples’ struggles for decolonization. Sponsors: Minju Bae (Temple/NYU), Crystal Baik (UC Riverside), Patrick Chung (University of Maryland), Christine Hong (UC Santa Cruz), Alfred Flores (Harvey Mudd), Elaine Kim (UC Berkeley), Joo Ok Kim (University of Kansas), Deann Borshay Liem (Mu Films), Monica Kim (NYU), Jeff Santa Ana (Stony Brook University), Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern), Naoko Shibusawa (Brown University) Signers: Jane Komori (UC Santa Cruz) Jinah Kim (California State University, Northridge) Audrey Wu Clark (United States Naval Academy) Daniel Kim (Brown University) Ida Yalzadeh (Brown University) Rachel Kuo (NYU) Laura Kang (UC Irvine) Sarita See (UC Riverside) Andrew Leong (UC Berkeley) Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (UCLA) Trung PQ Nguyen (UC Santa Cruz) Davorn Sisavath (California State University, Fresno) Nishant Upadhyay (University of Colorado Boulder) Na-Rae Kim (University of Connecticut) Simeon Man (UC San Diego) Susie Woo (California State University, Fullerton) A. Naomi Paik (UIUC) Michelle N. Huang (Northwestern University) Lili Kim (Hampshire College) Christopher Fan (UC Irvine) Josen Masangkay Diaz (University of San Diego) Heejoo Park (UC Riverside) C. Aujean Lee (University of Oklahoma) Vin Nguyen (University of Waterloo) Yumi Lee (Villanova University) Mark Tseng-Putterman (Brown University) Vivian Truong (University of Michigan) Ka-eul Yoo (UC Santa Cruz) James Matthew McMaster (UW Madison) Cynthia Wu (Indiana University) Yuki Obayashi (UC Santa Cruz) Miliann Kang (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Christen Sasaki (UC San Diego) Terry K. Park (University of Maryland) Salonee Bhaman (Yale University) Cynthia Gao (NYU) Mary Yu Danico (Cal Poly Pomona) Joseph Ong (UCLA) Clara Han (Johns Hopkins University) Jane Kuoch (UCLA) Minh-Ha T. Pham (Pratt Institute) S. Heijin Lee (NYU) Anita Mannur (Miami University Ohio) Edith Chen (Cal State University, Northridge) Nadia Young-na Kim (Loyola Marymount University) Rebecca Jo Kinney (Bowling Green State University) David Roh (University of Utah) W. Anne Joh (Garrett Theological Seminary) Gina Masequesmay (Cal State University, Northridge) Todd Henry (UC San Diego) Grade Kweon (UNC Chapel Hill) Kimberly McKee (Grand Valley State University) Nitasha Sharma (Northwestern University) Beth Lew-Williams (Princeton University) Elizabeth W. Son (Northwestern University) Allan Lumba (Virginia Tech) Chad Shomura (University of Colorado Denver) Sudipa Topdar (Illinois State University) Robert G. Lee (Brown University) Sunny Yang (University of Houston) Elena Shih (Brown University) Richard Kim (UC Davis) Aimee Bahng (Pomona College) Karen Umemoto (UCLA) Genevieve Clutario (Wellesley College) JoAnna Poblete (Claremont Graduate University) Jean-Paul deGuzman (The Windward School and UCLA) Marie Myung-Ok Lee (Columbia University) Takuya Maedda (Brown University) Sarah Park Dahlen (St. Catherine University) Long Le-Khac (Loyola University Chicago) Jeremy Tai (McGill University) Jennifer Kelly (UC Santa Cruz) Laurel Mei-Singh (University of Hawai‘i Mānoa) Ji-Yeon Jo (UNC Chapel Hill) Nayoung Aimee Kwon (Duke University) Hiroaki Matsusaka (UCLA) Jennifer Jihye Chun (UCLA) Kira Donnell (SF State) Wei Ming Dariotis (SF State) Eric Mar (SF State)

Summary The possibility that North Korean ships may be smuggling weapons of mass destruction is a matter of intense concern in the Asia Pacific region and beyond. The few reported incidents of North Korean ships involved in WMD transport are ambiguous; some ships have been engaged in legal weapons trade and some carried “dual-use” goods suitable for use in non-military applications, like agriculture. Ownership of the North Korean merchant fleet is largely private and highly fragmented; most of its ships are small, old, and in poor repair, and are often subject to rigorous scrutiny in foreign ports. The inability of the government to effectively regulate the low-cost, sub-standard shipping industry creates the risk and incentives to smuggle goods, including WMD. Anti-proliferation efforts should abandon the divisive and unsuccessful Proliferation Security Initiative and concentrate on negotiating North Korea’s entry into international arms control treaties, maintain stringent port controls, and negotiate technical assistance to reduce the vulnerability of the North Korean shipping industry. An ongoing staple of security concern in the Asia Pacific region is the fear that the sea freight of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) will be used for illicit activities—from smuggling of drug and counterfeit currency to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In 2003, for instance, one North Korean defector testified to the U.S. Congress that North Korea obtained 90 percent of its missile components from Japan using cargo ships that sailed between Wonsan and Niigata. The U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) provided one response to these fears by seeking to create partnerships in the region to monitor and control the shipping of WMD; its de facto primary target was North Korean shipping.1 Another, in the wake of North Korea’s October 2006 nuclear test, was United Nations Security Council Resolution 1718, which among other things prohibited the transfer of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, ballistic missiles, and components of WMD to and from North Korea.2 North Korea’s major international freight capacity is in the shipping sector. North Korean shipping companies, like all other enterprises, lost state subsidies beginning in the early 1990s and adopted profit maximization as the primary goal of business activities.3 The push factor was government pressure on companies to make money. The pull factor was individuals’ need for income for their families. Combined with opportunities for travel denied to most North Koreans, loosening of government surveillance, and inadequate and undeveloped governmental regulatory capacity, it would not be surprising if smuggling occurred. Structural frailties in the North Korean shipping sector contribute to an environment in which owners, managers, and individual crew members are vulnerable to criminal exploitation and hence the potential for smuggling of all sorts of goods—from lumber to WMD. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there is little evidence to suggest that the North Korean government systematically transports WMD through its own merchant fleet or engages in smuggling by sea (or air). Also perhaps surprisingly, given the conventional perception of North Korea as a monolithic society in which all activity is controlled by the state, the North Korean shipping industry is fragmented and privatized as well as being, less surprisingly, nationalist in its ownership, flagging, and crewing patterns. Again, perhaps surprising is that the North Korean shipping industry operates as a conventional participant in global shipping markets and international shipping regimes. In the shipping industry, rather than being isolated from world trading regimes, North Korea is a globalized player, albeit a relatively small one. How Do We Know Anything About North Korean Ships? It is relatively straightforward to obtain data about North Korean shipping because of the characteristics of the global shipping industry that lend themselves to transparency. Countervailing tendencies to opacity, also present in global shipping regimes, are more or less absent in the case of North Korean shipping. Tendencies to transparency. Comprehensive data on merchant ships is collected and collated in international commercial shipping databases, the most reputable of which is the Lloyds Shipping Register.4 These are accessible to researchers on payment of a subscription. Data on individual ships, companies, and owners are also available from a variety of open-source databases. These databases allow for a large degree of cross-checking and cross-matching of data.5 Open-source information on ships is also available via the public reporting mechanisms of international port control conventions and procedures.6 Because of the reporting systems demanded by international laws, conventions, norms, and safety rules, ships that enter foreign ports undergo regular safety inspections.7 Regional port control authorities, particularly the Tokyo and Paris MOU secretariats (Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control), collate and publish data drawn from these inspections online, providing a useful source of data on all ships that call into Asian and European ports.8 Tendencies to opacity. North Korean shipping also operates, however, as part of a global shipping industry that helps ship owners who, for commercial or other reasons, prefer to avoid transparency. It is not unusual, for instance, for ships to be owned in one country and flagged and registered in another. Ship owners may also be separate, and sometimes based in a different country from the business entity that manages and operates the ship. In other cases, the same entity may be both owner and operator. It is also common for names of ships to be changed on a regular basis. International shipping registers can therefore become quickly out of date as ships change owners, managers, names, and flags. A further problem with the shipping registers is that they are not systematically synchronized with each other. Global shipping is a competitive industry, and commercial considerations also promote tendencies to nondisclosure. The data. All data on North Korean shipping, unless otherwise noted, were obtained from the Lloyd’s Register of Ships (LRS), accessed in July and August 2008. Also consulted were the Equasis database and two key regional port control bodies, the Tokyo and Paris MOU secretariats. Figures from the different databases are occasionally incompatible—for instance, some ships are reported in one database and not in another. This is inevitable for any research on global shipping given, among other things, the different time periods at which data are entered. Ships routinely go in and out of service and sometimes sink. Use of the LRS database for all quantitative analysis, however, ensures consistency of analytical categories. Why the Concern about North Korean Shipping? While there are few reports of North Korean ships involved in WMD transshipment, the concern is that if any ships are involved in illicit activity, the state must have directed and managed that activity. The North Korean shipping sector undoubtedly has the potential to transport controversial or contraband cargo. The merchant fleet is old, small, and in poor condition. This, combined with lax regulation and pressure to make money, provides an enabling environment for owners, managers, and crew to seek profit wherever they can. A disincentive for the use of North Korean merchant shipping to transport WMD, however, is the fact that the international port regimes to which all shipping must adhere make rigorous inspection of North Korean merchant ships likely, including in the ports of allies such as Vietnam, China, and Russia. North Korea’s Merchant Fleet: Small, Unsafe, and Out of Date The DPRK merchant fleet in August 2008 amounted to just 242 vessels. The total dead-weight tonnage (the conventional measure of cargo-carrying capacity) of the entire fleet is 1,105,246 tons. This fleet makes up a tiny portion of global shipping, just over 1 percent.9 General cargo carriers comprise the majority of the North Korean fleet at 129 ships or 53 percent. The next biggest category is that of fishing vessels, with 34 ships or 14 percent of the total. Figure 1 shows the numbers of ships by category of vessel. North Korean ships are regularly inspected when they visit foreign ports and equally regularly reported to port control regimes for safety breaches and non-compliance with maritime regulations. The fleet is aging—the average ship was built 29 years ago and is unlikely to have seen anything other than the most basic investment under North Korean ownership. As figure 2 shows, 92 percent of the merchant fleet was built before 1990. North Korean ships have relatively small cargo-carrying capacities, as figure 3 shows. A massive 70 percent can carry cargoes of only 5,000 tons or less. No ship can carry more than 30,000 tons. These capacities contrast starkly with the 250,000-tonnages that are now common in global shipping.10 There is no database of conditions onboard ships, but proxy indicators of health and safety can be found in the port control regional monitoring databases. The Tokyo port control records, for example, show that between 1 January and 18 February 2006 there were 44 inspections of North Korean ships in Asian ports. All inspections found deficiencies; in seven cases, the deficiencies were so serious that the ship was detained until they could be remedied. These detentions took place in a number of different ports including Moji, Japan; Haiphong, Vietnam; Nakhodka, Russia; Yantai, China; and Hong Kong. Reports of poor conditions on North Korean vessels come from throughout Asia, including the ports of allies. It is clearly not the case, for example, that Japanese port controls, tightened for political reasons, skewed data artificially by holding North Korean ships to higher standards than other merchant shipping. 11 North Korean shipping is perhaps best understood as typical of that found in other low-income countries that have found a niche in the bottom tier of what has sometimes been called the two-tier structure of today’s globalized maritime industry. The top tier comprises shipping largely from developed states, which is relatively tightly regulated, and where crews work in decent conditions and earn high wages. Shipping in the bottom tier is comprised largely of low-cost carriers, mainly bulk-trade vessels, which are flagged in countries whose registries exist to create revenue for the flagged state, that is, the flag-of-convenience countries. Pay and living conditions are poor but provide seafarers from poor countries with the opportunity to earn hard currency.12 It would not be surprising if badly paid crews, working in substandard conditions sometimes grasped available opportunities to benefit from ancillary petty, or less petty, illicit trade. Ownership and Management In the North Korean shipping industry management overwhelmingly coincides with ownership, with only 13 ships registered as splitting ownership and management functions. This is not unexpected, given that main function of global shipping management companies is the hiring of crew cheaply from all over the world.13 Fragmentation of ownership. The fact that the North Korean shipping industry is extremely fragmented in terms of ownership goes counter to the conventional image of a monolithic North Korea. In August 2008, Lloyd’s Register showed that there were 125 North Korean ship owners. Two-thirds of them (82 of 125) owned only one ship. Another 22 owned only two ships, and eight owned three. This left 13 shipping owners owning four ships or more; of these, only three owned more than 10 ships each. Figure 4 illustrates the extreme fragmentation of North Korean ship ownership. A privatized industry. Even more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that North Korea’s shipping fleet is overwhelmingly non-government-owned. According to Lloyd’s Register, the government directly owns just one ship and has a beneficial ownership in five more. Direct ownership is of the 1973-built, 12,000-ton general cargo ship, the Chon Song. Of the five in which the government possesses a beneficial interest, two are owned by the South Hamgyong provincial government—the 2,500-ton general cargo ship, the Paek Han San, built in 2003, and the 500-ton fishing vessel, the Sin Pung, built in 1960. The three remaining cargo ships in which the government has a beneficial interest are the 14,000-ton general cargo ship, the Tae Dong, built in 1983; the 10,000-ton container ship, the Kum Rung 7, built in 1972; and the 3,000-ton aggregates carrier, the Kum Rung 5, built in 1991. The Tae Dong is registered as owned and managed by the Korea Taedong Shipping Co., which is in turn registered as a subsidiary of the North Korean government. The Kum Rung 7 and the Kum Rung 5 are both registered as owned and managed by the Korea Rungra 888 Trading Co., which is also registered as a subsidiary of the North Korean government. Lloyd’s Register shows that the North Korean government has an additional 40 subsidiary companies, but none of these as of August 2008 owned ships (suggesting a prior government disinvestment in the shipping sector). Private ownership of North Korean ships is not a new phenomenon. In 1999, a Singapore court noted that North Korean ship owners should not be considered as controlled or owned by the North Korean government just because they were domiciled in that country.14 In the same judgment, the court noted the provision of North Korean law that specifically allowed ships to be owned by nongovernmental cooperative associations. The country’s 1998 constitution specifically allowed nonstate entities to own property. The July 2002 economic reforms, that were a consequence of de facto privatization beginning in the 1990s and de jure cause of privatization from 2002 onward, extended and promoted nonstate entrepreneurship. It is logical to assume that those enterprises best able to exploit foreign trade opportunities—that is, the shipping industry—would have taken advantage of the 2002 economic reform legislation. The National Dimension – Flagging North Korean Ships Merchant shipping has for the most part chosen to fly the home flag. This is unusual for the global ship-ping industry, in which over 64 percent of shipping (measured by tonnage or cargo-carrying capacity) is registered in countries other than that where the ship has a national connection through, for instance, ownership or management.15 As of August 2008, of the 242 DPRK-owned merchant ships, 223 (92 percent) were flagged at home (see figure 5).16 The flag state of eight of the remaining 19 ships was not recorded by the Lloyd’s Register. If these eight ships were also flying the North Korean flag—which is very possible—this would mean that an overwhelming proportion of North Korean ships, some 231 of 242, were flying the home flag. Irrespective of the unknowns, however, what these figures indicate is that most of the country’s ship owners have not chosen to take advantage of the anonymity that flying another flag might allow them. Foreign Partnerships. As of 2008, North Korean ships and ship owners had relatively few institutionalized foreign partnerships. Those that existed involved ships that were flagged abroad. The 11 known foreign flag states for DPRK ships were Sierra Leone (3); Mongolia (2); Panama (2); with Belize, China, Georgia and, perhaps rather unexpectedly, South Korea flagging one ship each. Only one ship owned and flagged in North Korea, the Lady Belinda, had a partnership agreement with a foreign manager, in this case located in Greece. Global Entrepreneurs. Shipping is by definition a globalized industry, and the North Korean shipping industry is a full participant in five different ways. First, North Korean ship owners buy and sell ships on the international market. Second, they insure their ships abroad (for instance, in London). Third, North Korean managers and crew call at ports around the world (except the United States, whose ports are closed to North Korean ships). Fourth, crew and managers meet with counterparts from other countries both in home ports and abroad. Fifth, North Korean shipping officials have contact with shipping operators from other countries through the development of the DPRK as a flag-of-convenience registry. Although North Korea is still building ships, its capacity is small and the industry’s existing ships have necessarily been purchased from others around the world. North Korean ships are more likely to have been built in Japan than at home. The country is also buying ships built elsewhere. One shipping company owns a ship built in China as recently as 2005. North Korea’s three “new build” acquisitions of 2008 were built at home, but were small—10,000 tons on average. Figure 5 indicates the range of countries where North Korean ships were built. Most of North Korea’s sea trade remains in Asia; it includes oil shipped from Russia’s Asian ports and a regular goods trade with China and Vietnam. Sea movements are not confined to Asia; regular port calls are recorded in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The DPRK is situated on the edge of a busy network of sea lanes in Northeast Asia. Its ships use the trade routes between Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, through which over half of the world’s merchant marine regularly sails—the same trade routes as its prosperous trading neighbors, including Japan, South Korea, and China. Owners and crew have regular contact with international traders, in ports of call and in home ports. The DPRK has eight international ports; Nampo on the west coast and Chongjin on the east are by far the most important. Nampo is important for long-distance shipping; its ships travel to South Korea, China, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Chongjin and Wonsan are bases for trade with Russia and (before it instituted sanctions) Japan. Chongjin takes a 24 percent share of the DPRK’s foreign trade and is home to a resident Chinese consul, whose main function is to serve the Chinese traders operating in the northeast of the country.17 Nampo, whose share of North Korean foreign trade is around 30 percent, is a bustling port in which crew congregate from all over the world (including sometimes from United States ships delivering food grain). Both Chongjin and Nampo have seamen’s clubs, catering to foreign crews but also to North Koreans who need to meet with foreigners engaged in the shipping trade. Finally, North Korea offers a flag-of-convenience shipping registry. The largest flag-of-convenience shipping registries are located in Panama and Liberia, although many countries offer flag-state facilities to foreign ships.18 The flag-state industry is not confined to poor states. The United Kingdom and Germany, for example, have set up less closely regulated “second” registries in an effort to attract international ship registrations.19 According to the International Transport Workers’ Federation, ships are understood to be flying flags of convenience “where beneficial ownership and control of a vessel is found to lie elsewhere than in the country of the flags the vessel is flying.”20 The Federation also categorizes a state as a flag-of-convenience state on health and safety grounds. This is because flag-of-convenience states do not always enforce minimum ship safety standards, may overlook poor working and living conditions, including long hours and low pay, and do not ensure health and welfare support. In total, 291 merchant ships were listed in Lloyd’s Register as being flagged in North Korea. Of these, 223 were DPRK-owned, 67 were foreign-owned, and one had unknown ownership. Figure 6 shows the ownership location of the foreign-owned ships flagged by the DPRK. Interestingly, two U.S. ships are among those flagged in the DPRK. DPRK revenues from its international flagging operations are not known, but Mongolia, for instance, generates around $200,000 a year from its 260 flagged ships, and it would not be unreasonable to suggest that North Korea might earn a similar sum. Flagging of foreign ships is not therefore a major source of income for the DPRK. Foreign owned ships flagged in North Korea face fewer regulatory constraints than ships flagged in most other countries, but they are likely to be inspected during most port calls because of the DPRK’s international standing as a high risk country in terms of maritime safety standards. These ships therefore risk additional costs because of delay from detentions by port authorities. The reasons that foreign ships fly the North Korean flag need further research, but it would be reasonable to speculate that they are either economic or historical or a mixture of the two. For an old ship soon to be taken out of commission, it may cost more to transfer the flag than to retain it. Similarly, an owner or manager with a past or present business relationship with a North Korean owner (or manager) may choose to retain the flag. These suggestions are speculative, but the disadvantages of flying the DPRK flag are manifest, and there is no evidence that it has become an attractive flag of convenience in the international shipping market. WMD Incidents Involving North Korean Shipping Over the years, the U.S. and Japanese governments in particular have expressed concerns about DPRK government shipments of WMD and their components. Informing these concerns are statements from North Korean defectors and intelligence reports. Somewhat surprisingly, in the light of the global visibility of such claims through reporting in the international media, it is difficult to find hard data on the alleged incidents, and indeed it is hard to find references to more than a tiny number of incidents—the same examples tend to be iterated in all accounts of North Korean WMD proliferation. Table 1 lists the incidents reported in the international press as involving North Korean ships and the transportation of WMD for which there are significant data. In the cases for which ship data are known, the ships were old (built in 1974, 1980, and 1981), small, general-purpose cargo carriers. The owners were Korea Dae-hung Shipping, Korea Kangsong Shipping, and Sohae Sonbak. Korea Kangsong has the largest fleet in the country at 14 ships, but it shows few signs of prosperity, with an average ship age of 32 years and an average cargo-carrying capacity of less than 1,500 tons. Sohae Sonbak has 11 ships, the third highest number in North Korea, and its fleet has a combined cargo- carrying capacity of 223,000 tons, about a quarter of the country’s total. Its ships have an average size of 13,000 tons and an average age of 28 years. Korea Daehung Shipping has five ships with an average age of 27 years. The ship most regularly mentioned in the international media as a possible conduit of illicit goods is the passenger ferry Man Gyong Bong 92, owned and managed by the Daizin Shipping Company, headquartered in Pyongyang. Until Japan stopped North Korean ships entering its ports in 2006, the Man Gyong Bong 92 provided a regular passenger and goods service between the two countries. No instance of smuggled goods was ever identified by the Japanese authorities, despite rigorous port inspections. The repeated allegations of the ship’s involvement in smuggling WMD components, emerging mainly from defectors and unnamed U.S. and Japanese intelligence sources, seemed to be based on an assumption that all commercial and financial transactions with Japan, from the purchase of secondhand bicycles to the transfer of remittances from North Koreans in Japan to relatives in the DPRK, could be used to sustain indirectly North Korean WMD programs. Other recent incidents involved “dual use” goods for which a link to WMD is possible but not certain. Sodium cyanide is a good example of a dual-use product. Sodium cyanide has legitimate applications in mining and agriculture, both of which are important industries in the country and both of which are dependent on imported chemicals, but it can also be used in the manufacture of the nerve gas tabun. In 2004, a South Korean business exported 107 metric tons of the chemical to Dandong, China, knowing that it would be re-exported to North Korea. The businessman involved received a jail term of one and a half years as sodium cyanide is classified by the South Korean government as a strategic material. Foreign-owned ships have also been suspected of smuggling WMD components to and from North Korea. One such incident was the April 2003 seizure of the French ship Ville de Virgo by German police who had discovered that the ship was carrying 214 aluminum tubes with false end-user certificates and whose destination was North Korea.21 The tubes could have been used as gas-centrifuge components for enriching uranium for nuclear weapons (or as parts for bicycle frames or aircraft). The ship was forced to stop at the Egyptian port of Alexandria where, with the cooperation of the Egyptian government, the tubes were unloaded and returned to Hamburg. In recent years, perhaps the most notorious incident involving DPRK shipping was the arrest of the crew of the Pong Su in 2003, after the capture of heroin and drug smugglers who had landed off Melbourne, Australia, from the North Korean ship.22 The crew testified that the North Korean ship had been hired by a Malaysian drug syndicate that had told the ship owner and crew that the purpose of the voyage was to transport secondhand cars. In 2006, the court ruled that the four North Korean crew charged with trafficking in heroin were innocent and set them free, after they had served three years in prison. Even the most well-known incidents involving North Korean ships in alleged smuggling do not demonstrate deliberate malfeasance. There are, however, potentially major rewards for profit-seeking shipping operators. Absent domestic regulatory capacity, and with economic incentives propelling owners and crew to seek every possible trade opportunity, the conditions are ripe for all sorts of freelance activity, legal and illegal. North Korean Shipping and WMD Proliferation There is little hard evidence that the government of North Korea is involved in the illicit shipping of WMD or components of WMD. DPRK shipping incidents involved either legally traded weapons or chemicals with both military and civilian applications. The government has other ways to transport WMD besides using its own ships. State-to-state trade, for example with Iran or Pakistan, can be a carried out using aircraft or ships belonging to allies. The DPRK government has no record of selling WMD to terrorist groups, and there are no serious allegations from any source, let alone evidence, that it is doing so now. The very high likelihood of inspection during port calls abroad acts as a disincentive for the use of DPRK-owned and -flagged ships for transport of illicit cargo. North Korean shipping is, however, vulnerable to criminal exploitation by owners, managers, and individual crew members because of the structure of the shipping industry. Working conditions on the ships are poor, official wages for North Korean sailors are likely minimal, and opportunities and incentives for transporting illicit cargo are probably plentiful. There are many small shipping operators, and businesses are now expected to make profits rather than relying on the state for income; profit maximization has become the primary goal for ship owners and crew. The North Korean government is much less able to exert regulatory control than it was before the 1990s, thus allowing more opportunity for illicit trading activities. These are arguably more likely to involve smuggling of civilian goods, including possibly narcotics, than weapons of mass destruction. Policy Implications Current U.S. policy regarding the threat of weapons proliferation by North Korean shipping is almost entirely focused on the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). This is a U.S.-led effort, begun in 2003, that focuses on interdictions at sea of ships carrying WMD. The PSI was developed outside existing multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, although the U.S. government has encouraged states to join the initiative—arguing in 2008 that 92 countries supported the initiative. The PSI is controversial legally and in terms of its effectiveness.23 The legality of interdicting ships in international waters is ambiguous. Key states, including North Korea’s neighbors, South Korea and China, have refused to sign up, weakening the PSI’s effectiveness in targeting North Korean shipping. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has identified numerous shortcomings in the implementation of the PSI, including the absence of budgets, procedures, and a written strategy.24 The PSI has been expensive, inefficient, and arguably unsuccessful, and has caused unnecessary dissension among partners who might otherwise have collaborated on counter-proliferation efforts. Its funding should be reallocated to support nonproliferation objectives that could be negotiated within the framework of the ongoing Six-Party Talks on North Korea’s nuclear program. Efforts should focus on mitigating the structural weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the DPRK’s shipping industry and preventing potential criminal activities by ship owners, managers, and crews. Stringent port controls should be maintained, perhaps in combination with technical assistance to North Korea to improve its maritime practices. In the medium to long term, the DPRK will need to redevelop its economy so that, among other things, the government will no longer need to raise money by offering a flag of convenience. Economic development would also make it less necessary for ship owners, managers, and crews to earn hard currency from smuggling. Economic redevelopment will, of course, depend on foreign capital investment—and this will in turn depend upon the resolution of political tensions in Northeast Asia. Not all transportation of WMD is against international law. Putting a halt to legal WMD transportation is a difficult matter and would be most likely to occur subsequent to entry of the DPRK into international nonproliferation conventions. The signing up of the DPRK to relevant international conventions is in turn only likely subsequent to or as part of a political settlement to the current security crises on the Korean Peninsula. Hazel Smith is a member of the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. Dr. Smith is currently Chair in Resilience and Security at Cranfield University, UK and Director of the Resilience Centre in the Department of Applied Science, Security and Resilience. Dr. Smith worked on the DPRK for nearly two decades, where she has been a regular visitor since 1990. She worked for nearly two years in North Korea (between 1998 and 2001) for the UN World Food Programme, UNICEF and the United Nations Development Programme, and continues to work for IOs, governments, NGOs, business, and the international media as an advisor on North Korea. Dr. Smith has published extensively on North Korea including the UNICEF Situation Analysis of Children and Women in the DPRK, and her recent work includes a report on DPRK shipping for the Japanese foreign ministry and a DPRK context analysis for development programming for the Swiss Development and Cooperation Agency. She is the author of Hungry for Peace: International Security, Humanitarian Assistance and Social Change in North Korea (2005), and Reconstituting Korean Security (2007). Dr. Smith has been interviewed by international media including the BBC, KBS, Voice of America, NPR, CNN, CBS, ABC, and PBS, and was invited to testify at the UK House of Commons on Korean security (2006). The Korea Policy Institute thanks Sarah Park for her work on this article and the East-West Center for granting permission to republish it. Endnotes