A memorial statue for the military sexual slaves – young women from Korea, China and the Philippines, in San Francisco. (Steven Whyte’s Facebook) By Women of North and South Korea and Overseas allies | March 8, 2019 In a landmark joint statement on the centenary of the March First Movement for Korean independence and national self-determination, women from North and South Korea alongside overseas allies called for a long overdue, victim-centered resolution to Japan’s unredressed crime of military sexual slavery–its notorious “comfort women” system in which an estimated 200,000 women, the majority Korean, were coerced into sexual labor. The Korean Committee on Measures for the Sexual Slavery for Japanese Army and Drafting Victims from North Korea and the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance of the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (the Korean Council) from South Korea spearheaded writing the joint statement. The members of both organizations met from February 12 – 13 at Mount Kumgang in North Korea to begin discussing the plan. During those two days, more than 200 South Koreans, including victims of Japanese imperialism, family members of victims, activists, and scholars, attended this special meeting to discuss ways to address the past crimes of the Japanese military committed against Korea as a nation and its people before and during WWII. The Korean Council, which was one of the organizations invited to this special joint meeting, first met women from North Korea on May 31, 1991 in Tokyo at the First Symposium on Peace in Asia and the Role of Women (아시아의 평화와 여성의 역할 1차 심포지엄). South Korean citizens actively participated in the fundraising drive for the advertisement, organized by the Korean Council. Within a week, South Korean citizens and overseas organizations donated enough money to pay for the half-page advertisement in the Washington Post on March 1st. The efforts of the women from North and South Korea were soon strengthened by other organizations in South Korea and overseas. The international joint statement advocates for peace in the Korean peninsula and seeks long-overdue justice for the victims of Japanese imperialism. Joint Statement Calling for Resolution of the Issue of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery from the Women of North and South Korea, and those Standing in Solidarity  to Commemorate the Centenary of the March 1st Movement We demand that the Japanese government apologize and pay reparations for committing inhumane war crimes against our people and the women of Asia. In 2018, North and South Korea opened the door to peace and reunification through the historical Panmunjom Declaration in April and Pyongyang Joint Declaration in September. The road between North and South Korea has been reconnected, and the warmth of peace envelops the Korean peninsula and gives birth to a new spring. Significantly, it is the centenary of the March 1st Movement, in which the Korean people shouted for independence, standing against the Japanese empire’s devastating colonization of then-unified Korea. The March 1st movement was the large-scale resistance of the Korean people against Japan, which colonized Korea under military rule. During almost 40 years of colonial occupation, Japan plundered our historical relics and resources and committed unjustifiable crimes against humanity. These war crimes, which include human trafficking, use of slave labor, and military sexual slavery, violated international law and can never be erased. However, rather than apologizing officially and making reparations, the Japanese government continues to distort and deny the facts of the history of invasion, refusing to take responsibility for the sexual slavery they committed, as well as other crimes against humanity. Furthermore, following the historic Panmunjom Declaration in April and Pyongyang Joint Declaration in September, and subsequent improvement in inter-Korean relations, the Japanese government has repeatedly attempted to block progress towards peace and is in fact preparing for a resurgence of militarism and imperialism. The transnational movement for the resolution of the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery has grown beyond solidarity between North and South Korea and extended globally. We, women from North and South Korea, and overseas, stand together on the centenary of the March 1st Movement to tell the world of the war crimes that were committed by the Japanese empire and its imperial army, including Japanese military sexual slavery. Furthermore, we resolve to strengthen our shared activism towards the goal of a complete and satisfactory solution, including an official apology and legal reparations from the Japanese government. We demand the following: We demand that the Japanese government: Unequivocally admit to committing illegal colonization and war crimes, and fulfill all its legal responsibilities for these crimes. Officially apologize and pay legal reparations to the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, and immediately cease any remarks and behaviors that defame the victims, strip them of dignity, or deny and distort the truth. Admit to the crimes against humanity, including forced mobilization, which were committed during its illegal colonization, and apologize and fulfill all legal responsibilities to the victims. Immediately cease all policies which result in renewed aggression against Korea or lead to a resurrection of militarism. Immediately cease all discriminatory policies and behaviors against Korean-Japanese who were displaced to and settled in Japan as a result of Japan’s illegal colonization of Korea. We demand that the international community: Investigate the crime of Japanese military sexual slavery, which the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies has repeatedly and consistently confirmed as a serious violation of human rights, as a vital step in resolving and bringing an end to the prevent wartime sexual violence that is still being perpetuated. Demand that the Japanese Government seek and implement a permanent resolution according to the principles of a victim-centered approach and the recommendations of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies. Urge the U.S. Government and Governments of the Allies of World War II to disclose all records on Japanese military sexual slavery in order to facilitate a complete investigation and prevent further defamation of the victims and denial of the war crimes by the Japanese Government. We will continue to work in solidarity, not only from North and South Korea but globally, so that these demands are met. February 28, 2019 Note: A key driver in the transnational pursuit of justice and a signatory to the statement, the Bay Area-based Education for Social Justice Foundation has produced key educational resources, including a compilation of primary source documents, for teachers, students, and activists alike. #Japanesewarcrimes #MarchFirstmovement #MilitarySexualSlavery

People watch a TV live broadcast about top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Vietnam, Feb. 27, 2019. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaochu) By Paul Liem | March 4, 2019 Rarely, if ever, has the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) succeeded in commandeering the narrative when it comes to past setbacks in its negotiations with the United States.  Washington, with China and Russia on occasion weighing in, has typically had the final word.  But after the Hanoi Summit last week, that has all changed. As expected, in Hanoi, the United States called a press conference to make its case to the “global community” that the talks had stalled due to unreasonable demands by the DPRK. But in an unprecedented move for North Korean diplomats, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho and Vice Foreign Minister Choi Son Hui went directly to the international press to share their views, and likely the views of Chairman Kim Jong Un, on where the talks went awry, challenging the U.S. team to account for its omissions. Last Thursday, President Trump told the press that Chairman Kim wanted the United States to lift sanctions “in their entirety” in exchange for partial denuclearization: They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted, but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that…. I mean, they wanted sanctions lifted but they weren’t willing to do an area that we wanted. They were willing to give us areas but not the ones we wanted. Shortly after midnight, 3/1/2019, Foreign Minister Ri told the press: We aren’t asking for all the sanctions to be lifted, but only some of them. We’re asking for relief from five of the UN Security Council’s 11 sanctions resolutions, the ones adopted between 2016 and 2017, and in particular the aspects of those sanctions that interfere with the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood. Ri went on to explain in detail what the D.P.R.K. was offering in exchange for a partial lifting of sanctions, and why: Our proposal was that, if the US lifts some of the UN sanctions, or in other words those aspects of the sanctions that impede the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood, we will completely and permanently dismantle the production facilities of all nuclear materials, including plutonium and uranium, in the Yongbyon complex, through a joint project by technicians from our two countries, in the presence of American experts. Even though the security guarantee is more important to us, as we take denuclearization measures, we understood that it could be more difficult for the United States to take measures in the military field. That is why we proposed the removal of partial sanctions, as corresponding measures. Our proposal was that, if the US lifts some of the UN sanctions, or in other words those aspects of the sanctions that impede the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood, we will completely and permanently dismantle the production facilities of all nuclear materials, including plutonium and uranium, in the Yongbyon complex, through a joint project by technicians from our two countries, in the presence of American experts. Ri also stated that the DPRK would commit in writing to a “permanent halt to nuclear testing and long-range rocket testing.”  Emphasizing North Korea’s insistence on a measure-for-measure process, Ri reasoned, “If we go through this level of trust building measures then we’ll be able to accelerate the process of denuclearization.”  The talks foundered, he pointed out, when “the U.S. insisted we should take one more step besides the dismantlement of nuclear facilities in Yongbyon areas.”  “It became crystal clear that the U.S. was not able to accept our proposal,” he stated. Madame Choi underscored Ri’s frustration.  UPI reported that “she accused the Trump administration of having moved the goal posts, saying it initially talked about dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear complex and is now taking issue with other sites as well.”  Madame Choi also stated that Chairman Kim “may have lost the will to negotiate” and that Trump and the United States were “missing an opportunity that comes once in a thousand years” and claimed “our Chairman had a difficult time understanding the U.S. system of measuring,” according to CNN. Ri and Choi’s press conference had the effect of holding the Trump administration accountable to a set of facts that President Trump and Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, had omitted from their account of the latest U.S.-DPRK summit.  A senior U.S. official clarified the administration’s account to the media on condition that he remain unnamed, according to Eric Talmadge, AP Bureau Chief in Pyongyang. Although the official stated that the North Koreans “basically asked for the lifting of all sanctions,” he conceded that “the North’s demand was only for Washington to back the lifting of United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed since March 2016 and didn’t include the other resolutions going back a decade more. What Pyongyang was seeking, he said, was the lifting of sanctions that impede the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood – as Ri had claimed,” Talmadge reported. Lifting the post 2016 sanctions would be worth billions of dollars which the North could use to fund their nuclear and missile programs, the official explained.  “So, it was definitely a robust demand.  But it wasn’t, as Trump claimed, all the sanctions.  It also didn’t come as a surprise.  He said the North had been pushing that demand for weeks in lower-level talks,” according to Talmadge. Up until the last-minute cancellation of the closing ceremony scheduled for last Thursday, during which President Trump and Chairman Kim were expected to sign a joint statement, hopes were running high in South Korea and the Korean diaspora that the two leaders would declare an end to the Korean War and a pathway to denuclearization.  Why this did not occur can be understood from the two press conferences and statements by U.S. officials responding to the DPRK’s account. Ri explains that they proposed a partial lifting of sanctions in exchange for shuttering the Yongbyon nuclear facilities because they understood that that security guarantees would be more difficult for the United States to offer.  But the closure of Yongbyon was not sufficient for the U.S. team.  Statements by Trump, Pompeo, and a senior State Department official indicate that the U.S. team sought a comprehensive disarmament agreement including closure of a “second uranium enrichment” and furthermore, a freeze on production of any “weapons of mass destruction.” In reply to questions from the New York Times reporter, David Sanger, President Trump revealed that the United States demanded that a “second uranium enrichment plant” be closed.  “But remember, too, even the Yongbyon facility and all of its scope — which is important, for sure — still leaves missiles, still leaves warheads and weapons systems,” Pompeo added.  A senior state department official put it this way, “the dilemma that we were confronted with is that the North Koreans at this point are unwilling to impose a complete freeze on their weapons of mass destruction programs,” the Hankyoreh reported. The official continued, “So to give many, many billions of dollars in sanctions relief would in effect put us in a position of subsidizing the ongoing development of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea,” the report continued. In retrospect, the DPRK team was prepared to forgo a peace declaration in favor of offering the closure of Yongbyon in exchange for a partial, albeit “robust,” lifting of sanctions, as a trust-building measure.  The U.S. team upped the ante to a freeze on the DPRK’s production of “weapons of mass destruction.” For a day and a half of talks, this goal was so farfetched that one has to wonder whether the Trump entourage arrived in Hanoi with any intention to seal a deal or with the goal of simply pushing back on criticism at home that President Trump had been “duped” by Chairman Kim at the first summit, by proving to his detractors that he could “walk.”  After all, the North Korean counterpoint to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” regime of sanctions is that it is now focusing on the mass production of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, asserting that they have no need for further testing.  Why would they give them up before sanctions are likewise given up, and before a peace regime is in place, let alone freeze production of weapons programs not yet on the table? “When we saw the table and John Bolton sitting at the table and Stephen Biegun sitting behind when he had done all this work to do all this preparation, it just seemed for us, ‘Oh my gosh, something fishy is going on here,’” exclaimed Christine Ahn, founder of Women Cross DMZ, Newsweek reported.  Indeed, a “former South Korean Unification Minister, Jeong Se-hyun, attributed the failure to a last-minute stipulation proposed by Bolton that would mandate North Korea not only report on its nuclear weapons but its chemical and biological stockpiles too,” the report also said. Ultimately, at the Hanoi Summit, the parties came to an impasse, they walked away from the table on cordial terms with a clearer view of the distance between their positions, they shared their separate accounts of the talks with the international press, and they declared their intentions to return.  But momentum towards implementing the pledges of the Singapore Summit last June has been lost, and reconnecting will be challenging. Early last September, South Korean President Moon Jae-in helped lay the groundwork for the Hanoi Summit when he obtained an agreement with Chairman Kim in Pyongyang, in which “The North expressed its willingness to continue to take additional measures, such as the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities in Yeongbyeon, as the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.”  In the triangulated relationship between the two Koreas and the United States, how will President Moon intercede on behalf of U.S. proposals now demanding full disarmament of not just nuclear weapons programs, but also non-nuclear programs, before any sanctions are lifted? At Stanford University in January, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, shared a vision with the audience of a “perfect outcome moment where the last nuclear weapon leaves North Korea, the sanctions are lifted, the flag goes up in the embassy and the (peace) treaty is signed in the same hour.”  He won the trust of his counterparts in Pyongyang with his positive outlook.  But after being sidelined by his own team in Hanoi, will Biegun continue to have the same influence in Pyongyang? Koreans in both Koreas and in the diaspora have long awaited peace on the Korean peninsula, but is U.S. society ready for a major culture shift in policy towards the DPRK?  Is President Trump capable of preparing the American public to lay aside its reservations and make peace with the DPRK, a U.S. nemesis for the past 70 years? As for the DPRK, in his 2019 New Year’s address, Chairman Kim indicated his desire to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough with the United States but cautioned that he would seek other options as needed: I am ready to meet the US president again anytime, and will make efforts to obtain without fail results which can be welcomed by the international community. But if the United States does not keep the promise it made in the eyes of the world, and out of miscalculation of our people’s patience, it attempts to unilaterally enforce something upon us and persists in imposing sanctions and pressure against our Republic, we may be compelled to find a new way for defending the sovereignty of the country and the supreme interests of the state and for achieving peace and stability of the Korean peninsula. What are the limits to North Korea’s “patience,” and what might be the “new way” forward for North Korea at this point? These are only a few of the daunting challenges and questions generated by the ambivalent outcome of the Hanoi Summit. Paul Liem is chair of the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors. #Trump #KoreaPeace #KimJongUn #DPRK #USDPRKSummit #NorthKorea

Choe Son Hui Press Conference | February 28, 2019 In comments to the press following the collapse of the Hanoi summit, North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui who entered the global spotlight last year with her assessment of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence as a “political dummy” for likening North Korea to Libya, noted that Kim Jong Un “may have lost the appetite for negotiations after seeing the U.S. reaction to our unprecedented proposal of dismantling the Yongbyon Nuclear Complex in its entirety.” Translation of press conference  (Korean follows below) Choe Son Hui: We’ll take questions regarding our Foreign Affairs Minister’s statement. – When would Chairman Kim Jong Un visit Seoul? Choe: Please limit your questions to DPRK-US Summit. – What are the additional measures the United States demanded? Choe: As the Minister clarified, what we proposed was historically significant. We proposed the permanent dismantling of all the nuclear facilities in their entirety at Yongbyon, including all the plutonium facilities and all the uranium facilities, in the presence of U.S. experts. In return, we proposed, as the Minister mentioned, that the United States lift the 5 sanctions that are closely related with livelihood of civilian economy. By rejecting this proposal, the United States is missing out on a golden opportunity for peace. -What are the 5 sanctions related to civilian livelihood? Choe: The 5 sanctions we proposed lifting do not include any sanctions related to the military. We only proposed lifting the sanctions that are related to civilian economic livelihood. Since 2016, there have been 6 sanctions resolutions against DPRK. Including Res. 2280, there are 5 that we want to see lifted, but even among those, we did not propose to scrap them 100%, only those parts that are directly related civilian livelihood. What we proposed was dismantling the Yongbyon Nuclear Complex in its entirety and inviting U.S. nuclear experts to join uss. As I watched this Summit, I felt our Chairman was struggling to understand the U.S. calculation and approach to the negotiations. Going forward, I am afraid that our Chairman may have lost the appetite for negotiations after seeing the U.S. reaction to our unprecedented proposal of dismantling of Yongbyon Nuclear Complex in its entirety. – When would be the next Summit? Choe: Not decided yet. There is no agreement on the next Summit (or negotiations) yet. – What is DPRK’s position on declaring the Nuclear List? Choe: I’d like to mention that the American nuclear expert Siegfried Hecker visited the uranium enrichment facility in Yongbyon Nuclear Complex. What we proposed is to completely, irreversibly dismantle such a enormous facility, including the enriched uranium facility. However, there was no appropriate response from the United States. Therefore, I do not know if such opportunity will be presented to the United States again. Thank you. _______________________________________________________________ 최선희 부상 : 우리 외무상 동지가 한 기자회견에서 의문시되거나 물어볼 것이 있으면 몇가지 질문만 받겠습니다. (김정은 위원장 서울 답방 하시나요?) 회담과 관련된 질문만 국한시켜주십시요. Choe Son Hui Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Choe: We’ll take questions regarding our Foreign Affairs Minister’s statement. – 김정은 위원장은 언제 서울 답방하나요? – When would Chairman Kim Jong Un visit Seoul? Choe: Please limit your questions to DPRK-US Summit. – 미국이 요구한 추가 조치는? – What are the additional measures the United States demanded? 최선희 부상: 영변 지구와 관련해서 이번에 우리가 내놓은 안은 외무상이 밝힌 바와 같이 영변 핵 단지 전체 그 안에 들어있는 모든 플루토늄 시설, 모든 우라늄 시설 포함한 모든 핵시설을 통채로 미국 전문가 입회 하에 영구적으로 폐기할 데 대한 역사적으로 제안하지 않았던 제안을 이번에 했습니다. 그 대신 우리가 미국 측에 요구한 것은 외무상동지가 밝힌 바와 같이 제재결의 중에서 민생용 민수용 제재 5건에 대해서 해제할 것을 요구했습니다. 이러한 제안에 대해서 미국측이 이번에 받아들이지 않은 것은 천재일우의 기회를 놓친것이나 같다고 생각합니다. Choe: As the Minister clarified what we proposed was to historically significant. We proposed permanent dismantling of all the nuclear facilities in its entirety, including all the plutonium facilities and all the uranium facilities with the presence of US experts. In return, we proposed, as the Minister mentioned, the US lift the 5 sanctions that are closely related with livelihood of civilian economy. Rejection of such proposal by the US is missing out on a golden opportunity for peace. -민생을 위한 5가지 제재는? -What are the 5 sanctions related to civilian livelihood? 최선희 부상: 민생과 관련해서는 우리가 제안한 5가지 제재 결의에서 군수용은 요구하지 않습니다 아직까지는. 그러나 민생과 관련돼서 인민생활 경제발전과 관련된 그 부분에 대한 사항들이 제재 해제를 요구하였을 뿐입니다. 결의 제재가 2016년부터 취한 대조선 결의가 6건이 됩니다. 그 중에서 2270호 등 5개 인데, 여기에서 이 가운데서도 100%가 아니고 민생과 관련된 부분만 제재를 해제할 것을 요구한 것입니다. Choe: The 5 sanctions we proposed lifting do not include any sanctions related to military. We only proposed to lift the sanctions that are related to civilian economic livelihood. Since 2016, there are 6 sanctions resolutions against DPRK. Including Res.2280, there are 5 that we want to see lifted, but even among those, we did not propose to scrap 100%, only those parts that are directly related civilian livelihood. 우리가 제안한 것은 영변 핵단지 전체에 대한 폐기입니다. 여기에서 실행할 때는 미국 핵전문가들이 와서 입회하게끔 돼 있다. 이번에 제가 수뇌회담을 옆에서 보면서 우리 국무위원장 동지께서 미국에서 하는 미국식 계산법에 대해서 리해하기 힘들어 하지 않시지 않는가, 리해가 잘 가지 않아서 하는 듯한 느낌을 받았습니다. 앞으로 이렇게 지난식에 있어보지 못한 영변 핵단지를 통채로 폐기할 데 대한 그런 제안을 내놨음에도 불구하고 민수용 제재 결의 부분적인 결의까지 해제하기 어렵다는 미국측의 반응을 보면서 우리 국무위원장 동지께서 앞으로의 조미 거래에 대해서 의욕을 잃지 않으시지 않았는가 하는 느낌을 받았습니다. What we proposed was dismantling of the Yongbyon Nuclear  Complex in its entirety. And when we are executing the dismantling, we’ll invite (US) nuclear experts. As I witness this Summit, I felt our Chairman was struggling to understand the US’s calculation and approach to the negotiations. Going forward, I am afraid that our Chairman may have lost the appetite for negotiations after seeing the US’s reaction to our unpresented proposal of dismantling of Yongbyon Nuclear Complex in its entirety. – 다음번 회담은? – When would be the next Summit? 최선희 부상: : 아직 정해진 것은 없습니다. 다음번 회담이 정해진 것은 없습니다. Choe: Not decided yet. There is no agreement on next Summit(or negotiations) yet. – 핵리스트 제출에 대한 북한의 입장은? – What is DPRK’s position on declaring of the Nuclear List? 최선희 부상: 제가 한 가지 강조하고 싶은 것은 미국의 핵 박사 지그프리드 헤커 박사가 영변 핵시설에 있는 농축우라늄 시설을 방문한 적이 있습니다. 그러한 공장까지도 거대한 농축 우라늄 공장까지 포함한 모든 핵시설을 우리가 이번에 영구적으로 되돌릴 수 없게 폐기할 데 대한 제안을 했지만 여기에 대한 미국 측의 대답이 호응이 없었습니다. 그래서 앞으로 이러한 기회가 다시 미국측에 차려지겠는지에 대해서는 저도 장담하기 힘듭니다. 감사합니다. Choe: I’d like to mention that the American nuclear expert Siegfried Hecker visited the uranium enrichment facility in Yongbyon Nuclear Complex. What we proposed is to completely, irreversibly dismantle such a enormous facility, including the enriched uranium facility. However, there was no appropriate response from the US. Therefore, I do not know if such opportunity will be presented to the US again. Thank you. Video of press conference #KoreaPeace #DPRK #ChoeSonHui #USDPRKSummit #NorthKorea

21 March 2019 Open Letter to the UN Security Council Members The peace process on the Korean Peninsula must go on We are 55 civil society organizations that act for peace on the Korean Peninsula. Since the last summit in Vietnam between the DPRK and the U.S. ended without result, concerns have been raised that the deadlock between the two countries will be prolonged. We wish to make it clear that there must be no further action to aggravate the situation. We appeal to the Members of the UN Security Council, the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1718, and the international community to ensure that the peace process on the Korean Peninsula is firmly sustained. We request the Members of the UN Security Council to publicly announce in support of the following: the reopening of the DPRK-the U.S. dialogue; the lifting all the sanctions related to humanitarian assistance; and the starting of negotiations to build peace regime on the Korean Peninsula. We also request the 1718 Committee to lift all the sanctions against humanitarian support to the DPRK. The dialogue between the DPRK and the U.S. must continue. The 2nd DPRK-U.S. summit clearly showed that removing tensions from the Korean Peninsula, where the Cold War still runs, is not an easy task. For the countries who have been enemies to each other for almost 70 years, it is not easy at all to trust and begin to have open talks with each other. This is why it is neither realistic nor appropriate for the U.S. to demand that the DPRK completely denuclearize at once. The DPRK needs to consider the fact that deep-rooted mistrust is also alive despite her stated willingness to denuclearize. We would like to highlight that the DPRK and the U.S. committed in Singapore ‘to establish new relations, to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula and to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’. We expect the two countries will adjust their demands and expectations to start phased and simultaneous implementation of their promises at the smallest level they feel comfortable with. Once they start building trust in the process, they will be able to agree on larger issues. The DPRK and the U.S. must earnestly listen to each other and continue their dialogue. At least, the sanctions against the DPRK that are related to humanitarian assistance must be lifted The UN says that the sanctions against the DPRK are not the end, but the means. In the same light, all resolutions of the UN Security Council on the sanctions emphasize the commitment to “a peaceful, diplomatic, and political solution to the situation.” The true purposes of such resolutions are to urge “the DPRK and the U.S. to respect each other’s sovereignty and exist peacefully together” and also “the council members as well as other states to facilitate a peaceful and comprehensive solution through dialogue”. Humanitarian assistance is a universal and non-derogable value and spirit in the work of the UN. As the UN Security Council resolutions clarify that these resolutions “are not intended to have adverse humanitarian consequences for the civilian population of the DPRK or to affect negatively or restrict those activities, … the work of international and non-governmental organizations carrying out assistance and relief activities in the DPRK for the benefit of the civilian population of the DPRK.” However, the sanctions against the DPRK by the UN and the stronger ones imposed by the U.S. after the 1st DPRK-U.S. summit have aggravated the conditions for humanitarian assistance to the DPRK. We urge the 1718 Committee to lift all the sanctions that prevent humanitarian assistance to the DPRK. These sanctions hamper implementation of inter-Korean agreements for exchange and cooperation. They even made it difficult to resume operation of Mount Geumgang tours and Gaeseong Industrial Complex, which are stopped activities unrelated to the UN sanctions. As initial steps for peace, the two Koreas need to expand meetings and cooperation among them in order to end military tension and confrontation, and thus paving way for peace in the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia. The sanctions against the DPRK which impede to conduct humanitarian assistance and build cooperative relationships between the two Koreas must be relieved as soon as possible. ‘Denuclearization as Peacemaking Process’ must be observed as a principle The nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula is a product of the instability inherent to an armistice regime, grown out of the decades-long military confrontation and arms race. Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is closely connected to building a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula with normalizing relations between the DPRK and the U.S. The denuclearization of the DPRK alone cannot be the entry point for negotiations to begin. Peace on the Peninsula cannot be achieved only through denuclearization. It can only be achieved, instead, when it becomes part of a peace-building process. Efforts to build a permanent peace regime here, such as signing a peace treaty or a non-aggression agreement, and normalizing relations between the DPRK and the U.S. must be paralleled. The kind of complete denuclearization that people in the two Koreas sincerely wish to achieve is a state where all nuclear threats surrounding the Peninsula are removed. This cannot be achieved only by ‘Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Denuclearization’ of the DPRK alone. Abolishment of the extended deterrence strategy to which the ROK, the U.S., and Japan rely on is one of the associated and necessary tasks. Nuclear-Free Korean Peninsula can become a stepping stone for Northeast Asia Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone and Nuclear-Free world. There is no other way to achieve peace but through peaceful means Achieving peace on the Korean Peninsula will serve as a testing case for whether humanity will be able to peacefully resolve the accumulated conflicts of today’s world, or not. In Korea, we have recently witnessed that peace can be achieved through peaceful means and problems can be solved through dialogue and negotiation. Since the inter-Korean summit last year, the two Koreas have ceased all hostile activities, cherishing the most peaceful time ever since the armistice began. We should never return to the repeated threats of nuclear war and heightened military tension under any circumstances. Once again, we urge the UN Security Council and the international community to support the painstaking efforts to bring peace to the Korean Peninsula. Cooperation from the international community is absolutely crucial. We plead that you do utmost to ensure the continuity of the peace process on the Korean Peninsula. For its part, Korean civil society will spare no effort. 80 Million Koreans Community Preparing for Reunification (K.P.R.) Asia Peace & History Education Network Chuncheon Womenlink Citizens’ Coalition for Democratic Media Citizens’ Coalition for Economic Justice Civil Peace Forum Civil Society Organizations Network in Korea Civilian Military Watch Conference for Peace in East Asia Daejeon Differently Abled Women Solidarity Daejeon Women’ Association for Better Aging Society Daejeon Women’s Association United Daejeon Women’s Association for Democracy Daejeon Women’s Association for Peace-Making Dongbuk Womenlink Eco Horizon Institute Green Korea Gunpo Womenlink Gwangju Womenlink Incheon Womenlink Jeju Peace Human Rights Center Jeju Peace Human Rights Institute WHAT Korea Federation for Environmental Movements Korea NGO Council for Cooperation with North Korea Korea Veterans for Peace Korea Women’s Associations United Korea Women’s Hot Line Korean Sharing Movement MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society Movement for One Korea Namseo Womenlink National YWCA of Korea NCYK (National Council of YMCA’S of Korea) Networks for Greentransport Ok Tree Peace Network Peace Sharing Association PEACEMOMO People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) Professors for Democracy Pyeongtaek Peace Center Reconciliation and Reunification Committee, NCCK (The National Council of Churches in Korea) Research Institute for Peace and Reunification of Korea Sejong Women’s Corporation Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea (SPARK) The Corea Peace 3000 The Headquarters of National Unification Movement of Young Korean Academy The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan The Research Institute of the Differently Abled Person’s Right in Korea The Righteous People for Korean Unification Women in Action for Life PAN Women Making Peace Womenlink Won-Buddhism Diocese of Pyongyang World Without War #KoreaPeace #Nuclearweapons #SouthKorea #USDPRKSummit

Christopher Ahn, a leading suspect in the case who is now in US custody and sought by Spain for extradition, standing outside the North Korean embassy in Madrid on February 22, the day of the attack. (Department of Justice) By Tim Shorrock | May 6, 2019 A Special Nation Investigation On Monday night, the Department of Justice issued a wanted poster for the leader of Free Joseon, a shadowy group of Korean exiles suspected of leading a violent assault on the North Korean embassy in Madrid on February 22. A suspect, Adrian Hong Chang, “is considered to be armed and dangerous,” says the poster, which includes a color photo of the fugitive and instructs arresting police officers or anyone who knows his whereabouts to contact the US Marshals Service. The public notification from the DOJ underscores the seriousness of the US government’s efforts to track down two Koreans sought for possible extradition to Spain under a criminal warrant issued in March by Judge José de la Mata of Spain’s high court. The very unusual move has stirred a backlash from US foreign-policy hard-liners on North Korea who say the Trump administration’s manhunt for the suspects amounts to support for that country’s 34-year-old dictator. That response is being led by Lee Wolosky, a New York lawyer and partner at Boies Schiller Flexner with extensive national-security experience. He entered the picture as the attorney and spokesperson for Free Joseon on March 26, the same day de la Mata identified Hong (Chang’s original surname), and has added a layer of mystery—and obfuscation—to an already strange story. In his public statements, Wolosky has defended Free Joseon’s actions in Madrid, denied the judge’s accusations, and chastised the US government for publicly disclosing the names of the suspects. Wolosky did not respond to requests from The Nation for an interview. On Tuesday, a Boies Schiller Flexner spokesperson called to ask “what this story is all about” but did not respond to questions about who was paying for Wolosky’s representation and how he got involved in the case. Hong is a Korean citizen of Mexico long known in Washington for his strident opposition to the government of Kim Jong-un. Hong and Christopher Ahn, a former US Marine who once served in Iraq, stand accused of breaking into and entering the North Korean embassy in Madrid, taking North Korean diplomats hostage, and stealing computers, hard drives, cellphones, and encryption devices that they later handed over to the FBI. Ahn was arrested in Los Angeles by US Marshals on April 18. In the first court action in the case, on April 23, Ahn appeared in federal court in Los Angeles. He remains in jail and was denied bond under an extradition warrant from Spain, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, with another hearing scheduled for July. In a series of events that has yet to be explained, Hong met with the FBI in New York and Los Angeles in late March to discuss the embassy attack, according to the DOJ court filings. Yet he somehow managed to evade the government’s raid in April on his apartment in LA and is now in hiding, his attorney claims. Hong, who is a permanent US resident, came to fame in 2004 after founding Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a California-based organization which claims to operate an “underground railroad” that helps North Korean defectors and refugees settle in South Korea and the United States and uses the media and the Internet to promote their stories. He left LiNK in 2008 but remained active in his staunch opposition to the Kim government in Pyongyang. In 2015, Hong reemerged in public to organize the Joseon Institute—a precursor to his new organization—and announced that he would be preparing for “increasingly imminent, dramatic change” in North Korea. A recent posting on the Free Joseon website hints at that change. In it, an embedded YouTube video titled “In Our Homeland” claims to show someone in North Korea shattering framed pictures of Kim Jong-un and his father. “Down with Kim family rule!” the video reads. “For our people we rise up! Long live Free Joseon!” No North Koreans, however, were involved in the Madrid attack, according to Spanish police. Nevertheless, the perpetrators showed a remarkable sense of timing. The incident occurred a few days before the failed summit between President Donald Trump and Kim in Hanoi, where one of Kim’s top negotiators was Kim Hyok Chol, a former ambassador to Spain. The DOJ’s quick response to the warrant and its respectful treatment of North Korea in its “Memorandum of Points and Authorities” filed on April 19 is clearly linked to the Trump administration’s desire to keep the denuclearization talks with Kim going after months of stalemate. But it also could be a way for the US government to distance itself from the raid. Spanish intelligence initially blamed two individuals connected to the CIA for the attack, according to the Madrid daily El País. The State Department responded that the US government “had nothing to do with” it. And within days of that report, The Washington Post jumped in with a story tamping down the CIA talk. Quoting “people familiar with the planning and execution of the mission,” the Post countered that the raid was actually the work of Cheollima Civil Defense, a mysterious “dissident” organization that first came to public attention in 2017. On March 26, Cheollima confirmed the story on its website. Under its new name of Free Joseon (Joseon is the ancient name for Korea adopted in 1919 by opponents of Japanese colonial rule), Cheollima justified the raid as a stand against an illegal regime: “The charade of pretending that the [Kim] regime is a normal government must stop—the regime is simply a giant criminal enterprise.” Cheollima claimed it had been “invited into the embassy” and insisted that “no one was gagged or beaten.” At the same time, it complained that the names of Hong and others were leaked by the US government in a “profound betrayal of trust.” That left the impression that one of two things had happened: The attack was never approved by Cheollima’s US-government allies, or it was sanctioned but went drastically wrong. Strangely, before the DOJ notification, few in Washington’s community of North Korea antagonists seemed to be aware of Free Joseon or its recent activities. “Honestly, I don’t know anything about them,” said Greg Scarlatoiu, the executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), who last saw Hong in 2015 and considered him a “dedicated human-rights activist.” Scarlatoiu, whose organization was founded in 2001 to expose the cruelties of the North’s police state and prison system, was excited by the emergence of another opposition group. “This is the first time we see organized, apparently militant resistance outside of North Korea,” he told The Nation. But he was quick to add that, as of now, there is “no clear, irrefutable evidence of resistance inside North Korea.” Jenny Town, a senior analyst and editor with the 38 North website and research group who last saw Hong around 2006, said Free Joseon’s claims that its actions were peaceful don’t seem credible in light of video and other evidence gathered by Spanish police. “I would trust the video rather than the political statements,” she said in an interview. Moreover, Hong’s “politics were never secret. He’s always been pro–regime change and trying to rescue North Korean defectors.” Several Korean Americans who knew Hong said his obsession with fomenting a revolt led by defectors has been well known in DC and the large Korean communities in Los Angeles and New York for years. “He was very, very demagogic,” said Christine Hong (no relation), a professor and historian at UC Santa Cruz who met Hong in the early 2000s at a conference on North Korea. A Rashomon  Story The conflicting tales and explanations about Hong and his group have a Rashomon, dueling-perspective feel to them that makes it difficult to come to definitive conclusions about the Madrid attack. “I think everybody’s telling the truth, at least in part,” John Kiriakou told The Nation. A CIA counterintelligence officer from 1990 to 2004, he was a whistle-blower prosecuted for divulging details to the media about the CIA’s torture program and, after a plea agreement, jailed in 2013 on the absurd charge of confirming the name of a known CIA officer. Kiriakou’s first take, he said, was that “the CIA would never, ever sanction an operation like what we saw in Madrid. It was so amateurish and so criminal in its nature that no one at headquarters would ever approve.” If the agency launched an embassy break-in, “it would be done in the middle of the night, with one insider and several specialists sent from Washington—not a bunch of exiles. Never, absolutely never.” But that said, he asked, “Do I think the CIA has had contact with these people? Absolutely. That’s what they do. The CIA has contact with opposition people, real and fake, all over the world.” The confusion about Free Joseon’s US-government ties is apparently what Wolosky is trying to clear up. In his press statements, he has tried to portray his clients as heroic dissidents “who are working in opposition to a brutal regime that routinely and summarily executes its enemies.” He turned up the heat when the DOJ arrested Ahn. “We are dismayed that the US Department of Justice has decided to execute warrants against US persons that derive from criminal complaints filed by the North Korean regime,” Wolosky declared on April 19 in a statement posted on the Free Joseon website. A few days later, he went on CNN and made the audacious claim to reporter Brian Todd that Hong is in hiding because “North Korean hit squads have been dispatched” to kill him. (Wolosky chose his media outlet carefully: Todd is responsible for some of CNN’s most sensationalized reporting on North Korea over the past two years.) After the arrest, Wolosky sought to link the dissidents to Otto Warmbier, the Virginia student who was imprisoned in North Korea for a year and a half before being returned to the United States in a coma and dying in 2017. “The last US citizen who fell into the custody of the Kim regime returned home maimed from torture and did not survive,” Wolosky said. “We have received no assurances from the US government about the safety and security of the US nationals it is now targeting.” On April 22, he tweeted, “Never thought I’d see the day when DOJ is executing warrants against U.S. nationals being targeted by North Korea, based on criminal complaints from the Kim regime.” Last Friday, he charged that the DOJ and Spain based their accounts on “the highly unreliable accounts of North Korean government witnesses.” Those claims are preposterous and are based on fallacies about the investigation, said a European analyst who is in contact with Spanish officials involved in the investigation. North Korea, which called the embassy intrusion a “grave terrorist attack” and an “act of extortion” in its state-run media, did not file charges against the attackers or request their extradition. In fact, “they haven’t cooperated at all,” the analyst said. The Spanish just “wouldn’t issue direct warrants without proof,” he said. “The people in the embassy were beaten pretty badly and were hospitalized. The Spanish authorities view this as a serious case.” So who are these guys, and what are they really up to? Are they working for the CIA? Why has a lawyer who has represented clients in important national-security cases suddenly emerged as their spokesperson? The Nation has gathered enough strands of information to provide some preliminary answers. First, there is strong evidence that Hong has connections to US intelligence agencies. According to the European analyst with ties to Spanish law enforcement, Spanish police and intelligence officials have “solid proof” that Hong met with known CIA officials in Spain—including photographs and communication records. In April, the right-wing Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, which is known for its contacts with South Korean intelligence, reported that Hong signed a US-government contract about eight years ago and that his “consulting work often involved the CIA.” And in 2018, according to a prominent North Korean defector interviewed by The Washington Post, Hong was in Washington for a meeting at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. When I asked the ODNI if it could confirm or deny that report, a US official said the ODNI “declines to comment.” But she warned that reporters should “really check” and “be careful” of their sources on this story, adding, “I’ve said enough.” Second, several North Korea analysts believe that the CIA was involved in past actions by Free Joseon. In 2017, Cheollima Civil Defense was involved in a covert action that whisked Kim Han-sol, a nephew of Kim Jong-un, from Macau to a safe house in an unknown country after his father, Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean leader’s half-brother, was murdered in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. At the time, Cheollima thanked the US government, as well as the governments of China, the Netherlands, and another nation it did not identify for their assistance and later posted a video of the younger Kim speaking about his family. (His poise and solid command of English can also be seen in a remarkable interview he did a few years earlier with a Finnish journalist at his school in Bosnia.) Last week, Wolosky told CNN that Ahn was involved in the extraction of Kim Han-sol and called him “an American hero.” Ahn would have been prepared for a covert mission: As a Marine in Iraq, he was the deputy chief of intelligence for a battalion that ran US detention facilities after the scandal at Abu Ghraib, according to a 2008 article in The Washington Times. After his time in Iraq, he worked in Washington as the director of operations for Vets for Freedom, a group that stood out for its adamant support for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and advocated for victory in Iraq, according to a profile on NPR. (See him lament the “loss” of patriotism at the University of Virginia in this video from the 10th anniversary of 9/11.) Third, Wolosky’s background in national security could explain why he represents Free Joseon. During his years as director for transnational threats at the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he was responsible for several important investigations, including that of the US blacklisting of a bank in Macau that was linked to North Korea. From 2015 to 2017, Wolosky was President Barack Obama’s special envoy on closing the US detention facility in Guantánamo, Cuba, and has extensive connections to many top Democrats involved in counterterrorism. Most significantly, Wolosky is the attorney for United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a neocon organization that focuses much of its energy on Iran’s links with North Korea. It is chaired by former senator Joseph Lieberman and was co-founded by (and retains close ties to) John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national-security adviser. Wolosky’s representation of UANI was confirmed on Tuesday by Edward Evans, a spokesperson for Boies Schiller Flexner. “UANI is a long-standing client, but there are no active litigation matters,” he said. That organization, according to journalist Eli Clifton, receives much of its funding from “GOP megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.” It claims Iran’s weapons and missile programs are illicitly backed by North Korea and wants the US government to increase sanctions against both countries. UANI would have good reason to support regime change in North Korea, which the group sees as part of a triumvirate of countries threatening US interests. “I am hopeful that Trump will use his recent momentum from Venezuela to demonstrate strength and resolve to North Korea and Iran’s regimes,” Mark Kirk, a former Illinois senator and a senior UANI adviser, wrote in a February 2019 op-ed timed for Trump’s ill-fated summit with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi. Adrian Hong and the Axis of Evil Adrian Hong is from an evangelical family and discovered North Korea issues while a student at Yale. He founded LiNK shortly after George W. Bush famously declared in 2002 that North Korea was part of an “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and Iran. With the US government now clearly on the side of regime change, activist groups and evangelical Christians who opposed North Korea on anti-communist grounds were given a renewed lease on life. “The axis of evil allowed all these cold warriors to renovate along human-rights lines,” said UC Santa Cruz’s Christine Hong, who has written extensively about the role of defectors in US foreign policy. By all accounts, Adrian Hong was driven by a messianic regime-change ideology that was on vivid display in his last public appearance, before the Canadian Parliament in 2016. In 2006, he was instrumental in a State Department operation that smuggled six defectors into the United States in the first US-sponsored effort to give asylum to North Koreans. His fame grew when he was briefly arrested and detained in China for helping refugees. He spoke often, as at this conference at the Hudson Institute in 2012 that was broadcast on C-SPAN. In the ensuing years, LiNK and other groups established a formidable network that included Scarlatoiu’s HRNK, the Defense Forum Foundation, and the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy, which has poured millions of dollars into programs for North Korean defectors and sponsors visits of high-level defectors to Washington. In contrast to the American Friends Service Committee and other humanitarian organizations that work in North Korea, these more hard-line groups argue against engagement with Pyongyang, even by the South Korean government, and often talk openly about the need for regime change. Under Hong, LiNK adopted a peculiar America-first approach to North Korea that largely excluded the South as a player in reunification discussions. During his time there in 2006, Hong led several delegations of college kids, most of them Korean American, to South Korea to voice “frustration about how little South Koreans seem to care about human rights.” Their activities, according to an account in the South China Morning Post, “included ambushing local politicians, distributing fliers and staging public demonstrations.” South Koreans basically told him to bug off, a response that stung Hong. “The worst reaction has been student protesters saying ‘go back to your country, mind your own business, this is our issue, we will take care of it,’” he complained to the newspaper. Hong also promoted an economic vision for a liberated North Korea that sounds much like Trump’s predictions of US-led development for the North today. “In serial calls for regime change in North Korea, [Hong] has glibly pitched the vast growth potential of a post-collapse North Korea brightened by capitalism and annexed to U.S. financial interests,” Christine Hong wrote in a recent essay. In 2008, Hong quit LiNK and his high-profile job and left Washington. “He went dark on most of his contacts,” said Town of 38 North. A few years later, he founded a financial consulting firm, Pegasus Strategies, and began focusing more of his energies on overt support for regime change. One of his motivations was the example of Libya, where in 2011 the government of Moammar El-Gadhafi was overthrown by a US- and NATO-led intervention assisted by the CIA. “I consider the Arab Spring a dress rehearsal for North Korea,” Hong told The National, a daily published in the United Arab Emirates, shortly after Gadhafi was captured and murdered. North Korea “has seen what happened” to deposed rulers in Tunisia and Egypt “and especially Gaddafi this year.” Shortly after Gadhafi’s fall, Hong went to Libya to test his model. By this time, he was established as a TED fellow, with the credentials to organize autonomous gatherings for the Silicon Valley PR organization under the rubric TEDx. As a conference in Tripoli was getting underway in 2012, Africa Intelligence, a specialty newsletter, said the event “allowed international investors and business people to mingle with Libya’s new rulers,” including Libya’s Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur (who became an adviser to the Joseon Institute, the London Sunday Telegraph reported last week). The idea behind meetings like this, Hong later wrote in an op-ed for The Christian Science Monitor, was to help create “a class of Korean technocrats [who] must be capable of stabilizing and rebuilding on a national scale.” It was around this time that he signed his contract that “involved” the CIA, according to Chosun Ilbo. A few years later, Hong began to work with Ahn, and Cheollima Civil Defense took shape. Little is known of Ahn since his days with Vets for Freedom, but Hong was likely attracted to his commitment to the exercise of US power. “Who is the leader of the world pushing for goodness and harmony and democracy and trying to facilitate that?”Ahn asked in his 2008 interview with The Washington Times. “It’s the Americans, and not the government, but the people through their sacrifices.” Hong had a similar vision. In his trips to Asia, he frequently sought to persuade high-level North Korean defectors to join his cause—including Kim’s half-brother while he was exiled in Macau. “He asked Kim Jong Nam multiple times to serve as the insurgent leader, only to be met with rejection,” a former South Korean intelligence official told The Washington Post. Just before the attack in Madrid, Hong went to Tokyo in an attempt to raise funds and meet Japanese officials “who could help provide protection for Kim Han Sol,” according to an account in NK News. But a Japanese intelligence official told the reporter that he didn’t understand Hong’s request because Kim’s nephew “now resides in either the U.S. or Israel under full government protection.” Now Hong and Ahn stand charged with violent crimes that the DOJ said could put them in prison for over 10 years. DOJ documents claim that Hong, after first visiting the embassy posing as a financial consultant, returned on February 22 and asked to see the chargé d’affaires, identified as Y.S.S. When an official went to look for him, Hong opened the door and let Ahn and six others “carrying knives, iron bars, machetes and imitation handguns” into the grounds. Once in control, they proceeded to restrain members of the embassy staff “using shackles and cables.” In a technique often used by terrorists and US Special Forces, Hong and his crew placed bags over their captives’ heads. Among them was Y.S.S. Hong and Ahn, according to the DOJ complaint, “took Y.S.S. to a bathroom where they tied his hands behind his back, placed a bag over his head, and threatened him with iron bars and imitation handguns.” This was apparently an attempt to persuade the commercial attaché, who had been an aide to Ambassador Kim Hyok Chol, to defect. Once done with their mission, the suspects then flew to the US East Coast, where Hong contacted the FBI and apparently turned in his colleague, according to DOJ documents related to the case. (In a meeting with the FBI in Los Angeles, the DOJ said, Hong “stated that Ahn was one of the members of the group who participated in the attack” and “lived in Chino, California.”) Hong did not respond to queries sent to his verified Twitter account or an e-mail address provided by a former classmate. So who’s paying Wolosky, the lawyer? “That’s a great question,” said former CIA operative Kiriakou. If Wolosky has a security clearance, “it’s conceivable that he could be paid by the government, including the ODNI, the CIA, or even the NSC.” In fact, the chances that he has retained his clearance since leaving government are high: A defamation lawsuit against UANI that Wolosky handled was dismissed by a federal judge in 2015 after the government argued that it could reveal state secrets. Evans, the spokesperson for Boies Schiller Flexner, ignored questions about Wolosky’s security clearances. On Tuesday, however, Wolosky released a statement to The Nation taking issue with the DOJ’s claims. “As we have maintained from the beginning, Free Joseon was invited to enter the Embassy, and there was no ‘attack’ or forced entry,” he said. “This is now made clear by the CCTV images released by the DOJ itself. In due time, we expect to be able to present additional evidence that contradicts the account of the North Korean government, which correctly recognizes the threat posed to it by those championing the cause of freedom.” It now looks as if Wolosky’s audacious defense of Free Joseon could mark the beginning of a campaign by regime-change advocates to support Hong and Ahn as freedom fighters who deserve US support. The opening salvo was fired on April 25 by Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University who is frequently called to testify before Congress because of his hard-line views and ardent support for military and economic pressure on North Korea. “For the U.S. to accept what is essentially a North Korean version of the events is to effectively defend the Kim regime,” he wrote in The Los Angeles Times. Fox News picked up the story, with interviews with Wolosky and Lee, and that segment has been tweeted by such neocon stalwarts as Iraq War promoter Max Boot. Last Friday, the campaign against North Korea was boosted by a well-timed story in The Washington Post that said the Kim government issued a $2 million bill for Warmbier’s hospice care before he was released. Trump denied it, saying “We don’t pay money for hostages.” But by Monday, despite former US envoy Joseph Yun’s explanation that the US government was obligated to make the payment, hundreds of people from left and right tweeted the Warmbier story and used it to hammer Trump and Kim. What’s next? In a mysterious posting on its website on Saturday after the Post story broke, Free Joseon wrote just one word: “Orange.” An intelligence source quoted by one Korean newspaper said the color may indicate “a deciphering algorithm.” But could it be a sign that Free Joseon’s next target for its campaign against extradition is Trump, well known for his orange countenance? For Adrian Hong, who used the alias Oswaldo Trump while hailing an Uber during his getaway in Madrid, that’s entirely possible. As Town concluded, the tale of the attack and Hong’s role in it “is all very murky to everyone.” Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World, and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #KimJongUn #DPRK #TimShorrock #USDPRKSummit #NorthKorea

Korean Americans take part in a DMZ Peace Chain in New York City on April 27, 2019.(Dami Choi) By Simone Chun |  May 23, 2019 Originally published on Truthout.org “The April 27 Panmunjom Declaration was indeed a historic event. The path to peace and reconciliation since then has been rocky, but the effort cannot be allowed to fail, or even to be delayed. It is too important. The promise is too great to be lost, the costs of failure are too grim to contemplate.” —Noam Chomsky to Truthout On the one-year anniversary of the April 27 Panmunjom Declaration, the landmark inter-Korean agreement in which President Moon and Chairman Kim committed to bringing a formal end to the Korean War, South Korean news networks were peppered with coverage of the hundreds of thousands of South Koreans forming a human chain along the 500-kilometer demilitarized zone (DMZ) established in 1953 as part of the Korean Armistice Agreement. Originally intended to serve as a temporary buffer zone between the two Koreas until a peace settlement could be reached, the DMZ remains the most heavily fortified border in the word, separating generations of Koreans from one another. The DMZ Peace Chain, as this human chain came to be called, served as a powerful expression of the Korean desire for reconciliation and peace. It gathered worldwide attention, with Pope Francis offering his prayers that “this celebration offer hope to all that a future based on unity, dialogue and fraternal solidarity is indeed possible.” In the U.S., however, the anniversary of the landmark inter-Korean agreement passed with virtually no attention from the domestic media. In spite of the fact that over 70 percent of South Koreans believe that the Panmunjom Declaration has had a positive impact on inter-Korean relations, cynicism and overt opposition to the inter-Korean peace process have dominated U.S. media since the groundbreaking meeting between President Moon and Chairman Kim. The U.S. media’s overt tendency to discount Korean sentiment while appraising Korean affairs is a reflection of a longstanding political dynamic in Washington. With almost colonial flair, the U.S. has dominated inter-Korean affairs for nearly a century, to the extent that domestic Korean sentiment is barely treated as an afterthought. A Korean women’s peace delegation visiting Washington last month reported that the majority of U.S. congressional representatives they met with characterized the summit held in Singapore between Chairman Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump as “just a show,” diminishing the fact that the state of U.S.-North Korea relations impacts millions of actual people. Many of these Congress members openly cast doubt on the fact that South Koreans overwhelmingly support peace with the North. Lamenting that even “progressives in the U.S. seem unwilling to support the efforts of South Korean President Moon Jae-in,” Rev. Jiseok Jung, one of the organizers of the DMZ Peace Chain, appealed to Americans to “support respectful dialogue with North Korea.” I had a similar experience during my own visit with Democratic members of Congress on June 12, 2018, as part of the Korea Peace Network, finding myself on the receiving end of some rather blunt comments by an adviser to Sen. Bob Menendez. Commenting on the then-recent Panmunjom summit, he pointed out that irrespective of any current or future South Korean diplomatic initiatives, U.S. self-interest dictated that “the 28,500 American troops stationed in South Korea remain to defend America’s strategic interest in Northeast Asia,” presumably in perpetuity, with Koreans continuing to foot the bill. In this sadly popular version of U.S. realpolitik, the will of the Korean nation is unshakably subordinated to U.S. geopolitical and strategic interests. Bringing Koreans Together Pyongyang and Washington have been deadlocked since the Singapore summit, due primarily to Trump’s hardline stance demanding the North’s upfront and total denuclearization, which even conservative analyst Daniel DePetris labels the “same bankrupted formula under [a] delusional theory.” In spite of this impasse, President Moon, who brokered the first meeting between Trump and Kim, is continuing his efforts to salvage diplomacy and to place Koreans at the center of the peace process. The concept of providing Koreans with something beyond a proxy role in determining their own destiny resonates with many. Philip Zelikow, a former U.S. diplomat who had direct experience in steering the U.S.’s role in German unification and navigating the end of the Cold War, favors the model of “bringing Koreans together first.” Zelikow argues that the key to successful denuclearization lies not in narrowing the focus to the resolution of “technical issues,” but in harnessing the “enormous political force in both of the Koreas” by focusing on “issues that the Korean people care deeply about.” Zelikow’s stance is shared by 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland, a veteran of the Irish peace process. In her solidarity message with the DMZ Peace Chain, she invoked the universal principle of self-determination in calling for Koreans to take control of their own destiny. Recalling her visits to both North and South Korea in an interview with Truthout, she lauded “the Korean people’s passion for peace and a peace treaty,” and encouraged Koreans not to “let outsiders destroy your peace.” “It is your country, make peace happen!” Maguire said. The Deep Roots of Nonviolent Resistance in Korea In fact, nonviolent resistance to injustice is a deeply rooted principle within Korean political culture. The DMZ Peace Chain invoked the spirit of the Korea’s 1919 March 1 Movement — a nonviolent nationwide protest calling for Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, and one of the first civilian-led social movements of the 20th century. It also drew inspiration from more recent nonviolent civil political transformations in Korea, including the 2016-2017 Candlelight Revolution, which brought an end to the rampant corruption of the Park Geun-hye administration. As Boston College Emeritus Professor Ramsay Liem told Truthout, the DMZ Peace Chain “continues the long history of the Korean people’s struggle for independence and justice … Korea’s greatest gift to the world will be the example of the indomitable will of everyday people to chart their own future and make their own justice.” Koreans take part in a human peace chain in South Korea on April 27, 2019. (DMZ Human Peace Chain Movement Headquarters, South Korea) The more than 500,000 participants represented Koreans of all stripes and political beliefs, from young to old, and from far-right religious groups to the most progressive organizations. Reflecting the global significance of the Korean peace process, citizens of 20 countries were represented among the 30,000 participating non-Koreans who joined in at the DMZ and around the world, as concurrent human chains were formed in Sydney, Okinawa, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York. In the United States, the Peace Chain was endorsed by renowned intellectuals, peace activists, military veterans and prominent Korean American community leaders, who reiterated the obligation and responsibility of the United States to bring about — or at least not impede — peace in the Korean Peninsula. Their voices are having an impact on the U.S. Congress, as evinced by resolutions such as H.R 1771 – Divided Families Reunification Act and H. R. 152 – Calling for a formal end of the Korean War. The DMZ Peace Chain stands in magnificent contrast to the Washington-dominated political narrative, in which 80 million Koreans seem to be considered at best incidental to a Korean peace process. Reconciliation and peace between the Korean people, and an end to the genocidal war that scarred their nation, is a gravely historic matter that should be for them to decide. It cannot and must not be reduced to a bargaining chip in the struggle for one-upmanship between U.S. Republicans and Democrats. It is high time that Koreans take their place at the center of the peace process. Let Koreans set themselves free. Dr. Simone Chun has taught at Northeastern University in Boston, and served as an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is an active member of the Korea Peace Network, and a member of the steering committee of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. She served as an international women’s delegation of peace to Korea organized by Women Cross DMZ and Nobel Women’s Initiative. Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission. #DMZPeaceChain #peacetreaty #PanmunjeomDeclaration #SimoneChun #USDPRKSummit #WomenCrossDMZ

Members of Korea Peace Now! and South Korean Parliamentarians participate in a Hill briefing on March 12, 2019, to announce the launch of a global women-led campaign to end the Korean War. By Christine Ahn | May 23, 2019 Originally published in Truthout.org On Friday, when the news broke of North Korea’s missile test, two dominant myths immediately circulated in both mainstream and social media. One was that U.S. diplomacy with North Korea was failing, because North Korea had once again proved that it couldn’t be trusted to keep its promise. The other was that more pressure was needed to force North Korea’s denuclearization. But these narratives — which cut across partisan lines — fail to address an obvious fact: The U.S. policy of maximum pressure has not achieved its desired aim to denuclearize North Korea. To the contrary, U.S. policies of aggressive sanctions, military posturing and political isolation have only further emboldened the Kim regime to pursue nuclear weapons as a defense against U.S. regime change. As a recent U.N. study reveals, these types of aggressive policies are driving a devastating humanitarian disaster in North Korea. The Failure of U.S. Maximum Pressure Following North Korea’s Friday test, many were quick to chastise Trump and the limitations of his personal diplomacy with Kim. Instead of fixating on the failure of Trump’s diplomacy with Kim, we should point to the decades-long failed U.S. approach to force North Korea’s denuclearization, including Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, or its predecessor, Obama’s strategic patience. North Korea didn’t test missiles for over 400 days while engagement was underway with both Washington and Seoul. Weeks ahead of the Hanoi summit, U.S. Special Representative Stephen Biegun outlined the Trump administration’s pragmatic approach, a departure from his administration’s previous maximum pressure strategy, saying the president was “ready to end this war.” Yet in what can only be described as diplomatic whiplash, the talks in Hanoi collapsed because Trump revived Bolton’s Libyan Model, demanding that North Korea unilaterally disarm before improving relations between the two countries as promised under the Singapore Declaration, a clear nonstarter for Kim. Reuters verified that “U.S. President Donald Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States.” While the U.S. media was singularly obsessed with Pyongyang’s test, it failed to cover the Trump administration’s military provocations. Trump reneged on his promise to Kim in Singapore to cancel the war drills with South Korea: U.S.-R.O.K. joint military exercises are still underway. This time the military exercises involved the highly controversial Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery, which prompted North Korea to denounce as “destroy[ing[ peace and stability in the Korean peninsula.” On May 1, the United States tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile off the Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Context matters. Sanctions: War by Other Means The other narrative that cuts across partisan lines is that sanctions are succeeding in applying pressure on Kim who is feeling the domestic heat as the North Korean economy suffers. Also last Friday, the UN World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization released a joint report signaling the alarm that 40 percent of North Koreans — 10 million people — are in dire need of food aid following the worst harvest in a decade. Following the U.N. findings on the food crisis in North Korea, Washington analysts quickly pointed the finger at the Kim regime, which “spends obscenely on its military while its people starve.” U.N. Security Council (UNSC) sanctions “are not intended to have adverse humanitarian consequences for the civilian population of the DPRK,” according to the 2017 UNSC Resolution 2375, particularly on economic activities and humanitarian assistance. However, the May 2019 U.N. report found that sanctions are in fact harming North Korea’s agricultural production, preventing the import of necessities like fuel, fertilizers, machinery and spare parts. In addition to impacting North Korea’s food production, sanctions are impacting the livelihoods of ordinary North Koreans, such as those working in fisheries and textiles. Sanctions specifically impact the garment industry because UNSC sanctions now ban the export of North Korean textiles. Who do we think works in those garment factories? Of the estimated hundreds of thousands of North Koreans employed in the textile industry, 98 percent are women. The international community has long known that sanctions are hampering humanitarian aid operations. In October 2017, the UN Humanitarian Resident Coordinator in Pyongyang cited 42 examples of direct and indirect occasions where sanctions have impeded and prevented humanitarian work inside the country. Yet in the U.S., across partisan lines, the humanitarian crisis in North Korea is solely placed on the government with no mention of the potential or actual impact of international sanctions. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota criticized the administration’s lack of “a plan” or a “real negotiating tactic.” She suggested Trump “should listen to Otto Warmbier’s mother who said we should be upping sanctions.” Even progressive presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders told ABC News the North Koreans are a “threat to the planet” and that the right approach was more “pressure on North Korea.” Tim Shorrock, veteran Korea journalist at The Nation quickly offered Sanders a corrective on Twitter: “It’s not North Korea that’s a ‘threat to the planet.’ It’s the 70 year-old confrontation between the US and North Korea that’s the threat to the planet – not to mention Korea itself. The US has a responsibility here, sir. You know that talking to peace activists.” In fact, in March, I was among those peace activists when I traveled to Washington with the Korea Peace Now!, a global campaign of women mobilizing to end the Korean War. We organized a delegation of South Korean women parliamentarian and peace activists to meet with several U.S. Members of Congress, including Senator Sanders. During our meeting, Sanders seemed genuinely concerned about what can be done to address the stalemate with North Korea. The South Korean delegation, which included Lee Jae-Jung, the only woman on the Moon administration’s elite inter-Korean economic cooperation policy team, urged easing U.S. sanctions impeding progress between the two Koreas. Sanders also heard from Esther Lee, a North Korean defector, who talked at length of the counterproductive effect of sanctions on ordinary people in North Korea. “What will improve the ordinary North Korean people’s situation is more engagement with people from the outside world, not less,” Lee explained. After our visit, Sanders released this video and tweeted that a peace agreement is “the best path for American security and for the security of the region.” Though Sanders doesn’t currently have executive decision-making power, he can introduce the Senate version of a Congressional House Resolution calling for an end to the Korean War, H-Res 152, which now has dozens of sponsors including progressive champions, such as Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal and the first Korean-American Democrat, Andy Kim. Fortunately, after Friday’s missile test, the White House did not immediately jump into attack mode. After a 35-minute call on Tuesday between President Trump and South Korean President Moon on how to keep channels open with Kim Jong Un, Trump agreed to support South Korea’s food aid to the north, noting that such humanitarian assistance would be very timely and a positive step,” according to Seoul’s Blue House. What would be timely and positive is lifting some of the sanctions that are harming ordinary civilians, especially those impacting inter-Korean cooperation. Last month, South Korean farmers purchased 30 tractors to send to North Korean farmers in a show of their solidarity and to challenge the harsh sanctions. Five of them are now in Gwanghwamun Square near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul awaiting approval to cross the DMZ. The farmers are calling for the lifting of sanctions, which are impeding inter-Korean cooperation, such as the Kaesong Industrial Complex and tourism in Mt. Kumgang. In a statement released by the farmers, they said “it is the right of the Korean people to determine their own destiny, citing the Panmunjom Declaration,” the joint declaration signed by Moon and Kim on April 27, 2018. While Trump’s response to North Korea’s Friday test was measured, unless Trump can recognize the futility of maximum pressure, we may see a dangerous return to the era of “fire and fury.” In his April speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong Un gave Washington until the end of 2019 to “quit its current calculation method and approach us with a new one.” The short-range test is a message to Trump: The clock has started. While there is no guarantee that North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons, it is more likely to do so if it no longer perceives a threat to its security, which Russian President Vladimir Putin affirmed following his meeting with Kim last month in Vladivostok. Putin said that Kim was willing to disarm but needed international “security guarantees.” In other words, peace is key to achieving denuclearization. We should heed advice from two U.S. leaders who succeeded in freezing North Korea’s nuclear program, President Jimmy Carter and President Clinton’s former Defense Secretary William Perry. In his endorsement of Congressional Resolution H-Res 152, Carter said ending the Korean War is “the only way to ensure true security for both Korean and American people.” And Perry argues that “normalization is essential in achieving denuclearization. They go together hand in hand.” On April 27, on the anniversary of the first summit between Kim and Moon, 500,000 South Koreans and peace-loving friends in cities across the world held hands in a “DMZ Human Chain for Peace.” I traveled to Cheorwan, South Korea, and held hands with thousands who gathered in this city divided by the demilitarized zone (DMZ), while many of my colleagues joined hands with 200 people in New York City from the North Korean to South Korean Missions at the U.N. Ultimately, it will be the Korean people who will end the Korean War, but it will take all of our solidarity and pressure on the United States to negotiate a peace settlement with North Korea. Christine Ahn is the international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing for peace on the Korean Peninsula. Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted with permission. #Trump #MissileTests #KoreaPeace #Nuclearweapons #ChristineAhn #Armistice #Sanctions #USDPRKSummit

Photograph Source: White House – Public Domain By Gregory Elich | July 13, 2019 Originally published in Counterpunch.org Although widely derided by the Washington Establishment as an empty photo opportunity, the recent meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un at Panmunjom produced an agreement to resume working-level talks in the near future. According to the North Korean news agency KCNA, the two leaders discussed stumbling blocks in improving relations and easing tensions, and agreed to work towards a “breakthrough in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and in the bilateral relations.” The resumption of working-level talks comes as welcome relief after months of stalled progress since Trump pulled the plug on the Hanoi Summit due to North Korea’s failure to accede to the demand that it unilaterally disarm. At Hanoi, U.S. negotiators presented a plan that called for North Korea to denuclearize, while promising nothing in exchange. Nothing, that is, other than punishment in the form of “maximum pressure” sanctions. All that was on offer to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, the official name for North Korea) was the vague mention of unspecified economic benefits after it had fully denuclearized. In addition to denuclearization, the U.S. side widened the scope of talks at Hanoi by delivering a document to the North Koreans that demanded the dismantlement of chemical and biological warfare programs, as well as ballistic missiles and facilities. U.S. negotiators also wanted a detailed accounting of nuclear facilities, subject to intrusive U.S. inspections. For the North Koreans, to implement such a proposal would allow inspectors to map the bombing coordinates of its nuclear facilities, an obvious non-starter when the U.S. has yet to provide any semblance of a security guarantee. In essence, what the U.S. offered at Hanoi was the Libya Model of denuclearization, in which obligations are loaded solely on its negotiating partner. That is not an approach that is going to work with North Korea, as among other reasons, its nuclear program is far more advanced than was the case with Libya’s. The DPRK has something substantial to trade, and it is not going to relinquish it for free. The sanctions against the DPRK are designed to strangle its economy. The North Koreans regard sanctions relief as an essential element in the trade-off for denuclearization. The fate of small nations that the United States has attacked, such as Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, did not go unnoticed in the DPRK. Those object lessons led the North Koreans to draw the logical conclusion that the only way for a small targeted nation to ensure its survival would be to develop a nuclear deterrent. There has been much talk in the U.S. media about the Trump administration’s apparent intent to adopt a more flexible approach to negotiations. This has resulted in much hand-wringing among the Washington Establishment, panicked over a potential reduction in tensions, which it fears could have knock-on effects in sales of military hardware to Asian allies like South Korea and Japan. New pretexts would need to be developed to explain the military buildup in the Asia-Pacific that is aimed at China. How real is this new flexibility? In a widely misread report in the New York Times, it is suggested that Trump may “settle” for a nuclear freeze, leaving the DPRK as a nuclear power. A careful reading of the article indicates, however, that the Trump administration does not envision a nuclear freeze as an end state, but rather as a “foundation for a new round of negotiations.” Talks “would begin with a significant – but limited – first step.” From there, U.S. negotiators would seek to persuade Kim to expand the range of nuclear facilities that would be dismantled. On Trump’s return flight from South Korea, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun talked about U.S. plans for the next summit between Trump and Kim. Biegun said that the U.S. wanted a complete freeze on the DPRK’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs while negotiations are underway. This is not different than what was stated in the New York Times report, leaving aside the misleading use of the word “settle” and the fretful comments the Times quoted from Establishment analysts. Biegun’s choice of words is significant: ‘WMD,’ rather than ‘nuclear.’ John Bolton’s insistence on including chemical and biological weapons programs in any negotiated settlement remains very much to the fore. North Korea denies having any such operations and U.S. belief in their existence is predicated primarily on supposition, backed by weak and inconclusive indications. If the DPRK does not have a chemical or biological weapons program, then it cannot freeze what it does not have, and it cannot provide details on programs that remain a fantasy in the minds of Washington. It requires little imagination to anticipate how hawks in the Trump administration would seize upon North Korean denials as a means of sabotaging negotiations. Whether North Korea has chemical and biological programs or not, it is likely to have misgivings about the United States adding demands while at the same time offering no concessions. When Libya denuclearized, it too faced an ever-expanding array of conditions, including visits by John Bolton and other U.S. officials, telling it how to vote at the United Nations and ordering it to cut military ties with Syria, Iran, and North Korea. It is notable that at no time has any U.S. official mentioned what kind of security guarantee it could offer to the DPRK. Given the record of U.S. militarism in recent decades, it is difficult to conceive of any assurance the U.S. would provide that could be trusted. Whatever the U.S. may offer will need to be supplemented, and protection will have to come from elsewhere. Chinese President Xi Jinping alluded to the same during his recent visit to Pyongyang, when he stated, “China will take an active role in resolving North Korea’s security concerns.” In May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that security guarantees are an “absolutely mandatory” component of any negotiated agreement with the DPRK. “Russia and China are prepared to work on such guarantees,” he added. In his meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on May 14, Lavrov stressed the importance of providing security guarantees to the DPRK, but all Pompeo wanted to talk about was hitting North Korea as hard as possible with sanctions, without letup. Much has been made of Stephen Biegun’s claim that the United States plans on a more flexible “simultaneous and parallel” approach to negotiations. When examined, there is less change than many suppose. Biegun is in line with the rest of the Trump administration, emphasizing that “in the abstract, we have no interest in sanctions relief before denuclearization.” Since sanctions relief and security guarantees are off the negotiating table as far as U.S. officials are concerned, what are they ready to offer? According to Biegun, flexibility means the U.S. would consider agreeing to the two nations opening liaison offices in each other’s capitals, permitting some people-to-people talks, and humanitarian aid. That last point may mean that the United States would consider stopping its efforts to block humanitarian assistance. Or it could indicate a willingness by the U.S. to directly provide a token amount of aid while continuing to shut down independent aid operations in the DPRK. To the North Koreans, this “flexibility” is a distinction without a difference. It remains the Libya Model. As such, it is a recipe for failure if the U.S. rigidly adheres to this strategy. Complicating matters further is the rider the U.S. Senate attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. If the rider makes it into the House version, then once the defense budget is signed into law, it would mandate secondary sanctions on any financial institution that does business with the DPRK. Current sanctions leave it to the discretion of the Treasury Department as to which firms to sanction. The Senate bill aims to cut off the North Korean economy from what little international trade it still has after sanctions, so as to inflict further harm on the population. Certainly, this also signals the Senate’s opposition to any negotiated settlement. The North Koreans need two things in exchange for denuclearization: the lifting of sanctions and a security guarantee. What that security guarantee would look like is difficult to discern. A piece of paper is not going to do it. The DPRK needs a reliable means of assuring its security if it is going to denuclearize. Across the entire U.S. Establishment, both within and outside the Trump administration, there is an unwavering belief that every action the DPRK takes towards denuclearization should be rewarded with “maximum pressure” sanctions. It is a curious notion, this expectation that nothing need be offered to North Korea in exchange for meeting U.S. demands. Odder still is the conviction that the DPRK ought to be satisfied with being tormented by crippling sanctions for each concession it makes. But then, imperialism and arrogance go hand-in-hand. There is no reason, however, to expect the North Koreans to be servile. “North Korea wants actions, not words,” observes Christopher Green of the International Crisis Group. “I’m not sure the U.S. is mentally ready for it, even now.” Whether or not North Korea denuclearizes depends entirely on the United States. If the Trump administration believes it can bully the DPRK into unilateral disarmament, then it is sadly mistaken. If on the other hand, it eventually comes to recognize that the only way to achieve its objective is to offer some measure of reciprocity, then denuclearization becomes an achievable goal. At this point, there is little indication that the U.S. is prepared to move beyond the former position. Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org  Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich. #Trump #DPRK #GregoryElich #Nuclearweapons #USDPRKSummit #NorthKorea

Sanders-021507-18335- 0004 By Tim Shorrock | July 29, 2019 Originally published in the Nation.com Led by former vice president Joe Biden, the leading Democratic candidates for president in 2020 have focused on President Trump’s friendly (though presently shaky) relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as a prime example of a foreign policy that’s gone off the establishment tracks and left traditional US allies in the dust. With their next televised debate set for next week, Biden and most of his competitors hope to convince voters—especially those who voted Republican in 2016—that Trump’s personalized style of US power projection presents an existential danger not only to the United States but als0 to its friends around the world. “We need allies,” Biden told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on July 5, five days after Trump revived his once-stalled negotiations with Kim in a historic meeting on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone arranged with the support of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Yet Trump “is absolutely dissing them,” the Democratic front-runner continued, and is instead “embracing thugs. He’s embracing Kim Jong-un, who is a thug.” Even as Trump and Kim announced at the DMZ that their new negotiating teams would soon begin a new round of talks, Biden continued his line of attack, declaring on Twitter and in the CNN interview that the conversation at the border was merely a “photo op” that “gave Kim everything that he wanted: legitimacy.” Since then, of course, those talks have been delayed by continued disputes between Washington and Pyongyang, most lately about an upcoming series of US–South Korean military exercises and the North’s latest test, on Wednesday, of two short-range missiles. Yet, given all that’s happened in Korea over the past 18 months, it’s hard to see how Biden’s tough line toward Kim—or a return to the confrontational days of 2017, when all-out war seemed a distinct possibility—could win over the swing voters the Democrats need to defeat Trump. On most issues, particularly immigration, the president’s racist stands and outrageous tweets give the party plenty of ammunition, no manner who the nominee is. But on Korea and Kim, not so much. Since the first Trump-Kim summit, in June 2018, North Korea has refrained from testing any long-range strategic weapons, and the United States and South Korea has stopped the massive military exercises that so angered the North in years past (the ones coming up in August will be much smaller). And despite an onslaught of media stories about North Korea’s still-formidable military capabilities, the two Koreas have taken advantage of the first major diplomatic opening since the early 2000s to make enormous strides in scaling down tensions on the border, including destroying dozens of front-line guard posts and getting rid of mines. “If Biden tries to make North Korea a campaign issue and tries to say that Trump is appeasing the Kim regime, he is wasting his time,” said Harry Kazianis, a prominent conservative and senior director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, a think tank founded by former president Richard Nixon. “The 2020 election will come down to economics, not nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula,” he told The Nation in an interview. Still, Biden’s competitors have kept up the political offensive. At the first Democratic debate, on June 27, Senator Kamala Harris called North Korea “a real threat in terms of its nuclear arsenal” and said Trump “embraces” Kim, “a dictator, for the sake of a photo op.” Senator Elizabeth Warren continued the attack in a tweet a few days later, saying that instead of “squandering American influence on photo ops,” the United States “should be dealing with North Korea through principled diplomacy that promotes US security, defends our allies, and upholds human rights.” Senator Bernie Sanders, in contrast, has been more nuanced. “I have no problem with [Trump’s] sitting down with Kim Jong-un,” he told ABC’s This Week. But in his view, he said, Trump has badly damaged the State Department and its ability to manage foreign affairs. “We need to move forward diplomatically, not just do photo opportunities,” he added. It’s a close race for the Democratic nomination: In a poll released July 19 by NBC News, Biden led the pack with 25 percent, with Sanders and Warren holding steady at 16 percent and Harris just behind at 14 percent. This week, a CBS poll had it even closer, with Biden still at 25 percent, but with Warren at 20, Harris at 16 and Sanders at 15. The next three—Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, and Julián Castro—came in at 6, 4, and 2 percent, respectively. A total of 20 candidates will square off next Tuesday and Wednesday on CNN. When it comes to foreign policy, Biden has been by far the most outspoken. He outlined his philosophy in a major speech on July 11, in which he castigated Trump as an “extreme” threat to US national security and again criticized his “cozy” relationship with Kim. (Writing in The Washington Post, neocon columnist Josh Rogin said that Biden views the 2020 election “as the last chance to save what’s left of the United States’ moral and international credibility and respect.”) But the former vice president’s alternative policy on Korea, spelled out in his earlier interview with Cuomo on CNN, was a throwback to his days in the Obama administration, which (contrary to a ludicrous claim by Trump at the DMZ) rejected the idea of direct talks with North Korea unless Pyongyang gave up its nuclear weapons first. Trump, Biden told CNN, “ended our relationship, as a practical matter, with South Korea and Japan as a united front and let China off the hook.” He accused Kim of doing nothing in return. “And what have we done? We’ve suspended exercises.” Asked what he’d do differently, Biden offered a taste of the militarism that Trump tried in 2017. “I make it clear that we’re going to move our defenses up, as we did before, and we’re going to make sure we have the capacity to deal with it near term. I’m going to let South Korea and Japan know we’re there for them. We are their nuclear umbrella. We’re there for them. And China understands, if you don’t want us in your throat here, if you don’t want us in your face, do something.” Biden’s approach reflects a basic misunderstanding of the peace process in Korea. His overwhelming focus on Trump’s relationship with Kim—shared by the other candidates—obscures Korea’s agency in the peace process and the real issues at stake for Washington, Seoul, and Pyongyang. “This is a rare moment in history where US and Korean interests are aligned,”said Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ and the Korea Peace Treaty Campaign, in a talk in Washington on July 16. In a discussion at the Center for International Policy, Lee identified the “greater motivating factors” behind the US talks with North and South Korea as Trump’s need to show a win before the 2020 election; Kim’s need to lift sanctions as part of his drive to improve North Korea’s beleaguered economy; and Moon’s need to make progress in inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation before his own term is up in 2022. The organizations she works with, Lee added, are working in Washington and in Congress “to create a political space in DC to prepare for peace in Korea.” Any discussion of the peace process, in fact, must begin in South Korea. The talks between Trump and Kim only came about because of the encouragement of President Moon, who began the current wave of diplomacy in January 2018 when he invited Kim to send emissaries to the Winter Olympics in the South. Even Shinzo Abe, Japan’s right-wing prime minister and Trump’s closest ally in Asia, has jumped on the bandwagon, offering his own direct talks with Kim (he’s also now embroiled in a bitter economic and diplomatic dispute with Moon over Japan’s World War II–era conscription of Korean laborers). Biden’s emphasis on the nuclear umbrella—under which the United States has pledged to defend non-nuclear South Korea and Japan with its own weapons—also shows an appalling lack of understanding about the North and its motives. Those weapons, which are carried on US ships and planes in the Pacific region, are part of the arsenal that Kim Jong-un would like to see directed elsewhere, and they explain why he has insisted on the wording “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” in any joint statements with Trump. It’s also a key issue for South Korean peace activists. “There’s been a lack of discussion about what South Korea and the US should give up to help North Korea give up its nuclear weapons,” Tae-ho Lee, an activist with People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of the largest and most influential NGOs in South Korea, said during a recent visit to Washington. “Security assurances to North Korea are impossible without removal of the nuclear umbrella.” He also said the combination of the US and South Korean militaries, linked in an alliance since 1954, are an “overwhelming power.” For the past 30 years, he pointed out, South Korea’s military spending alone has been higher than North Korea’s entire GDP. Sanders, alone among the Democratic candidates, has been paying attention to and meeting with peace activists and has incorporated into his platform some of their ideas for engagement. He recently used a campaign video that featured an interview with Christine Ahn, executive director of Women Cross DMZ, to argue that Trump’s insistence on tough sanctions until an agreement is reached is threatening progress. “Peace is the best path for American security,” he says. Sanders’s stance is winning support from other progressives within Democratic ranks, such as Representative Ro Khanna of California, a Sanders backer who was the primary author of a bill that passed the full House on July 11 calling for a “binding peace agreement” to bring a formal end to the Korean War. Khanna’s bill, an amendment to a National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020, marked the first time that Congress had taken a stand on ending the 70-year-old war. The vote was the result of intense lobbying by an array of peace groups, including Ploughshares, Win Without War, and Peace Action. In a statement, Ahn called the vote on the Khanna amendment a “game-changer.” She added: “It’s a clear sign that the American people want an end to the oldest U.S. conflict, and that ending decades of hostilities with a peace agreement is the only way to resolve the nuclear crisis.” In a sign that civil society groups may be having an impact on the Trump administration, Ahn and Hyun Lee recently met with Stephen Biegun, Trump’s chief negotiator, to discuss the prospects for peace. In the weeks after Trump’s meeting with Kim at the DMZ, close analysts of the Korea situation, and the South Korean officials who have been in discussion with the White House, predicted that the next step in US–North Korean talks will involve North Korea’s giving up a major chunk of its nuclear program in return for a partial lifting of US and UN sanctions that are crippling the most vulnerable parts of the North’s economy. That would move both sides past the disastrous summit in Hanoi in late February, when Trump walked out after unsuccessfully pressing Kim to accept a deal that would have involved the North giving up its entire weapons program before obtaining any sanctions relief whatsoever. This was seen in Pyongyang as a demand for surrender or capitulation—something they have said they will never do. Biegun expressed the new US flexibility a day before Trump’s meeting at the DMZ, when he informed his South Korea counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, that the US government was prepared to move the US–North Korean negotiations forward “simultaneously and in a parallel” manner. Biegun, whose role was eclipsed in Hanoi by John Bolton, Trump’s hardline national security adviser, added in a speech to the conservative Atlantic Council on June 19 that “the door is wide open” for negotiations, and said he and his North Korean partner were committed to “regain our momentum” by returning to the basic areas of agreement—including establishing new US–North Korean political relations and building a “lasting and stable peace regime”—that came out of the first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Bolton, as many observers noted, was nowhere to be seen at Trump’s meeting at the DMZ. Despite Biegun’s signaling and Trump’s insistence that he’s in “no hurry” to get an agreement, North Korea recently complained about new, albeit small, US military exercises with South Korea, and said they make it hard to trust the United States. In statements carried on its official news agency, KCNA, the North Korean foreign ministry said the upcoming “19-2 Dong Maeng (Alliance)” drills scheduled for August are “clearly a breach of the main spirit” of the June 12 statement in Singapore, where Trump canceled large-scale military drills and—to the shock of many—called them “provocative.” Underscoring its concerns, on Monday KCNA broadcast photographs of Kim examining a new submarine that experts cited by The Wall Street Journal “believe could carry multiple missiles, including those with nuclear capabilities.” And then came this week’s launch of what South Korea called a “new kind of short-range ballistic missile,” one that is similar to two projectiles fired last May. North Korea, in a KCNA dispatch, said the test was a message to South Korean “warmongers who are running high fever in their moves to introduce the ultramodern offensive weapons into South Korea and hold military exercise in defiance of the repeated warnings from” the North. Recently, the South began deploying the first of 40 F-35A advanced fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin. The North Korean statements and actions alarmed Kazianis, of the Center for the National Interest. “If the situation remains unaddressed” and US and North Korean diplomats can’t return to “dialogue and compromise…we could very well go back to the days of North Korean nuclear testing, ICBM launches, and President Trump calling out ‘little rocket man,’” he warned Monday in The American Conservative. Yet even after Pyongyang’s angry statements, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has assured reporters that a new round of talks will start soon. On Tuesday, he said the United States is prepared to “provide a set of security arrangements” that would guarantee to North Koreans that “if they disband their nuclear program,” the United States “won’t attack them.” The next round of negotiations, he added, “will begin in a couple of weeks.” Later, he downplayed the latest test, telling reporters that “lots of countries posture before they come to the table.” Still, if personalities matter, Biden is unlikely to shake his disdain for Kim and the North Koreans. Last May, responding to Biden’s initial criticisms of Trump’s relationship with Kim, KCNA called him “reckless and senseless, seized by ambition for power.” In an echo of its denunciation of Trump in 2017 as a “dotard,” KCNA said that what Biden uttered “is just sophism of an imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being, let alone a politician.” If the Democrats are smart, they will realize that words like that, like North Korea’s latest missile salvos, are often a prelude—even an invitation—to dialogue. 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. #KimJongUn #BernieSanders #USForeignPolicy #Nuclearweapons #TimShorrock #Democraticcandidates #NorthKorea

Korean Americans in NY march for peace, and reunification of Korea. By Minju Bae and Ju-Hyun Park | September 21, 2019 Originally published in Truthout.org On September 11, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a screenshot of CNN’s headline ticker and highlighted “Trump Sides with Kim Jong Un,” assessing “That’s it. That’s the headline.” She continued, “Obviously [Former National Security Advisor John] Bolton leaving is good — it was an enormous mistake to appoint him in the first place. One doesn’t need to boost authoritarians to make the point.” And then, two minutes later, Rep. Ilhan Omar retweeted Ocasio-Cortez, “Trump sides with yet another dictator.” To their credit, both congresswomen voted for House Resolution 152 (introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna) earlier this year, which calls for the formal end to the Korean War. However, it was disappointing but unsurprising to watch two of the most progressive members of Congress discuss Korea in this light. After all, the sentiments that Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Omar expressed are common among Democrats writ large. In the Democratic debate on September 12, presidential candidates Julián Castro and Sen. Kamala Harris made similar points. The problem with reflexively dismissing U.S. diplomatic engagement with North Korea is that it depends on a narrative that is disconnected from facts. For more than 70 years, Koreans have lived with division and the horrific consequences of war. The last two years of Korean-led intergovernmental cooperation have laid the groundwork toward peace and reunification. U.S. progressives ought to be supportive of that process — it’s their obligation to history and morality. The origins of the Korean War are directly linked to the surrender of Japan in World War II, which ended two generations of violent colonial rule in Korea. The movement for Korean liberation was just as long. Liberation activists quickly organized a unified, democratically established government called the Korean People’s Republic (KPR) under the leadership of lifelong liberation activist Yeo Un-hyeong. But just weeks after Japan’s surrender in 1945, the U.S. military began to occupy southern Korea and outlawed the nascent KPR, establishing a military government staffed by many former Japanese colonial officials. Koreans resisted U.S. occupation in numerous uprisings. U.S. and pro-U.S. forces responded with retaliatory massacres. In 1948, the U.S. military — in collusion with the newly formed United Nations — installed the conservative, pro-U.S. Republic of Korea (ROK) through a sham election. One of the first acts of the U.S.-installed “democracy” was to suppress an uprising on the island of Jeju by slaughtering tens of thousands of people. It was only after the ROK’s formation that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly known as North Korea, was founded. Since then, the U.S. has done everything in its power to destroy the DPRK, from carpet bombing more than 90 percent of the country from 1950-1953, to modern-day bipartisan economic sanctions, which deprive North Koreans of life-saving necessities like fuel, medicine and access to international trade for their livelihoods. As part of its decades-long war against North Korea, the U.S. aided and abetted South Korean dictators Rhee Syngman, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan in brutally crushing reunification and democratization movements, like the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. The U.S. and South Korean militaries also collaborated in creating systems of institutionalized sexual assault of Korean and migrant women, including medical torture and forced sterilization of sex workers who serviced U.S. military personnel. Decades of worker, student and rural organizing eventually made South Korea a democracy in the 1990s, but the U.S. military occupation continues. It’s no wonder the dead — our dead — never make it into the U.S. narrative of freedom and democracy. This narrative attempts to justify U.S. militarism in the Pacific as it disciplines an inherently untrustworthy and illegitimate regime. Five million people died in the Korean War, and it’s hard to say how many more have been killed (and are still being killed) by U.S. policies since. This is the status quo Democrats uphold when they diminish the complexity of contemporary Korean politics to a false binary of siding with or not siding with “a dictator.” What about denuclearization? What about human rights? And indeed, what about them? The U.S. has no moral authority to enforce denuclearization or human rights on the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. has bombed civilian targets in Korea and installed nuclear missiles in the south. It still has the largest nuclear arsenal of any nation on Earth and has military infrastructure, including missile sites, throughout the Pacific. Americans cannot be moral and political arbiters for places they do not live in and people they do not know. The greatest threat to human rights in Korea isn’t reunification; it’s the war, which the U.S. must end. The Trump administration may entertain direct talks with North Korea. But the same administration also blocked joint economic projects like the inter-Korean railway and refused to end sanctions as a precondition to an eventual peace treaty. Progressives can do better by pushing to end sanctions and sign a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. That’s the choice the U.S. faces: cooperate with the peace process in full, or perpetuate a forever war that exacts a bloody toll on both sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. In spite of everything, Koreans have created resilient communities throughout the peninsula. Whether in North Korea, South Korea, or elsewhere, we have cared for each other, shaped our own destinies amid extraordinary violence and most importantly, survived. And for decades, we’ve built across borders toward reunification. A just and lasting peace is possible in Korea but only if we build it ourselves, not on the U.S.’s terms. For Koreans around the globe, Friday’s full moon marked the beginning of Chuseok. Some have characterized Chuseok as the “Korean Thanksgiving.” This is inaccurate. Unlike Thanksgiving, Chuseok is not a celebration of genocide. Instead, it is a holiday for family reunion, communion with our ancestors, and commemoration of our past, present and future. For Koreans with separated families, it is a time to mourn our separation. May this be the last Chuseok that this is the case. Copyright Truthout.org.  Reprinted with permission. Minju Bae is an activist, scholar and educator. Her work examines Asian and American diasporas and histories. Minju is a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development. Follow her on Twitter: @mnj_b. Ju-Hyun Park is a genderqueer writer of the Korean diaspora. Their work has previously appeared in The Fader and Public Radio International. Ju-Hyun is a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development. Follow them on Twitter: @hermit_hwarang. #elections #KoreaPeace #DPRK #KoreanWar #NorthKorea

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