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By Myungkyo Hong | May 8, 2023 | Originally published in Asian Labour Review On May Day, a local union leader surnamed Yang, from the Korean Construction Workers Union (KCWU), set himself on fire outside of a court to protest the concerted prosecution against trade unionists like him for carrying out union organizing activities. A number of construction workers’ unions have been at the centre of the state repression. So far, the police has conducted more than a dozen raids since the end of last year. More than 900 unionists have been investigated and 18 organizers and leaders detained. Recently, the local prosecution had requested arrest warrants for Yang and two other construction union officials. They are under investigation for forcing construction companies to hire unionized workers and collecting union membership dues, which the prosecution describes as intimidation and extortion. Yang was due to be in court at 3 pm on May Day, but instead he chose to self-immolate in protest. He was airlifted to the hospital but passed away the next day. In a social media post shared on the morning of May Day, Yang described himself as only “carrying out union work justly and without wrongdoing.” He was disturbed by the fact that the prosecutors were now charging him with “interference and intimidation.” He wrote, “My pride cannot abide this. I should have fought doggedly and struggled tenaciously to win. Perhaps I’m taking the easy way out. I was glad to have been in this together with you. I will stand at the side of my comrades eternally.” The Unhidden Anti-Union Agenda As we condemn the attacks on trade unions, it is crucial to understand why the Yoon government – working hand in hand with the construction companies – has taken aim at the construction workers’ unions. The government under President Yoon Suk-yeol has never hidden its anti-union and anti-worker agenda. It has mounted attacks on the truckers’ strike, and tried to push through anti-worker labor policies. On February 21 this year, Yoon remarked, “At construction sites, powerful vested unions are openly committing illegal acts such as demanding bribes, forcing recruitment, and obstructing construction.” Yoon referred to construction site violence as the “Construction Worker Mafia.” He directed that “prosecutors, police, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, and the Ministry of Employment and Labor work together to crack down on systematic illegal acts such as extortion and violence at construction sites.” He has labeled labor unions as “anti-reform rigid vested interests” and has stepped up the offensive. The construction industry is subject to economic fluctuations. It is dependent on the fortunes of the real estate sector and the government’s housing construction plans. As the fifth largest in the world by revenue, Korea’s construction sector is now dealing with the deflation of the real estate bubble which has resulted in a severe downturn in construction. One way the construction companies try to overcome this crisis is by attacking stronger labor unions, which the current anti-worker government is more than willing to support. The Labor Offensive Workers employed on construction sites are irregular and on short-term contracts. Challenges abound for construction workers from various construction sites to organize themselves into strong labor unions. The temporary nature of construction sites also make it harder for workers to negotiate with employers. Yet construction workers have been organizing. The construction workers’ movement emerged in 1989 and grew enormously after the mass layoffs of workers during the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. Crane and truck operators were unionized in the 2000s. Since the 2010s, the movement has rapidly expanded and significantly improved the situation of low wages and poor working conditions. From just over 70,000 members in 2015, the organizing efforts have grown the KCWU to a union of 160,000. If counted along with those in the more conservative Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU), 250,000 construction workers are now in unions in South Korea. In the past, South Korean Chaebols accumulated huge profits from the construction industry based on the over-exploitation of workers. By gaining control over large construction sites, the unions have significantly increased their bargaining power. A key victory of the KCWU’s struggle was abolishing the construction “participation system” to eliminate multi-level subcontracting that undermines job security and worker solidarity. The KCWU won an amendment to the Construction Industry Basic Law that abolished the “the lowest-priced winning bid system”. This happened against the fierce opposition of construction companies vexed by the growing power of unions. In recent years, construction workers have established new unions and negotiated with construction companies over pay and conditions. The KCWU was founded in 2007, comprised of Civil Engineering Construction Regional Union, Crane Operators’ Union, Construction Machinery Union, and Electrical Workers’ Union. In addition, the National Plant Construction Workers’ Union was founded in 2007 that encompassed regional plant unions. These new unions became a force in countering the power of capital in the construction industry. From the beginning, the construction companies were not at all willing to bargain with the unions. The construction workers fought to hold negotiations several times a month. Their efforts culminated in a landmark labor agreement in 2017, more than a decade later, when the construction union went beyond regional negotiations and demanded a national collective bargaining agreement. Construction companies did not believe workers could come together as a union capable of bargaining with the companies. Even if they did, they would stop the struggle once the leadership was detained. However, construction workers who built the union knew the power of being united as a union despite the threats and intimidations. In addition, labor unions, by monitoring the construction companies, have in fact prevented corruption and irregularities in the construction industry and strengthened civil safety by preventing faulty construction. The State and Capital’s Counter-Offensive The Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and public prosecutors are now waging a ruthless counter-offensive against KCWU unionists. They have labeled the physical actions by the unions to take over construction sites as “illegal” and are detaining union organizers. The government and construction companies are attacking the KCWU on two main grounds. One is that it is illegal for the crane operators to receive a monthly bonus (i.e., a separate and additional payment for extra hours worked) from their employers. The other is that the union has control over hiring construction site workers. The monthly fee is perceived as a performance bonus for crane operators. According to court precedents, the bonus is considered a “wage” because the crane operators work longer than the prescribed hours. It is also a risk allowance for performing dangerous work. But the government ignores this ruling and attacks the bonus as an “illegal, unfair payment.” The union made it clear that it is for work performed at the request of construction companies. If the government uses this pretext to attack the union, they will stop accepting the extra payment and instead adopt “work to rule’ by not working any additional hours. Another ground for the repression stems from construction unions pushing for “closed shop.” Unions demand medium and large construction sites to require newly hired workers to join a construction union. However, until a “closed shop” agreement is reached with the construction company, union organizers demand that the companies hire union members and contest the control over the hiring. This sometimes involves physical confrontations between the unions and the companies. Labor’s All-Out Struggle The recent government and construction companies’ attacks on the KCWU should be understood in the context of growing union strength and worker power in the construction sector. Against such escalating repression, the labor movement in Korea is not backing down. Already the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), of which the KCWU is an affiliate, along with other affiliated unions, have announced a series of strike actions and rallies over the next two months. The Korean Metal Workers’ Union is the first to call for a general strike for May 31. The KCWU is aiming to mobilize 100,000 union members to go on strike in July. The KCTU is building a broad alliance of “anti-Yoon Suk-yeol” general strike for July. As the social and political crisis deepens in South Korea, this fight has rapidly emerged as a key battleground. Its processes and outcomes will undoubtedly shape the future of the labor movement and Korean society. Myungkyo Hong is an experienced student and labor movement activist. He is a former organizer at the Samsung Electronics Service Branch of the Korean Metal Workers' Union. He is currently an activist with the social movement organization Platform C. He contributes to columns about social movements for Hankyoreh, Weekly Kyunghyang, and Daily Labor News.

By Simone Chun | April 25, 2023 South Korea’s far-right President Yoon Suk-yeol, who was elected by a narrow margin of 0.7% last year, is in Washington, D.C. this week for a state visit at the invitation of President Biden. According to The New England Korea Peace Campaign, Boston Candlelight Action Committee, and Massachusetts Peace Action which are preparing to hold a protest on Friday, April 28th in Cambridge, MA during Yoon’s visit to Harvard, “Since entering office, Yoon’s right-wing administration has expanded costly and provocative US-ROK military exercises, heightened tensions with North Korea, rolled back workers’ rights, threatened to abolish the ministry of gender equality, and has taken many other actions to undermine struggles for peace and justice in South Korea”. Indeed, backed by Washington, President Yoon has pursued extreme hawkish policies directly against South Korea’s national interests. Yoon’s state visit comes at a time when South Korea is experiencing unprecedented crises on the political, economic and national security fronts as a consequence of the Biden Administration’s unrelenting pressure on South Korea to join the US anti-China bloc. Moreover, domestically, Yoon has installed a new National Security State, which experts refer to as the “republic of prosecution.” His administration is engaging in a massive political witch-hunt of his opponents, arresting key top officials of the previous Moon administration, and targeting the opposition Democratic Party and progressive political leaders. Yoon is using South Korea’s national-security laws and red-baiting rhetoric to crack down on unions and those who are working for peace and unification. For example, on January 28 of this year, Jeong Yu-JIn, Director of Education of the Gyongnam Progressive Alliance and a mother of two, was arrested on charges of being a North Korean spy, an allegation she has steadfastly denied. Having been arrested, detained, and forced to make a false confession without access to an attorney, she engaged in a 40-day hunger strike in detention, which she only ended after 300 Koreans joined her hunger strike in solidarity. Although the hunger strike severely harmed her health, she remains steadfast and is preparing for her trial, with her greatest fear being that her two children remain without the care of their mother indefinitely. Yoon’s eagerness to prove his administration’s worth as a linchpin in Washingtont's new Cold War in Asia means that there will be more repression and prosecution such as this. Washington’s backing of a repressive political regime under an extreme far-right president whose inexperience in foreign policy and disregard for political norms is ushering in a new era of domestic and international uncertainty and risk for South Korea. Washington’s policies run directly counter to the sentiments of the majority of South Koreans, who strongly support balanced foreign relations with Russia and China, meaningful reconciliation with Japan, and peace with North Korea. According to recent polls, 80% of Koreans oppose the degree to which Yoon has capitulated to Washington’s imposition of its anti-China policy on South Korea. Washington’s endorsement of Yoon and its support for his new National Security State directly contravenes the majority of South Korean public opinion. According to recent figures, the Yoon administration has an abysmal 19% public approval rating. While the purpose of Yoon’s state visit is to prove his relevance to US imperial ambitions in Asia, Washington’s increasingly heavy-handed management of its one-sided relationship with South Korea is causing it to lose the battle for the hearts and minds among the South Korean public. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.

The greatest threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia is the U.S. Indo-Pacific military encirclement of China. By Simone Chun | March 21, 2023 | Originally published in Truthout The U.S. military encirclement of China threatens to escalate into an Asia-Pacific war, with the Korean Peninsula at the focal point of this dangerous path. Garrisoned with nearly 30,000 combat-ready U.S. forces manning the astonishing 73 U.S. military bases dotting its tiny landmass, South Korea is the most critical frontline component of U.S. military escalation in northeast Asia. Since the Obama administration’s 2012 “pivot to Asia,” Washington has intensified tensions with Beijing, doubling down on a “full-scale multi-pronged new Cold War” through the Indo-Pacific Strategy pursued by both the Trump and Biden administrations. Sixty percent of U.S. naval capacity has been transferred to the Asia-Pacific region, and 400 out of 800 U.S. worldwide military bases and 130,000 troops are now circling China. This is a reflection of Washington’s Asia-Pacific grand strategy, which views China as the U.S.’s top security challenge and prioritizes the maintenance of U.S. regional hegemony through military force by “defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC [People’s Republic of China].” It promotes the vision of an empire with unipolar hegemonic ambitions, expanding the theater of war in northeast Asia and distributing the totality of threats facing China. Its goal is to force China’s hand by triggering and escalating a hybrid war on multiple fronts, including military, technology, economy, information and media. This strategy is based on chaining together a regional “anti-hegemonic coalition” of U.S.-armed allies encircling China from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia and Indonesia in the south. In spite of the significant state-level and public resistance in these nations toward U.S. pressure to choose between allegiance to Beijing and allegiance to Washington, this vision has been largely realized thanks to unrelenting U.S. coercion through successive administrations. Three important implications of this grand strategy, which places the Korean Peninsula at the pernicious center of intensified China-U.S. competition, merit attention: 1) the accelerated remilitarization of Japan; 2) the revitalization of extremist hardline North Korea policies in both Washington and Seoul; and 3) the intensification and expansion of belligerent wargames targeted at China and North Korea. First, Washington’s military encirclement of China strategy bolsters Japan’s military build-up program. The U.S., despite having imposed a “pacifist” constitution on Japan in the wake of WWII, has for decades aggressively pushed for Japanese rearmament as a necessary adjunct of Washington’s efforts to dominate the Asia-Pacific. Labeling Japan a “failed peace state,” Gavan McCormack points out the ironic trajectory of its transformation into “one of the world’s great military powers” as a state actively girding for war under a so-called pacifist constitution. “With US encouragement, over time Japan built formidable land, sea, and air forces, evading the constitutional proscription by calling them ‘Self-Defence’ forces (rather than Army, Navy, and so on),” McCormack writes. “Other states with good reason to know and fear Japanese militarism (Australia included) also abandoned their commitment to the idea of its permanent demilitarisation…. [Its] constitution steadily sidelined, by early 21st century Japan was one of the world’s great military powers.” Thus, Japan’s Security Policy echoes U.S. goals such as the complete denuclearization of North Korea, the stoking of tensions on Taiwan and the continued U.S. military presence in Okinawa. Home to more than 50,000 U.S. troops, Tokyo has steadily laid the groundwork for its own remilitarization program by characterizing North Korea as an existential threat, and designating Beijing’s regional activities as a danger to its homeland. According to the retired Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) Admiral Tomohisa Takei, China has been the main target for Japanese rearmament, “using North Korea’s threat as cover.” At their most recent summit in January, President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed to work together to “transform Japan into a potent military power” to counterbalance China. Tokyo’s defense budget will grow 56 percent over the next five years, from $215 billion to $324 billion, raising its military spending to parity with that of NATO countries. Tokyo is also adopting a new policy of acquiring “counterstrike” capabilities against other nations as part of a recharacterized “self-defense” posture — an alarming development in a region still suffering from the historical legacy of Japan’s brutal imperial policy during WWII, and raising the fear that Japan may decide to carry out a unilateral attack against North Korea. Washington considers the remilitarization of Japan — which aspires to become the world’s third-largest military power after the U.S. and China — to be the linchpin of U.S. security interests in Asia. Second, Washington’s zero-sum stance against China obstructs its ability to craft a sensible North Korea policy. Thus far, despite Washington’s rhetoric of “seeking diplomacy and deterrence with North Korea,” and repeated claims of having “reached out to Pyongyang multiple times,” the Biden administration has not moved beyond its standing offer for talks with no preconditions. Moreover, the Biden administration’s recent appointment of a new special envoy for North Korean human rights issues shows that Washington intends to maintain its heavy handed policy of employing military threats and economic sanctions against Pyongyang. In other words, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stated, the United States will “maintain pressure on North Korea until Pyongyang changes course,” i.e. surrenders to U.S. terms. Even moderate experts have warned against the Biden administration’s preference for relying on “ineffective [and] ill-suited tools” such as “isolation, pressure, and deterrence,” intensifying U.S.-South Korea military exercises, and redeploying U.S. strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula. The goal of Washington’s North Korea policy, however, is not to achieve rapprochement with Pyongyang or establish peace in the Korean Peninsula, but rather to nurture and even enhance the purported “North Korean threat” as a pretext to rally South Korea and Japan behind its goal of containing China. Washington’s anti-China policy, which binds South Korea to the service of U.S. geopolitical strategic interests and keeps it in a subservient client-patron relationship with the U.S., also has the ancillary effect of empowering extremist far right factions in South Korea. These politicians exploit the North Korean threat as justification for domestic repression under South Korea’s National Security Laws — among the most draconian in the world — empowering them to leverage red-baiting and worse against any critics or perceived threats to their grip on power. Case in point: South Korea’s far right president, Yoon Suk-yeol, who was elected by a razor-thin margin of 0.7 percent barely eight months ago, is already leaving his mark, having established a “republic of prosecution” that pursues the politics of fear and prosecution domestically on the one hand, and subordinates South Korea’s sovereignty to Washington’s interests on the other. The “most disliked leader in the world” garnered a disapproval rating of 70 percent in a recent Morning Consulting survey, and faces massive and sustained public demand for his immediate resignation. It is noteworthy that in spite of Washington’s stated foreign policy goal of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights, the U.S. remains silent on Yoon’s “atavistic reversion” of vitally democratic South Korea into a newly repressive national security state. According to K.J. Noh, “South Korea’s essential role as the closest and largest military force projection platform against China, its role in a ‘JAKUS’ (Japan-South Korea-U.S. military alliance), its cooperation with NATO, its stated plans to join a Quad-plus, and its assumption of a submissive position toward U.S. decoupling and economic enclosure against China make it far too valuable to criticize or undermine regardless of its excesses.” Indeed, Yoon has tirelessly pressed ahead with dangerous hawkish foreign policies. Against the absolute majority of Korean public opinion (over 65 percent) who prefer neutrality and a “balanced policy,” Yoon has unwaveringly committed to stand with the U.S. in its hegemonic strategic rivalry with China. During the 2022 Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, Yoon unveiled Korea’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which is effectively cribbed from Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy designed to contain China. Moreover, Yoon has repeatedly advocated not only the redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, but has also declared his intention to arm South Korea with nuclear weapons, significantly raising the danger of a regional nuclear arms race. Third, Washington’s stance against China fuels belligerent ongoing wargames targeted at China and North Korea on the Korean Peninsula. The U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises — the world’s largest bilateral peacetime military drills — involve live fire drills, carrier battle group and submarine maneuvers and strategic nuclear bombing raids by aircraft. They have also explicitly included the rehearsed attack and occupation of North Korea as well as the “decapitation” of its leadership: a “plan for regime collapse and occupation.” Since the 2022 Biden-Yoon summit when Yoon agreed to the repositioning U.S. strategic nuclear-capable assets closer to the Korean Peninsula, South Korea has conducted near-monthly joint military exercises with U.S. forces. Under the GSOMIA (General Security of Military Information Agreement), which aims to create a “three eyes” intelligence-sharing grouping against China, these exercises also include joint maneuvers with the Japanese military. Coupled with the deployment of U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries in South Korea, these drills form a crucial aspect of regional U.S. war preparations. Leveraging South Korea and Japan to collect and share military intelligence as military subcontractors is a principal component of U.S.-led military action. In the case of South Korea, the reduction of sovereign military assets to virtual pawns in a U.S.-led conflict goes even further, with Washington explicitly accorded the authority to take full control of the South Korean military in the event of any war. The frequency and intensity of regional U.S.-led joint exercises have increased exponentially in the past year, ramping up tensions. In June 2022, the U.S. and South Korean militaries, for the first time in more than four years, held a three-day joint naval exercise involving U.S. strategic nuclear assets with the stated purpose of “reinforcing allies” against “North Korea’s mounting weapons ambitions.” Two months later, South Korea and Japan participated in the U.S.-led RIMPAC — the “grandest of all war games” — with the nominal goal of countering “North Korea’s evolving missile threats.” In spite of U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s claim that Washington does not “seek a new Cold War, an Asian NATO, or a region split into hostile blocs,” the U.S. is promoting NATO’s Asia-Pacific expansion to close the military circle around China, as demonstrated by its drive to extend NATO’s influence to Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. South Korea is fast becoming an important part of NATO’s Asia-Pacific expansion, as attested by Yoon’s attendance at the 2022 NATO meeting in Spain, in which China was singled out as a state that “challenge[s] our interests, security, and values and seek[s] to undermine the rules-based international order.” South Korea also became the first Asian country to join NATO’s Cyber Defense Group, a move that critics argue is laying the groundwork for war in Asia. Moreover, the scope and scale of U.S. regional military exercises will increase by a factor of 20 for the first six months of 2023 alone. The resumption of U.S.-South Korean joint live-fire exercises will be augmented by the addition of new and highly provocative “nuclear table-top drills,” which simulate region-wide nuclear conflict under the guise of deterring a North Korean nuclear attack. The proliferation of these U.S.-led military exercises in the Korean Peninsula and the Asia-Pacific region reveal Washington’s mounting resolve to drag South Korea into conflicts beyond the Korean Peninsula for the simple reason that South Korea, which has remained a U.S. garrison state since the Korean War, hosts the most lethal U.S. military footprint proximate to Beijing, including the world’s newest and largest U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek. U.S. officials have been quite blunt about South Korea’s subordinate role in Washington’s imperial quest. Gen. Robert Abrams, U.S. Forces Korea commander from 2018 to 2021, stated in 2021 that in addition to “threats from North Korea,” South Korea must join the U.S. in developing “new operational war plans” to counter China’s military influence in the region. Accordingly, former U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper predicted in 2022 that South Korea would inevitably “intervene with the United States in the Taiwan Strait should a conflict break out between Taiwan and China.” There is little doubt that under the far right Yoon administration, U.S. pressure on South Korea to serve in a vanguard role as a pawn against China will increase. Washington’s resolve to push its exorbitant imperial privilege by any means necessary is forcing South Korea down a risky and self-destructive path that promises little benefit for the Korean nation itself. What is happening now is the U.S. empire’s response to its most significant challenge to date, and represents an evolution of its militaristic posture in order to prevent its demise. As Tim Beal points out: For American hegemony the struggle is existential, and without hegemony the United States will be much diminished and poorer; it will have to live within its means rather than drawing sustenance from its empire. Hegemonic power has various dimensions — political, military, ideational, economic and financial. The US is being challenged, indeed is faltering, in each of these in various ways and to differing degrees. First and foremost, in intensifying its offensive against Beijing, Washington has shifted both risk and burden to allies that form its “vanguard against China,” enabling the U.S. to dictate decisions and procure imperial benefits while distributing the costs to vassal states. In order to justify its burgeoning military regional presence and intensified control over South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to bolster its posture against China, the U.S. needs to keep regional tension high. Despite the U.S. position that it is “open to talks” with North Korea, continued sanctions (including those targeting the civilian and medical sector), expansion of the U.S. military presence in the region, intensification of multinational military drills, and continued political rhetoric from Washington ensure that tensions with the north remain elevated. This benefits both Washington and the extremist regime in Seoul, and ensures South Korea’s perpetual relegation to the status of a U.S. neocolonial state. The greatest threat to peace and stability in northeast Asia is the U.S. Indo-Pacific military encirclement of China, which by design serves to escalate tensions and create a dangerous cycle of provocation and response. Washington’s hegemonic quest — the highest manifestation of 21st-century imperialism — is the antithesis of peace in the Korean Peninsula, the Asia-Pacific region, and beyond. When one factors in the Pentagon’s openly aggressive National Defense Strategy, which sanctions the use of nuclear weapons against non-adversaries, the intensified U.S. focus on maintaining hegemony and regional dominance at all costs takes on an even more ominous character, suggesting that the Korean Peninsula has the potential to serve as the flashpoint for a conflict of much wider scale and scope. Hawkish U.S. policies have consistently failed to garner public support in South Korea. According to a series of polls conducted in 2021, 61 percent of South Koreans support relaxing sanctions against the north and 79 percent support peace with Pyongyang, with an additional 71 percent supporting a formal end-of-war declaration between the two Koreas. These sentiments persist even among Yoon supporters, a majority of whom support an inter-Korean peace treaty, breaking with his rhetoric of a tougher stance toward North Korea. The South Korean Democratic and Progressive Parties, as well as major civil and labor organizations, support military deescalation with the North and maintenance of neutrality in the Washington-Beijing competition. Democratic Party Chairman Lee Jae-myung has repeatedly warned against South Korea becoming a “pawn in the plans of other states,” pledging his party to the principles of independence and sovereignty. A few years from now, after the Biden and Yoon administrations have ended, North Korea will likely not have been denuclearized and South Korea may emerge as the nuclear front line in the U.S. rivalry with China and Russia, setting the stage for the Korean Peninsula to serve as the main battleground in a new Cold War. If Biden has a genuine interest in achieving lasting regional security, he should pursue a broader vision in which nations can coexist. According to the latest poll, a significant majority of Americans support tension-reducing policies with North Korea and China, and 7 in 10 Americans are supportive of a summit between Biden and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Over half of those polled support a full-fledged peace agreement to finally end the 73-year-old Korean War — an unresolved conflict that has left nearly 5 million casualties and forcibly separated 10 million Korean families on either side of the 38th parallel, including more than 100,000 Korean Americans. Instead of narrowly focusing on the threat of China and exploiting the North Korean threat as a cover for a militaristic and volatile anti-China policy, the Biden administration should recognize that peace in the Korean Peninsula is not only obtainable, but can lay the groundwork for a broader and more stable regional order based on coexistence. Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, a lecturer at Northeast University and an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors, and serves on the advisory board for CODEPINK. She can be found on Twitter at @simonechun.

Ever the peacemaker, he met with Kim Il Sung in 1994 and helped freeze Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade. By Christine Ahn | February 22, 2023 | Originally published in Responsible Statecraft As the world reflects on the legacy of President Jimmy Carter, it’s important to remember the place where he may have left one of his greatest post-presidency marks — the Korean Peninsula. Not only was Carter instrumental in preventing a U.S. attack on North Korea that could have been a second Korean War, he also was an advocate for replacing the 1953 ceasefire with a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. Now, Carter’s legacy can provide the Biden administration with crucial insight of how to move forward with North Korea, especially as Pyongyang has become a de facto nuclear power. To Korea watchers, President Carter’s legacy on Korea is mixed. While in office, he made a tragic error in quashing the democratic uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, that claimed hundreds of lives. Tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest martial law following a military coup. On May 22, 1980, Carter’s national security team gave the green light to Lieutenant General Chun Doo-hwan to use force against the student protests in Gwangju, the birthplace of South Korea’s democracy. Much of the South Korean populace who longed for democracy felt betrayed by a U.S. president who championed human rights diplomacy. But after leaving the White House, Carter played an instrumental role in preventing a new Korean War. In September 1994, as President Clinton weighed a first-strike on North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, President Carter, flanked by a CNN camera crew, flew to Pyongyang to meet Kim Il Sung and outline the terms of the Agreed Framework, which succeeded in freezing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade. In his experience speaking with North Korean leaders, from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il, Carter felt that he understood what North Korea wanted, as well as how the United States and North Korea could move forward on a path toward peace. “All that the North Koreans have wanted is a peace agreement instead of a ceasefire and that we should help North Koreans access the outside world by ending our embargo,” he told me in November 2018, when we sat down together at the Carter Center in Atlanta. “They want basic peace with the United States and the ability to become part of a community of nations on an equal basis. I pray and hope that we work out an agreement and treat the North Koreans fairly.” Carter pointed out the irony of how the United States had spent the last 70 years trying “to destroy the economy of North Korea” while working “to boost the economy of South Korea. And still, we condemn the North Koreans for not having a good economy.” At that time in 2018, the two leaders of North Korea and South Korea, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, met three times — twice at Panmunjom and once in Pyongyang — where they signed two declarations committing to ending war on the Korean Peninsula and ushering in a new era of peace. But peacemaking between the two Koreas alone was not enough; the success of the inter-Korean peace process also rested on the United States establishing peace with the North. Unfortunately, summit meetings between the two in 2018-2019 ended in failure. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that. This year has already witnessed dangerously high tensions on the peninsula: North Korea recently displayed enough ICBMs to overwhelm the U.S.’s missile defense system and Washington and Seoul are ramping up massive joint military exercises in response. And South Korea under a conservative President Yoon Seok-yeol is flirting with the idea of arming itself with nuclear weapons. The backdrop to this endless cycle of provocations is the U.S.-China great power conflict, which has put the Korean Peninsula on its front line. While the Biden administration’s North Korea envoy has said he is willing to meet with his North Korean counterparts “anywhere, anytime,” Pyongyang has largely ignored those offers, and it’s not hard to understand why. Many U.S. policymakers across the political spectrum continue to resist calls for a peace, arguing that signing a peace agreement with North Korea would grant the Kim regime the right to become a nuclear-weapons state. Hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham has argued that a declaration of peace should only come “after [the North Koreans] give up their nukes.” Even Joseph Yun, a moderate and former U.S. Envoy to North Korea, said, “[I]t would be a real mistake to have a peace treaty come first, then denuclearization, because that is clearly an open admission that you’re dealing with North Korea as an acknowledged nuclear weapons state.” But a peace agreement would not necessarily recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. As pointed out in the Korea Peace Now! report “Path to Peace,” a peace agreement wouldn’t change the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which only acknowledges a nuclear weapons state as one that manufactured or tested a weapon prior to January 1, 1967. (North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 2006.) Plus, there are more compelling reasons why a peace agreement would help defuse tensions and halt the arms race. Stanford University professor and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, who routinely inspected nuclear facilities in North Korea through the 1990s, said, “North Korea will not give up its weapons and weapons program until its security can be assured. Such assurance cannot be achieved simply by a US promise/agreement on paper. It will require a substantial period of co-existence and interdependence.” Former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea James Laney put it best when he said, “[a] peace treaty would provide a baseline for relationships, eliminating the question of the other’s legitimacy and its right to exist. Absent such a peace treaty, every dispute presents afresh the question of the other side’s legitimacy.” A peace agreement is also supported by members of Congress. On March 1, Representative Brad Sherman will re-introduce the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, which was first introduced in 2021 and calls for formally ending the Korean War with a peace agreement. As we approach the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War Armistice, the Biden administration should take the lessons from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who made the most progress with North Korea to finally end the Korean War and usher in a new era of peace. Christine Ahn is the Founder and Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in peace building. Ahn is the co-coordinator of the global campaign, Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing to End the War, and co-founder of the Korea Peace Network, Korea Policy Institute, Global Campaign to Save Jeju Island, Korean Americans for Fair Trade, and National Campaign to End the Korean War.

By The Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective | February 14, 2023 Dear President Christina Paxson, We call upon Brown University’s administration to lift its sanctions against Professor Naoko Shibusawa. We are deeply troubled by the highly punitive and humiliating way that she has been treated and singled out for censure. Institutional racism and sexism have often proceeded under the guise of proceduralism, enabling differential–indeed inequitable–outcomes to appear to be the neutral implementation of institutional policies. What makes Brown University’s leveraging of protocols around confidentiality and collegiality to neutralize and gag Professor Shibusawa all the more egregious is the fact that a discussion of how academic institutions reproduce anti-Asian racism is at the heart of her 2022 article, “Where is the Reciprocity? Notes on Solidarity from the Field.” In this essay, Professor Shibusawa challenges us to confront the racist targeting of Asians as “low-hanging fruit,” asking us to consider the lines of continuity between intensified anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, on the one hand, and the “suckerpunchability” of Asian Americanists when they decry anti-Asian racism in the academy, on the other. We find it grotesque and ironic that Brown University is proving her thesis by targeting Professor Shibusawa, subjecting her to totally unwarranted, outlandish consequences. In its rash and deeply unjust decision to sanction Professor Shibusawa, Brown University is not operating in a vacuum. This is a time in which racist reaction against scholarship and teaching on race is in the spotlight, and the forms this repression has taken span the gamut from overt racism to bureaucratic proceduralism. Brown University’s actions, in other words, extend beyond Professor Shibusawa’s case, contributing to the chilling of academic freedom on a national scale. Published after undergoing double-blind, peer review in the flagship journal of the Association of Asian American Studies alongside the writings of other field-defining scholars and activists including Lisa Yoneyama, Yen Le Espiritu, Sunaira Maira, and Helen Zia, Professor Shibusawa’s article, “Where is the Reciprocity? Notes on Solidarity from the Field,” deliberates on the challenges facing Asian American studies, an understanding especially pressing today given the rise in politics that seek to silence critical race scholarship and to impede academic freedom. In our careful reading of the article, nothing warrants the charge of academic misconduct. Even as this essay incorporates anecdotes and reflections on her experience working to build capacity for Asian American studies in the face of the myriad forms that anti-Asian racism takes in a range of academic settings, Professor Shibusawa makes it impossible to identify specifics related to events that occurred at Brown University. The inclusion of Professor Shibusawa’s experiences not only lends credence to the article’s underlying arguments but also gives urgent voice to Asian and Asian American scholars, students, and activists who have faced similar circumstances. Indeed, given the systemic nature of what she indicts, we believe Professor Shibusawa should be praised rather than punished for her willingness to broach such topics in a public forum. We have worked closely with Professor Shibusawa as members of the Ending the Korean War Collective, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and activists from across the United States. Our work together has included the passing of public resolutions calling for a formal end to the Korean War at the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2021 and the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) in 2020. Professor Shibusawa’s participation in our collective is a profound testament to the way she envisions and enacts solidarity, particularly with regard to a war ironically memorialized as “forgotten” in the United States. As a scholar and mentor, she is deeply respected not just for her intellectual breadth, with her scholarship spanning the multiple fields of history, American studies, and Asian American studies, but also, her profound ethical solidarity. Professor Shibusawa’s entire career has been defined by courage and principle. In closing, we reiterate our call for Brown University to immediately lift its sanctions against Professor Shibusawa and restore her full rights as a faculty member. As members of university communities across the country, we are stunned by Brown University’s overreach. Indeed, the way she has been silenced and punished echoes the critique Professor Shibusawa makes in her article of how Asian Americanists are silenced and sidelined in institutional settings that otherwise tout themselves on their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to the personal injury experienced by Professor Shibusawa, we are deeply concerned about the far-reaching ramifications of Brown University’s impingement on academic freedom. By targeting an Asian Americanist who dares to expose how anti-Asian racism works to silence Asian Americanists in university settings, Brown University demonstrates its hostility to Asian American studies. We certainly hope this is not the message you wish to broadcast to the world. Sincerely, The Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective Jinah Kim Professor, Department of Communication Studies California State University-Northridge Patrick Chung Assistant Professor, Department of History University of Maryland-College Park Christine Hong Director, Center for Racial Justice Chair, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Associate Professor, Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Literature University of California-Santa Cruz Crystal Baik Associate Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies University of California-Riverside Monica Kim Associate Professor, Department of History University of Wisconsin-Madison Sung Eun Kim Ph.D. candidate, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures University of California-Los Angeles Joo Ok Kim Assistant Professor, Department of Literature University of California-San Diego Youngoh Jung PhD Candidate, Department of History Critical Gender Studies Specialization Program University of California-San Diego Clara Han Professor, Department of Anthropology Johns Hopkins University Ka-eul Yoo UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Asian American Studies University of California-Irvine Minju Bae Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Rutgers University - New Brunswick Elaine H. Kim Professor Emerita, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies University of California-Berkeley Madeleine Han PhD Candidate, Department of American Studies Yale University Chisato Hughes MFA, UC Santa Cruz Alfred P. Flores Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies Harvey Mudd College Deann Borshay Liem Producer/Director Mu Films S. Heijin Lee Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa CC: Lawrence Larson, Interim Provost (Lawrence_Larson@brown.edu) CC: Leah VanWey, Dean of the Faculty (Leah_VanWey@brown.edu)

By K J NOH | January 25, 2023 | This article is co-published with MR Online Progressive South Korean citizens have been watching with impending dread the deepening threats of political repression since the former prosecutor Yoon Suk Yeol assumed the South Korean presidency. On Wednesday, January 18, the Yoon administration took off its gloves. Early Wednesday morning, the South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service), the successor to South Korea’s secret police (KCIA), unleashed a frenzy of shock-and-awe raids against peace groups, civil society organizations, and labor unions, including the KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions), and KCTU-affiliated unions. The KCTU is a one million-plus-strong umbrella organization of trade unions built to create labor solidarity against the neoliberal violence of the State-Chaebol (multi-national corporation) Capitalist formation. A phalanx of police and NIS agents scrummed into KCTU offices in the early morning, and despite entreaties for legal observation and accompaniment, strong-armed their way into the offices in a violent search and seizure while hundreds of police barricaded the entrances downstairs. Union leadership claim that one thousand police were deployed in this 10-hour political strip search of KCTU leadership. Simultaneous raids were also conducted on the KHMWU (Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union), and the KMWU (Korean Metal Workers’ Union). Union officers, organizers, anti-war activists, were swept up in these raids and private homes were also raided. Stunned union representatives called these actions “unprecedented,” “excessive,” and “a plan to suppress the labor movement.” Raids were also conducted by the NIS against the ”Sewol Ferry peace shelter.” The Sewol Ho was a ferry that capsized on April 16, 2014, drowning 304 passengers, mostly working-class youth on a field trip to the resort island of Jeju. Told to stay on the boat and await a rescue that never came, the compliant youth slowly drowned in their cabins while texting their fear and regrets to their anguished loved ones, who had also been assured that a massive rescue effort was under way. No meaningful rescue attempt was undertaken. It is considered one of the largest civil catastrophes in South Korean history. The ferry, unbeknownst to the passengers, had been transporting 278 tons of iron rebar destined for the construction of a U.S.-handy naval base on the southern tip of Jeju Island, as one element of the aggressive U.S. policy to contain China. The ship was poorly refurbished, overloaded with freight, navigating in inclement weather, and it capsized during a turn. Neoliberal deregulation, suspected urgency to complete the naval base construction, along with an 8-hour period of complete government inaction during the capsizing, resulted in the massive death toll. The peace shelter, with its motto of “we could have saved them all,” was a sanctuary of grieving, remembrance, and comfort for survivors, and place of solidarity for victims of state capitalist violence. That sense of safety and sanctuary was violated by the NIS raid on January 18. A raid was also conducted on the offices of the June 15 Committee, a grassroots civil society seeking to build relations in hopes of reunification between North and South Korea. They had screened a North Korean film three years ago. The ostensible pretext for these raids, as alleged by the government, was that all of these organizations had steered foul of South Korea’s National Security Law (see this accompanying MR Online article) and were suspected of contacts or collaboration with North Korea to undermine the state. These allegations have been firmly denied by targets and challenged by assembly members. It’s more likely that the real reason for this repression is that President Yoon has been facing massive opposition from the Korean people. There have been 23 mass street protests against the Yoon administration, with up to half a million people participating, demanding that that Yoon step down immediately. There have also been mass labor strikes, most recently, a transportation union strike, and countless smaller regional actions. These demands for Yoon’s resignation stem from his viciously oppressive anti-labor and anti-union policies—Yoon ran on a platform of instituting a 120-hour work week—and recently squelched the transportation strike by threatening strikers with imprisonment. Other reasons include his dismissal of colonial era atrocities in order to facilitate South Korea’s coordination with Japanese remilitarization—he is described as a “selling out his country”; his collaboration with the U.S. weaponization of South Korea as a tool to contain China; his oppression of the main opposition DP party, along with suspicions of spousal corruption. The recent Itaewon crowd crush incident—a Sewol Ho redux—characterized by the same apathy and absence of government action for safety and human lives, along with an unending series of cringe-inducing foreign policy gaffes, has only added strength to these convictions. These ongoing street “Candlelight Protests,” along with other civil society and labor actions, echo the name and sentiments of the powerful mass movement that removed the previous conservative president, Park Geun-Hye and her party from power in 2016. As a rebranded continuation of Park’s party, the current administration sees these actions and movements as an existential threat. Facing stiffening headwinds, to preserve his role as a subcontractor to U.S. geopolitics and to maintain neoliberalism in South Korea, Yoon is reaching for the tried-and-trusty cudgel of South Korean dictators and autocrats, its 1948 National Security Law. The modern capitalist state of South Korean was originally created as a U.S. neocolonial bulwark against communism in East Asia. Noting Korea’s overwhelming propensity toward socialist politics—a legacy of its traditional communitarian culture and its anti-colonial struggles—the country was sundered into North and South. The United States and its quislings then unleashed genocidal state violence in the South against workers, peasants, and socialists, smashing every progressive bone in the body politic and indenturing the South as a shattered subaltern to global capital. This process was scarified and sealed by war, and then splinted and dressed in decades of bloody military dictatorship. South Korea’s National Security Legislation was imprinted into its institutions during this violent process, to ensure the continuity of the neocolonial capitalist state and to squelch all challenges to it. The Yoon administration’s actions are a re-expression of its original DNA. As eager understudy and arrant errand boy to U.S. imperialism, President Yoon’s atavistic reversion to the habits of the past military dictatorships are likely to be glossed over in a western media that is eager to carry water for the global project of continued hegemonic U.S. capitalist unipolarity. South Korea’s essential role as the closest and largest military force projection platform against China, its role in a “JAKUS” (a Japan-South Korea-U.S. military alliance) its cooperation with NATO, its stated plans to join a Quad-plus, and its assumption of a submissive position toward U.S. decoupling and economic enclosure against China make it far too valuable to criticize or undermine regardless of its excesses. Within South Korea, criticism or reform of the National Security Law is a third rail that is rarely touched: that itself can be construed as a violation of the NSL. Genuine solidarity is needed more than ever, to criticize and challenge this dangerous, atavistic turn in South Korea as the United States nudges itself and its quislings closer to the precipice of kinetic conflict. At stake is peace in the Pacific, and the future of a better world. K.J. Noh is a scholar and peace activist focused on the geopolitics of the Asian continent. He writes for Counterpunch and Dissident Voice, and reports for local and international media.

By Tim Shorrock | January 17, 2023 | Originally published in The Shorrock Files The Rise of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces is a continuation of Tim Shorrock’s Japan Crosses the Rubicon, published December 23, 2022. To access these and a treasure trove of articles by Shorrock on U.S. empire in Northeast Asia, please support The Shorrock Files as a subscriber on Patreon. Due to its defeat in World War II, Japan's "great imperial army" was dissolved. Immediately after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, however, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-chief of the occupation army, ordered the Japanese government to establish a national police reserve force. Here is the story of Japan's Self-Defense Forces and their special relationship to South Korea. From the AMPO Magazine archives, 1979, with an update on how the SDF was funded. Rushing Towards Remilitarization Since the Korean War Last month, as I’ve reported and the mainstream media has studiously avoided, Japan took a giant step towards becoming what the United States considers a “normal nation.” It did this by giving its “Self Defense Forces” the ability to strike enemy bases overseas for the first time since Japan’s surrender in 1945. I described that development on these pages on December 23 in an article entitled “Japan Crosses the Rubicon” that, thanks to Antiwar.com, received a record amount of traffic on my website last week. As I mentioned in that piece, the Kishida government’s “new” policies largely originated in Washington, which has been pushing Japan to become a bona fide military power for over 40 years. It also helped to revive its army during the Korean War by starting the Self Defense Forces, known as the SDF, as a “national police reserve force.” Washington military industrial think tanks such as the RAND Corporation consider the SDF critical to US strategy against China and make great efforts to raise its visibility in Japan. In my next article in this series, I will be tracing the history of the U.S. pressures on Japan to rearm, starting in the 1970s. While I complete my reporting, I want to bring you this article on the origins of Japan’s SDF from a 1979 edition of AMPO Magazine. It was founded during the Vietnam War by radicals seeking to link their antiwar movement with allied movements in the United States and Europe (“Ampo” is short for the US-Japan Security Treaty, the primary target in the 1960s of the Japanese left, as defined in the chant “Ampo hantai!” – Against Ampo! – that was heard during every major demonstration in Japan from 1960 to 1970. I was associated with AMPO in the 1980s and 1990s and helped distribute it for a time as its U.S. representative. The magazine was founded by members of Beheiren (Citizens Federation for the Peace in Vietnam) and published by the Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC) in Tokyo. It was a constant source of information about Japan’s role in the US empire in Asia and peoples’ movements throughout the region. Fujii Haruo, who wrote this 1979 piece, was one of AMPO’s (and Japan’s) best military analysts (read about his revelations here). His history of the SDF is both penetrating and prescient. Most important for American readers is the link he draws between the creation of the SDF and the Korean War, when Japan began its slow ascent as America’s Cops in the Pacific. Below, I present his main points and a downloadable PDF of the original article. UPDATE: Before getting to Haruo’s piece, it’s important to ask: how was the SDF financed by a Japanese government that, only five years before, had renounced war and watched as the United States dismantled its enormous military and war industry? The answer is, secretly, through a huge, hidden fortune of gold and other treasure seized by the U.S. military from Japan in 1945 and controlled by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the U.S. Occupation Force. That treasure, eventually worth billions of dollars, was used to influence Japanese domestic politics for decades. It is now known as the “M Fund.” Here’s the story, as told in 2003 by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave in Cold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold, published by Verso: In 1950, when the Korean War started, most U.S. forces in Japan were rushed to Korea, creating a security vacuum. Because the postwar constitution prohibited setting up a new army, the M-Fund secretly provided over $50 million to create what was characterized as a self-defense force. When the occupation ended in 1952 and Washington and Tokyo concluded their joint security treaty, administration of the M-Fund shifted to dual control, staffed by U.S. Embassy CIA personnel and their Japanese counterparts, weighted in favor of the Americans….The M-Fund council interfered vigorously to keep Japan’s government, industry, and society under the tight control of conservatives friendly toward America. I’ll be posting more on the M-Fund, including excerpts from the work of the late, great Chalmers Johnson, later this week. Meanwhile, let’s return to Haruo and the SDF. The rise of Japan’s Self Defense Force and the Korea Factor AMPO, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1979 By Fujii Haruo Japan’s restablished military – the Self Defense Forces – is, like the armed forced maintained by any country, designed to protect the present Japanese ruling system – i.e., monopoly capitalism. Due to its defeat in World War II, Japan’s “great imperial army” was dissolved. Immediately after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, however, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-chief of the occupation army, ordered the Japanese government to establish a national police reserve force. An immediate duty to be fulfilled by the police reserve force was to engage in maintenance of public peace in in Japan, since the U.S. troops stationed in Japan for that purpose were dispatched to the Korean peninsula. During the conflict in Korea, Japan served both as a dispatch base for U.S. operations in Korea, and as a supply base. U.S. military headquarters for the Korean war were located in Japan, there were many U.S. bases on Japanese soil, and the families of U.S. soldiers were living here. Not only was it the task of the police reserve force to protect them, it was also expected to eventually develop into a new Japanese army. The Self Defense Forces (SDF) comprised of Ground, Maritime, and Air forces, were created according to the 1954 reorganization of the police reserve force, and were given the additional task of defending the national against foreign attack. In other words, regardless of its name, the SDF actually took on the same functions as the militaries of other countries. The role of the SDF was to combat both domestic and foreign enemies, and to achieve these ends, it was to be mobilized both for external defense and internal security. In this way, a military was revived in Japan, equipped with both a military function against foreign countries, and one to maintain domestic peace and order by fighting against the enemy within the structure of Japanese monopoly capitalism, i.e., the Japanese people themselves… [By 1979], the national defense budget amounted to 2 trillion, 400 billion yen, the 8th largest in the world. The countries superceding Japan in terms of their military budget [were] the five nuclear-armed ones, together the West German and Saudi Arabia. The total strength of the SDF [was] 240,000 men consisting of 155,000 men in ground forces, 42,000 men in Maritime forces with war vessels totaling 220,000 tons, 44,000 men in the Air force with 750 aircraft. Japan was thbus equipmmed with the strongest, most modern arms in the world in terms of conventional weaponry, and quality-wise [was] the strongest in Asia... Present Focal Point: The Korean Peninsula From 1958 to 1960 the first-phase defense power reinforcement plan was carried out, through which the framework of the SDF as a military was built. With the conclusion in 1960 of the new Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (a military alliance) as a start, the SDF’s external function was defined and strengthened. The focus of its external task was then directed towards the Korean Peninsula. It was in 1963 that the Defense Agency’s Joint Staff Council confidentially conducted what became known as the “Mitsuya Study.” This study was designed to examine measure the SDF and Japanese government were to take, based on the assumption that a second Korean War would break out. The then U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric [who served from 1961 to 1964] stated around that time that he would expect Japan “to be equipped with enough monitoring power to protect the area, including a part of the Korean Peninsula, in the future.” The U.S. used Japan during the Korean War as a sortie and supply base. For the U.S. Japan and South Korea were one defense zone, and the U.S. forces stationed in Japan and South Korea were considered as one body. [emphasis mine]. It was under this perception by the U.S. forces that the SDF and South Korean military were developed. In the early 60s, the U.S. began discussing a large-scale cutback in U.S. troop strength in South Korea and adopted a plan which would encourage Japan to take over the responsibility. With the conclusion of a Normalization Treaty between Japan and South Korea in 1965, the political, economic and diplomatic relationship between the two countries was strengthened. [On this development, see my 2019 article in The Nation, “In a Major Shift, South Korea Defies Its Alliance With Japan.”] Strong resistance among the Japanese people agaisnt a direct military tie-up, however, necessitated that the South Korean military and Japan’s SDF continue their cooperations only indirectly, with the U.S. military as mediator. In 1968, however, high military officials of both countries began visiting each other and a system of informaqtion exchange between the two was established. In 1969, a U.S.-Japan joint communique was issues which stated that “the security of South Korea is important for the security of Japan itself,” thus placing upon Japan the expection that it would take over from the U.S. responsibility for South Korea’s defense. Then, between 1970 and 1971, one division of U.S. ground troops was withdrawn from South Korea… [By the 1970s],then U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger stated, in appreciation of Japan’s efforts, that “Japan is already playing an indirect role in the defense of South Korea. The defense capacity provide by Japan’s air Defense Forc3 is effective not only for the Japanese mainland but for the defense of South Korea.” Towards U.S.-Japan-South Korean Joint Defense Since the late 1970s the SDF’s attitude toward relations with South Korea became even more clear and positive. At the end of July 1979 the then director-general of the [Japanese] Defense Agency visited South Korea, becoming the first to do so while in active service… Following the July 1979 decision to freeze the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from South Korea, Japan was further drawn into assisting in South Korea’s defense. This trend continued in 1980, with the appearance of the Chun Doo Hwan regime in South Korea, and the Ronald Reagan administration in the U.S. These reactionary governments [promoted] trilateral military cooperation, including Japan, requiring that Japan go beyhond mere sharing of expenses for U.S. troops, increased imports from the U.S., and extending economic aid to South Korea. Japan is now being drawn into a higher degree of cooperation vis-a-vis South Korea’s defense... [For Japan to become a military power], the Japanese government, the Liberal Democratic Party and financial circles began actively working woward revision of the constitution to incorporate these militaristic changes. From the beginning of the 70, the government and the defense authorities have put much of their energy into forming a “national consensus” on the need to maintain the Self-Defense Forces. Then from 1978 they have tried hard to form a consensus concerning the actual use of the Self-Defense Forces... That process climaxed in 2015, when the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the LDP pushed through a critical vote in the Japanese Diet to lift its 70-year ban on foreign deployments and, as The New York Times reported, give “Japan’s military limited powers to fight in foreign conflicts.” And now, 8 years later, the Biden administration has made the SDF and the “trilateral” U.S.-South Korean-Japanese alliance into the centerpiece of its anti-China Asia strategy. Read Fujii Haruo’s full article in PDF format here. Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.

By Alice S. Kim | January 15, 2023 | Originally published in Socialist Project On September 24, 2022, more than 30,000 people occupied the main roads of downtown Seoul, South Korea, for the nation’s largest climate justice march. The sheer turnout of people from all walks of life and the participation by a wide range of advocacy groups were a testament to the impact of climate change on every aspect of life: human rights, women’s rights, religion, food insecurity, and labor rights. For many of these advocacy movements in Seoul, recent crises like COVID-19 have brought home the urgent need to address the climate crisis. Opening with a rally in Namdaemun Plaza at 3 p.m., the two-hour march occupied four out of six lanes of Seoul’s main Sejong-daero Boulevard. Standing on moving flatbed trucks, people spoke about the intersectionality of the climate crisis and other issues, including labor insecurity, housing instability, and social discrimination. Ten megaphone-mounted flatbed trucks placed at regular intervals logistically ushered large crowds of protesters – brightly clad youth in headdresses in sunflower or coral reef shapes, families wrapped in “Carbon Neutral” cloak-like banners, Buddhist monks with globe-painted temple lanterns, Catholic nuns wearing “Save the Earth” tunics and holding “Anti-nuclear NOW” placards, regional community groups demanding a stop to coal plants and new airports, and countless union members in matching vests, flying union banners. Game Changer for the Environment The groups of protesters regularly chanted in unison: “lives over profit” and “we can’t live like this anymore!” Drumming, music, and dance filled the streets. During a five-minute “die-in,” protesters fell to the ground, front to rear, like cascading dominoes. The march was the result of three months of planning, promotion, and fundraising by Action for Climate Justice, a coalition of more than 400 civic, regional/community, and trade union movements united under the guiding concept of climate justice. Like previous marches, environmental NGOs played leading roles in the organizing, such as Green Korea United and the Korean Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM), alongside youth movements. But 2022 also saw a large influx of long-established and new movement groups not exclusive to environmental activism but for whom the climate crisis has become central to their agenda – human rights groups, women’s groups, social movements, political parties, religious networks, food cooperatives, irregular contract workers, and trade union movements. From the Human Rights Movement Sarangbang, combating the violence of political and economic discrimination and exploitation since 1993, to the recent Human Rights Movement Network Baram working to secure the rights and dignity of discriminated groups, such as women, the disabled, LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and irregular contract workers – the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the climate crisis to the fore of their activities. Climate policy has likewise become a pressing issue for the Anti-Poverty Alliance, which emerged during mass layoffs and bankruptcies following the 1997 financial crisis and neoliberalization of the Korean economy. This “IMF era” alliance has grown to include 49 member organizations engaged in various struggles for livelihood, from the fight for a universal basic income to alternatives to substandard housing (including polytunnel villages where people live in greenhouse-like shelters made out of vinyl) and housing instability in the face of Korea’s speculative housing markets and climate change. Religious orders are also a sizable part of the movement now. Building on their legacy of sheltering democracy movement activists in the 1970s and 1980s, Korea’s faith-based groups have been organizing a climate movement that is cross-denominational and transnational such as the pan-Asian Inter-Religious Climate and Ecology Network. Expanding Networks The large outpouring of protesters in September 2022 even surpassed organizers’ expectations. Over the past two years, pandemic restrictions on gatherings and suspension of protest permits in South Korea have brought activism online and into classrooms and have included the unconventional occupation of public spaces. Some of the most visible climate actions in Seoul in 2021 appeared not on the city streets but rather above and underneath them, on large billboards mounted on skyscrapers and LCD screens installed inside subway lines. The yearlong campaign from 2020 to 2021, Climate Citizens 3.5, which was jointly conducted with artists, environmental groups, and researchers, used a chunk of its total budget, the largest allotted by Arts Council Korea, to rent 30 large-scale outdoor electronic billboards, 219 digital screens inside 21 subway stations, and all of the advertising space in 48 subway cars. Spread across the city, the billboards and displays were tailored to convey climate change-focused messages targeted to each location – climate policy changes for the traffic-heavy city center at Gwanghwamun and consumption-related taglines for shopping districts in Myeongdong and Gangnam: “Spend Less, Live More!” Such overlapping and expanding networks in the climate justice coalition attest to the burgeoning consciousness of the climate crisis for a population whose Cold War-divided peninsula placed North Korea and South Korea in the shadow of a nuclear winter long before the threat of exterminism via global warming became an issue. As policy researcher and activist of the Climate Justice Alliance Han Jegak states, “while climate change denial is not a widespread problem in South Korea as it is in other countries, there is still a generalized denial about the urgency to act, the attitude is that we can follow what other countries are doing.” He adds, “people express fear and depression over climate change, but such feelings do not lead to proactive actions. We need to forge alternatives collectively in place of mostly individualized actions like hyper-recycling. The movement needs to harness the anger related to the climate crisis and mobilize that.” One such concrete outcome from the march was the exponential rise in signatories successfully introducing a civil memorandum to stop the opening of new coal plants to the National Assembly floor. For many in the movement, the unprecedented rainstorms and flooding that took the lives of several people including a family in a semi-basement flat in Seoul in August 2022 has inflamed the call to action. For the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), this incident came as a personal loss, as one of the deceased was a union activist. The largest independent democratic trade union association in Korea with 1.1 million members, KCTU formalized its participation in climate action networks when it voted in a special committee on climate justice within its organization in February 2021. Environmental groups have long reached out to KCTU for more active participation in the movement as “public and energy sector unions and irregular contract workers are situated at the forefront of struggles over policy changes as well as facing the brunt of its effects,” as emphasized by KFEM activist and member of the climate coalition Kwon Woohyun. In many ways, the union’s participation in the climate movement was a significant development, explains Kim Seok, KCTU policy director, because “it was a decision to make the climate issue a key component of KCTU policies, including the collective bargaining agreement process, which is the most fundamental activity for unions.” In 2022, KCTU members circulated the most posters and mobilized 5,000 union activists to join the climate march. For a country whose export economy is centered on energy-intensive industries, environmental activism by labor unions faces complicated challenges. KCTU must contend with internal pressure from rank-and-file workers seeking compensation for job losses from the transition to clean energy as well as the broader national context in which the state has relinquished the development of clean energy industries to profit-seeking private sector companies. In the face of these challenges, KCTU’s proactive participation in the Action for Climate Justice coalition and its actions to work jointly with wide-ranging environmental and social movements hold the promise of broadening and solidifying the foundations of the climate movement going forward, while signaling the beginning of a potentially powerful new form of climate activism taking shape in South Korea. Alice S. Kim received her PhD from the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley and is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Seoul. Her publications include “The ‘Vietnamese’ Skirt and Other Wartime Myths” in The Vietnam War in the Pacific World (UNC Press, 2022) and “Left Out: People’s Solidarity for Social Progress and the Evolution of Minjung After Authoritarianism,” in South Korean Social Movements (Routledge, 2011).

Beset by popular protests, the right-wing administration resorts to outdated, draconian national security laws By K J NOH | January 14, 2023 | Originally published in Asia Times The Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s coordination and co-militarization with Japan in the service of the US efforts to contain China, along with its neoliberal policies and massive labor suppression, and its general incompetence has resulted in fierce opposition by large numbers of South Korean citizens. To date, they have taken to the streets in mass “candlelight” demonstrations 23 times, on occasion approaching a turnout of half a million according to organizers. The protests show no signs of abating. These huge demonstrations have demanded President Yoon’s immediate resignation along with prosecution of his wife for alleged corruption. The demonstrations also express strong opposition to US militarization of the country and military exercises, demand the return of South Korean sovereignty, and charge Yoon with selling out and betraying the nation. The Yoon administration has a 24% approval rating, according to recent figures. To counter this, the Yoon administration has been stifling and shutting down opposition to its policies with allegations that such opposition is derived from pro-Pyongyang sentiment or even alliance with North Korea. It is currently engaged in a massive political witch-hunt of its opponents. It has arrested key top officials of the previous progressive administration, has raided the opposition party headquarters, raided opposition party candidate Lee Jae-myung’s house many times and has just subpoenaed him, acts unprecedented in South Korean constitutional history. It is widely feared that Yoon will try to imprison the former progressive president, Moon Jae-in, possibly for acts of commission or omission in his policy toward North Korea. Even the South Korean military is alarmed: A former four-star general, deputy commander of the ROK/US Combined Forces Command, denounced Yoon’s administration as a “dictatorial regime” that is “suppressing freedom” – a military first. Republic of prosecution President Yoon, a former chief prosecutor sometimes dubbed a “Korean J Edgar Hoover,” promised during his election campaign that he would create a “republic of prosecutors.” Needless to say, the US backed Yoon’s candidacy: He received the blessing and endorsement of top US leaders and the US power establishment. He was commissioned to publish an article – a public confession of the doctrine of the faith – for the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, where he detailed his hawkish concordance with US policy against China and his desire to be a global “pivot state” – a clear reference to the “pivot to Asia.” The Barack Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” had started the momentum for military encirclement and escalation against China; Obama’s successor Donald Trump escalated this hybrid war into the economic domain, initiating a trade and tech war against China. The current US president, Joe Biden, rebranded the pivot to Asia as the US Indo-Pacific Strategy and Trump’s neo-mercantilist trade war as the IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), and has since escalated even further with full spectrum sanctions designed to destroy key Chinese industries. Yoon’s roadmap article for Foreign Affairs was widely welcomed and lauded, celebrated as an early Christmas present in Washington, in effect the fulfillment of Biden’s wish list for its Korean-backed anti-China strategy. After squeaking into office on the tightest of margins in South Korea’s electoral history, President Yoon has been making good on his promises to the US, shaping, sculpting, and subordinating South Korean military, economic, and foreign interests to align with US policy and goals. To backstop what are clearly unpopular, dissent-and-hardship-generating, extreme far-right policies – and in fulfillment of his promise of creating a “republic of prosecutors” – Yoon has appointed prosecutors who were subordinate to him to the majority of top administration positions, and prosecuting his opponents without mercy. Anyone who shows the slightest sign of opposition to his foreign or domestic policy has been put in the crosshairs of his army of prosecutors. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Yoon has sent his prosecutorial clown car barreling straight down on the road mapped out in his FP article, with “values” attached as a hood ornament, and “democracy” attached to the bonnet as road kill. The vehicle deployed has been “rule of law,” in particular, South Korea’s national-security laws. For example, Yoon is claiming that the recent labor strikes organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) “were upon orders from North Korea,” a hyperbolic claim completely denied by the organizers. The devil in democracy South Korea’s national-security laws (see here) are a relic of the past red-baiting military dictatorships, and are some of the most draconian in the world. They have been applied to destroy lives and livelihoods, despite their commonsense-and-human rights-contravening extremism and punitiveness. Revised and massaged several times over the years, they are still imprinted with the core genes of their intent: a political version of the Malleus Maleficarum (a medieval guide for witch hunting) to destroy “subversive” thought and movements in the South and to squelch political opposition. Like the Malleus, during South Korea’s military dictatorships, they were broadly written, malleable in interpretation and application, and relied heavily on confession extracted under torture. They are outdated and incompatible with any notion of a modern state, let alone South Korea’s much self-promoted “freedom and democracy” and “respect for individual rights.” For example, under the South Korean National Security Law, for the act of “praising or sympathizing with” North Korea – in the legislation, the North is always referred to as “anti-state group(s)” – South Korean individuals can be imprisoned for up to seven years: Article 7: Praising Or Sympathizing Up to 7 years in prison for those who praise, encourage, disseminate or cooperate with anti-state groups, members or those under their control, being aware that such acts will endanger the national security and the democratic freedom. If investigation of the KCTU labor strikes shows that they were “upon orders from North Korea,” as is claimed by the government, depending on the judicial outcome and the specific crimes they are charged with, the accused could be sentenced to death for “commission of anti-state acts under the influence” of Pyongyang: Article 4: Commission Of Anti-State Acts Members of an anti-State group or those who are under the influence of an anti-State organization who commit an anti-State act shall be punished as follows: Those who commit an act as defined by the Criminal Code articles [92], [97], [99], [250.2], [338] or [340.2] shall be punished as set forth in the Code. Those who commit an act as defined by the Criminal Code article [98] or who access, gather, leak, transmit or compromise a national security secret shall be punished as follows: Death, life or minimum 10 years for violating Criminal Codes [115], [119.1], [147], [148]. [164] or [169]. [177.1] or [180]. [192] or [195]. [207], [208], [210], [250.1], [252], [253], [333] or [337], [339] or [340.1, 2] Death, life or minimum 5 years in prison for destruction of public or government buildings or other structures essential for transportation, communication; abduction or seduction of officials; or theft or removal of ships, airplanes, automobiles, weapons or other materials related to the fore-mentioned functions. Minimum 2 years in prison for promoting or propagating acts defined in [1] or [5] or for creating or spreading false rumors aimed at causing social turmoil. Meeting with North Korean officials, as alleged against the organizers, could result in a 10-year sentence. Article 8: Meeting, Corresponding And Etc. Up to 10 years in prison for those who confer, correspond, or communicate using other means with anti-state groups, members or those under their control, being aware that their acts will endanger the national security and the democratic freedom. If any of the accused are successfully prosecuted, then those in their vicinity could be charged with “failure to inform” – that is, failure to “rat out” their friends, neighbors, colleagues, or even family: Article 10: Failure To Inform Maximum five years in prison or a fine of 2,000,000 won for those who fail to inform the police or security officials of persons who have committed acts defined in [3], [4], [5.1, 3 and 4]. This punishment may be reduced or waved in the case of involving family members. Filmmakers could be charged with “possessing (even temporarily) or disseminating arts” (from North Korea): Punishments as defined in [1], [3], or [4] for those who create, import, duplicate, possess, transport, disseminate, sell, or acquire documents, arts or other publications for the purpose of committing acts as defined in [1], [3], or [4] respectively. Outside of this article, there has been little discernible coverage or outrage in the Western media about these extraordinary developments. By contrast, former president Moon Jae-in’s slightest peccadilloes – for example, the prevention of anti-North propaganda balloon volleys – were the subject of US congressional hearings, allegations of human-rights violations, and charges of creeping dictatorship. This new witch-hunt, a hallucinatory reversion to the 1960s, looks to have been passed over without comment or criticism in the corporate media. The fact that Seoul even holds such national-security laws on the books gives the lie to the oft-repeated claim that South Korea is some sort of model democracy, part of an “alliance of democracies” partnering with “like-minded values” against “authoritarianism,” as the US and Korean Indo-Pacific strategies like to proclaim. K J Noh is a journalist, political analyst, writer, and teacher specializing in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region.

By Ju-Hyun Park | November 28, 2022 | Originally published in The Real News Network A Flurry Of North Korean Missile Tests Has Captured International Attention. But a longer view of US military threats and diplomatic obstinacy is missing from the picture. An increasingly tense standoff has been simmering on the Korean Peninsula for months, and is now escalating to a potentially “uncontrollable phase,” North Korean officials warn. Since August, the US and South Korea have conducted five major joint military exercises and numerous smaller ones—the most recent of which, Vigilant Storm, just concluded on Nov. 5 and involved over 240 military aircraft in the largest ever aerial drills the countries have conducted together. In the same time frame, North Korea has conducted several rounds of weapons tests involving dozens of ballistic missiles. The largest of these occurred on Nov. 2 in response to the impending Vigilant Storm exercises and reportedly involved 23 missiles, two of which landed off the east coast of South Korea, and one of which landed in waters south of the Northern Limit line, a maritime buffer zone in the Yellow Sea. This is the first time North Korean missiles have landed in waters delineated as South Korean. Other military exchanges have also occurred on a near-daily basis over the past two months. Barrages of US and South Korean missiles have been launched, usually without notice from Western media; hundreds of North Korean artillery rounds have been fired in military demonstrations; and both South and North Korean shows of force have occurred along the Demilitarized Zone and the Northern Limit Line. While similar saber-rattling has certainly occurred in Korea in the past, the frequency and intensity of these military exercises in recent weeks are part of a dangerous game of escalation that has no off-ramp. The US has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, meaning the two states lack an official channel through which they could cooperate to de-escalate the situation. This is particularly worrying as recent military exchanges at the Northern Limit Line threaten to upend the 2018 inter-Korean military agreement, which has, until recently, kept the peace in disputed maritime areas. The Biden administration seems determined to outmuscle North Korea, but the assumption that North Korea can, will, or should be intimidated through military force is as risky as it is outrageous. North Korea is taking unprecedented and bold steps to not only deter, but even to limit US military actions. This is indicative of a new DPRK strategy for dealing with Washington—one that Pyongyang itself has proclaimed and is currently being borne out in the escalating military struggle in Korea. Even if the two sides manage to avoid a clash now, they cannot avoid it forever, unless the US radically changes its approach to Korea. The crisis that has been unfolding since August began with the decision of the US and South Korea to proceed with the Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises—a massive combined drill conducted throughout South Korea, including sites within just a few miles of the DMZ. Even in the year prior to Ulchi Freedom Shield, however, the situation in Korea had already deteriorated significantly. Weapons tests on the Korean peninsula reached a record high earlier this spring due to an arms race between the two Korean states that began in 2021. Yet from June to August 2022, no major North Korean military activities occurred. Ulchi Freedom Shield broke this pause, and also triggered a crucial shift in North Korean nuclear policy. On Sept. 9, the Supreme People’s Assembly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea’s official name) passed a new law codifying the country’s status as a nuclear state. This new legislation includes provisions that (1) prevent North Korea from engaging in negotiations regarding its nuclear program for the foreseeable future, (2) bar the sharing of nuclear technology, and (3) establish the legal conditions under which a preemptive nuclear strike may be authorized. In a speech the following day, President of the State Affairs Committee Kim Jong Un declared, “We have drawn the line of no retreat regarding our nuclear weapons so that there will be no longer any bargaining over them.” This new law marks a significant departure from previous North Korean policy. Despite testing its first nuclear weapons in 2006, North Korea has never had a first-strike nuclear policy. In fact, its government did not even establish legal conditions for the use of nuclear weapons in any situation until 2013. This dimension of the new legislation can be understood as a response to South Korea’s “Kill Chain” doctrine—a military strategy promoted by recently elected far-right President Yoon Seok-Yeol, which enshrines the use of preemptive strikes against North Korea. While most mainstream media outlets have emphasized the preemptive strike provisions of North Korea’s new law, its real significance arguably lies elsewhere. In declaring itself a nuclear state, North Korea is seeking to internationally legitimize its nuclear weapons program as part of its sovereign right to self-defense. The self-imposed ban on sharing nuclear weapons technology with other countries is a step towards demonstrating responsibility for non-proliferation. This, crucially, means North Korea has now closed the door to negotiations with the US about its nuclear programs, marking the end of an era in relations between the two countries. The US’s Failed Strong-Arm Approach To Negotiations For over 30 years, negotiations concerning North Korea’s evolving nuclear programs have helped diffuse escalating tensions with the US on the peninsula. Until now, North Korea has been willing to bargain in exchange for normalization of relations and security guarantees. In 1994, a deal known as the Agreed Framework was reached based on such an arrangement. Pyongyang would dismantle its nuclear reactors in exchange for safer light-water reactors from the US, and the two countries would eventually establish formal diplomatic ties. The Agreed Framework fell apart because the US never provided the promised technology. When Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump met in Hanoi in 2019, a US reporter asked Kim if he would be willing to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Kim responded, “If I [wasn’t] willing to do that, I wouldn’t be here right now.” At that point, North Korea was chiefly concerned with lifting comprehensive US sanctions that had placed its economy in a stranglehold. It also needed the cooperation of the US in order to realize the goals of the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, a jointly agreed and signed North and South Korean roadmap for reconciliation and eventual reunification premised on ending the Korean War, which has never been formally concluded by a peace treaty. Instead of offering any leeway on these matters, Trump’s proposal to Kim in Hanoi stated that the US would offer nothing until North Korea dismantled all of its nuclear weapons, material, and facilities. In response, Kim and the North Korean delegation walked out of the summit. The failure of the US to seriously engage in previous negotiations with North Korea has directly contributed to the latter’s recent policy changes, including formally establishing itself as a nuclear state. As relations with the US deteriorated towards the end of the Trump administration, North Korea’s Foreign Affairs Minister Ri Son Gwon remarked, “In retrospect, all the practices of the present US administration so far are nothing but accumulating its political achievements. Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns.” Washington’s conceit that it can disarm North Korea without a fight—or without making concessions—has brought us to this juncture. However, it’s important to stress that this does not mean a future diplomatic resolution is impossible. Denuclearization may be off the table, but the possibility remains for dialogue on normalization and security, including a negotiated end to the Korean War. That being said, judging by the situation on the ground, a resumption of dialogue shouldn’t be expected any time soon. North Korea’s change in policy has been accompanied by a noticeable shift in the calculus guiding its military decisions. In the past, North Korea was more cautious about testing US resolve. Lately, North Korea has matched the US military’s shows of force, and in the process taken unprecedented steps. With the opportunity for diplomacy significantly reduced, North Korea is pursuing a policy of expanding deterrence against the US. While it is a common practice in Western media to ascribe a kind of ontological irrationality to North Korea, this kind of approach is as foolish as it is racist, because it ultimately only obscures reality. North Korea is sending a clear message to the US that it will no longer accept its freewheeling military behavior. Failing to take heed of these warnings will only push the region, and possibly the entire planet, closer to a catastrophic clash. A New Era Of Deterrence Both Washington and Seoul condemned North Korea’s new law enshrining its nuclear status and warned of an “overwhelming, decisive response” should North Korea conduct another nuclear test. On Sept. 18, The New York Times quoted South Korean President Yoon saying his government and the Biden administration were prepared to deploy “a package of all possible means and methods” to deter North Korea, including recourse to nuclear weapons. On Sept. 23, the US escalated the situation further by deploying the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to Busan for unannounced joint military exercises with the South Korean navy. This move provoked a flurry of missile tests from North Korea, including an intermediate-range ballistic missile that flew over Japan. On Oct. 7, the Ronald Reagan returned to the East Sea1 for another round of surprise naval drills—this time including military vessels from Korea and Japan. This only exacerbated the situation, prompting even more military activity from the north and corresponding weapons tests from the south. In the second half of October, South Korea conducted its annual Hoguk military exercises with the participation of US troops, practicing an amphibious invasion of North Korea. The massive Vigilant Storm aerial exercises began shortly after the conclusion of the Hoguk exercises on Oct. 28. Like Ulchi Freedom Shield, each of these exercises was preceded by stern warnings from North Korea that were ultimately disregarded by the US and South Korea. Prior to these incidents, North Korea had never before conducted missile tests with a US aircraft carrier present in Korean waters. In the past, similar maneuvers from the US would be principally met with fiery rhetoric; now, North Korea is responding with unprecedented military measures that signal a more aggressive approach to deterrence. Last week’s record barrage of North Korean missile tests drove this point home. A number of these missiles landed in waters off the southern part of the peninsula for the first time, and Pyongyang later clarified that the tests were intended to rehearse strikes against key South Korean and US military targets. These moves are about more than North Korea flexing its muscles—in upping the ante, Pyongyang is raising the risks incurred by Washington and Seoul should they engage in continued provocations. US military leaders and their South Korean counterparts have been careful to appear unfazed, but recently released documents from the Department of Defense offer some insight into how Washington is taking note of North Korea’s increasingly bold displays. The 2022 Missile Defense Review, released at the end of October, identifies North Korea as an “increasing risk to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces in the theater,” while the complementary Nuclear Posture Review acknowledged North Korean military activity as a “deterrence dilemma” and “a persistent threat and growing danger.” The latter document also included a warning that “any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” As these and other official documents demonstrate, the US nominally views its military activity through the same framework of deterrence as North Korea does, yet there is an unevenness here that must be contended with. For Washington, deterrence means preventing North Korea from threatening the archipelago of overseas US military bases that stretches across East Asia and the Pacific. South Korea is a strategic pillar of this network of overseas bases—US troops have never withdrawn from Korea since the 1953 armistice, and 28,500 soldiers remain stationed there to this day. With an additional 50,000 US troops in Japan, and aerial and naval bases stretching from Guam to Hawai’i, South Korea is the tip of a trans-Pacific spear pointed at the heart of China, now openly identified as the US’s chief rival. In other words, what is at stake for the US is its military hegemony in the region, which it needs to secure preferential “free market” arrangements in Asia. In contrast, North Korea is fighting for its survival against what has been, historically and presently, an existential threat. During the Korean War, the US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm on North Korea. By 1953, out of the 4 to 5 million Koreans who had been killed during the war, over 2 million people were killed in North Korea. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shadow of nuclear annihilation loomed large over the hostilities, and remained for decades after—long before North Korea was even close to acquiring nuclear weapons. General MacArthur, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower all threatened to use the atomic bomb with varying degrees of premeditation. From 1958-1991, the US stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons in South Korea, aimed at North Korea as well as China and the USSR. To this day, South Korea remains officially under the US nuclear umbrella, meaning the US will deploy nukes for its defense; North Korea has never had a comparable arrangement with another power. This history rarely figures into US accounts of the conflict in Korea, and it does much to explain North Korean actions. For the past 72 years, North Korea has been dedicated to ensuring the survival of its people. With the door to diplomacy seemingly closed by US intransigence, Pyongyang is now opting to place even more emphasis on its capacity to conventionally deter US aggression. What Now? After the most recent North Korean missile launch on Nov. 9, one State Department official claimed, “We continue to seek serious and sustained dialogue with the DPRK, but the DPRK refuses to engage.” Taken in view of the longer history of US-North Korea relations, this is an incredibly self-serving statement. A closer look at the aforementioned 2022 Nuclear Posture Review recently released by the Department of Defense offers some insight into why US claims to openness have failed to bear fruit: “With respect to reducing or eliminating the threat from North Korea, our goal remains the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Any mention of a peaceful resolution to the Korean War or normalization of relations with North Korea is notably absent from this position. The problem for the US is not the absence of a just peace, but North Korea’s capacity for deterrence in a situation of unfinished war. With this in mind, North Korea’s unwillingness to engage in negotiations at this time makes sense in the context of its own interests and historical logic. After all, what Biden is offering is ultimately no different than what Trump did: a demand for surrender, rather than a commitment to detente. The current conflict may not boil over into open warfare, but that risk will only increase so long as the status quo in Korea set in 1953 continues to hold. The US has always had the option to de-escalate in Korea, and that possibility remains open today. The catch is that Washington must actually treat negotiations as negotiations, rather than as a shakedown. That will have to entail making concessions that were previously unimaginable: recognition of North Korea’s nuclear status, an end to US sanctions, full normalization of relations, a peace treaty to end the Korean War, and an eventual full military withdrawal from the peninsula. These are the only solutions that accord with the reality of the situation—North Korea has become a nuclear state to protect itself from constant US threats, and until those threats are fully removed they will remain a barrier to transforming the status quo of division and hostility in Korea. These measures might alarm those who still cling to the idea that the US is defending democracy in Korea. If the democratic will of the Korean people is of such concern, it ought to be noted that the policies of current South Korean President Yoon, including his approach to North Korea, are widely unpopular. Thousands of people mobilized in August to protest the resumption of US-South Korean military exercises. Opposition was so extreme that it actually managed to unite South Korea’s rival trade unions; even more surprisingly, those unions stood in solidarity with the North Korean General Federation of Trade Unions. Support for North Korea is still a crime in South Korea, and it cannot be understated what an incredible risk these union leaders took in making a stand for peace. Since August, the movement calling for Yoon’s resignation has only grown, and is now being magnified even more as his administration’s bungled response to the tragic Itaewon disaster, which claimed 158 lives, continues to inflame passions. There is no standard of ethics or democracy by which the US can continue to defend its position vis-a-vis North Korea. The ongoing Korean War is not only a threat to regional security and the lives of millions of people, it is also a deep scar on the psyche of the Korean nation. Countless families were separated by the war, enduring for generations the pain of national division in the most intimate terms possible. The constant threat of renewed war has deeply shaped the politics of both Korean states, and made the peninsula one of the most militarized places on earth for the better part of a century. Previous South Korean governments have demonstrated a willingness to move forward with North Korea, yet the US has stuck to its narrow interests, hiding behind a narrative of “national security” that conveniently belies the historical fact that it was the US that traveled thousands of miles searching for this fight. Until and unless the Biden administration reframes its goals towards removing itself as an obstacle to Korean peace, anything it says about openness to dialogue should be disregarded.

Fast-tracked to the House floor last week, HR 1464/S. 416 (“The North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011”), a deeply flawed piece of legislation, passed the House. The goal of its backers is to push it quickly through the Senate before the pre-election session is over. Although framed as humanitarian in purpose, this legislation, modeled on a failed series of North Korean human rights bills that stretch back to 2003, proceeds from an outdated portrait of on-the-ground conditions as well as distorted premises. Empirically speaking, the “North Korean refugee orphan” misrepresents the reality of the children whom the bill purports to help. As a placeholder for children who are, by and large, not North Korean, not refugees, and not orphans, the “North Korean refugee orphan” is a dangerous fiction whose elastic license with the truth imperils the welfare of the children this legislation stands to impact. The bill’s alarmist image of “thousands of North Korean children [who] are threatened with starvation or disease” does not correspond to the reality of the children who—although often poor and sometimes in the care of a grandparent—actually have families, are registered, attend schools, are relatively well-nourished, and are Chinese citizens. Strategically loose on the supply-side details, this bill risks instrumentally construing these children as adoptable when, in fact, they are not. Far from ensuring the best interests of the child, as specified by international protocols, including the Hague Adoption Convention to which the United States is signatory, the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act, if passed, will give legitimacy to practices that shift U.S. adoption policy toward child-laundering or trafficking.[i] Initially introduced as part of the North Korean Freedom Act of 2003, this bill makes recourse to outdated language that describes the children in question as “stateless orphans” who are unregistered and lack access to education. In so doing, it fails to take into consideration the fact that, almost a decade later, circumstances on the ground in northeastern China have shifted. In the first place, the overwhelming majority of children this bill stands to impact have families. The bill further fails to distinguish between the few North Korean children (now adults) who have entered China with their families and the more numerous mixed-ethnic children (now 9-15 years of age) born in China to one Chinese parent, typically the father, and one North Korean parent, typically a North Korean migrant mother. This bill nowhere mentions that the children in question are Chinese citizens. Chinese law specifies that (1) “any person born in China…one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality” and (2) “any person born in China whose parents are stateless or of uncertain nationality and have settled in China shall have Chinese nationality.” In recent years, provincial and local authorities have permitted Chinese fathers to register their mixed-ethnic children without reporting on the status of the children’s mothers. In practical terms, this means that these mixed-ethnic Chinese children, born in China to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers, are able to attend school and receive social services. Moreover, when surveyed, these children describe themselves—rightly so—as Chinese. The bill violates the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Inter-Country Adoption. According to the Hague Convention, inter-country adoption shall take place only if competent authorities of the State of origin have established that the child is adoptable and have exhausted efforts to place the child within the State of origin. It is the duty of sending and receiving States (China and the U.S., respectively) to ensure that the child in question has been deemed eligible for adoption by the country of his or her birth (China and, to a lesser degree, North Korea). By directing the State Department to find ways to move children from country to country without proper documentation and in circumvention of a sending country’s adoption protocols, this bill promotes rogue adoption operations and risks child-trafficking. Diplomatically volatile and potentially offensive to the sovereignty of China and North Korea, this bill negatively affects our foreign policy on multiple levels within the region. The bill aggravates our foreign relations with North Korea, a country with which the U.S. is still technically at war and does not officially recognize, by regarding it as a foreign sending country. The bill requires our Secretary of State to work with China as a foreign sending country despite China’s steps in recent years to curb foreign adoption. The bill instrumentalizes South Korean nationality laws, which recognize a North Korean defector mother upon her arrival in the south as a South Korean citizen who possesses the right to relinquish her child, while insufficiently accounting for the Chinese nationality of the mixed-ethnic child in question. In effect, instead of “saving” orphans, the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011 will create “orphans” by legitimizing the movement of children across borders with little to no documentation—in essence, child-trafficking. Should this bill pass, it will contravene international standards for the protection of children’s legal and human rights to their birth families and nationalities. It will signal that for the U.S., the “best interests of the child” is a standard only in name, not in action. *Prepared by KPI Fellows Christine Hong (email: chong@kpolicy.org) and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (email: jkwondobbs@kpolicy.org). This research was supported by the He-Shan World Fund of the Tides Foundation. [i] Although the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights acknowledges that “there is no universal instrument that addresses all trafficking in persons,” UNICEF includes in its definition of child-trafficking “movement that renders the child vulnerable.” See “Preamble to Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.” See also UNICEF, “Note on the Definition of ‘Child Trafficking.'”

By Tim Shorrock | August 29, 2022 | Originally published in Responsible Statecraft In America these days, almost any information about North Korea, be it rumor, fake news, or just plain silly, becomes fodder for the mainstream media. From TMZ to The Guardian, reporters know there is an insatiable appetite for anything that puts Kim and his regime in a bad or crazy light. But when it comes to South Korea, which hosts 28,500 American ground troops and the Pentagon’s largest military base outside of North America, U.S. media coverage is, shall we say, highly selective. That was made resoundingly clear on August 14, when Seoul was the scene for the largest public demonstration in decades against the U.S. military presence in South Korea. Amazingly, not a word about the protest appeared in the U.S. media. That Saturday, thousands of people chanting “this land is not a U.S. war base” demonstrated against Ulchi Freedom Shield, the first large-scale military exercises between U.S. and South Korean forces since 2017. The protests were organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), South Korea’s second-largest labor federation. They were joined by a range of progressive allies, including People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), an influential citizen’s group founded in 1994. “At a time when military tensions on the Korean Peninsula are escalating and there is no clue for inter-Korean dialogue, we are concerned that an aggressive large-scale military exercise will exacerbate the situation,” PSPD declared. “We once again urge the US and ROK governments to suspend the ROK-US joint military exercise and make efforts to create conditions for dialogue.” At the demonstration, protesters took direct aim at the heart of U.S. policy in Korea, with signs that read “No war rehearsal, No U.S.” and “No Korea-U.S.-Japan military cooperation.” Outside of the Korean press, the only outlets to cover this massive showing against militarism were Iran’s Press TV and China’s CGTN, which provided extensive video of the mobilization. The single print story on the march appeared in Xinhua, China’s daily wire service. Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post, which often set the pace for U.S. press coverage of Asia, deemed the demonstration newsworthy. Hypocrisy? Yes. As I put it in a sardonic tweet, “Every rumor, fake news, intelligence leak or eyebrow twitch about Kim Jong Un and North Korea gets star treatment in the US media.” Yet, when “thousands of SOUTH KOREANS” march in Seoul against US-ROK war games, “NOT ONE PEEP.” The contrast seemed to hit a nerve: by the weekend, nearly 6,000 Twitter users had “liked” my post and over 2,000 had retweeted it. The contradictions were evident on Twitter itself. As it often does with countries we’re not supposed to like, it slapped a label on one of my posts about the demonstration, urging users to “stay informed” because “this Tweet links to a Iran state-affiliated media website.” With that warning, Twitter was effectively delegitimizing my own coverage of the demonstration. To be fair, political rallies on the left and right are a common occurrence in South Korea; obviously, editors and reporters must make choices about what to cover. But in a country where a majority of its citizens support the presence of U.S. forces and a U.S. general has operational control over their army in times of war, a rally of several thousand citizens openly calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal is certainly newsworthy. At the same time, the drills have been a hot topic for years. In 2018, with much of Washington opposed, they were downgraded to computerized simulations as a way to build trust during the denuclearization talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un. Those talks collapsed in 2019, primarily over Trump’s refusal to lift U.S. sanctions in return for a partial shut down of the North’s nuclear infrastructure. This year, with North Korea regularly testing its long-range missiles, the new presidents in Washington and Seoul, Joe Biden and Yoon Suk Yeol, decided to resume the real-life exercises. The air, land, and sea drills, which in the past have mobilized around 50,000 South Korean and 17,500 U.S. soldiers, began on August 22 and wind up on September 1. Sadly, the discrepancies in coverage reflect old patterns going back to the early days of the Cold War. Editorial staffs of major U.S. newspapers and cable news shows (and now, Twitter’s upstart crew) are steeped in Cold War mythologies about the Korean War and largely reflect the viewpoint of Washington’s national security community. Currently, both parties see in the North a determined and dangerous long-term foe, and in the South a reluctant ally torn between loyalty to the United States and its expansive economic ties with China, America’s new nemesis. In this world, there is little room for coverage of South Korean trade unionists, leftists, and progressives who stand against the American consensus. That mindset was recently on display at the Post when it praised South Koreans for electing Yoon, an inexperienced conservative hawk who said during his campaign that he might consider a pre-emptive strike on North Korea “to protect peace” on the peninsula. “South Korea makes a welcome turn toward the U.S. — just when it is really needed,” the headline crowed. The Post editorial also took a nasty swipe at former President Moon Jae-in, parroting right-wing talking points that he had “consciously” played down North Korea’s human rights record and “balked” at adding new batteries to the American THAAD missile deployment that has drawn Beijing’s ire. For America’s papers of record, the failure to cover South Korea’s progressive left also reflects a failure of nerve. The KCTU and People’s Solidarity that organized this month’s antiwar demonstration have deep roots in the democratic movement of the late 1980s, when years of struggle culminated in the massive demonstrations of 1987 that forced the pro-U.S. generals who had ruled the South for 26 years to step aside. During that tumultuous era, both the Times and the Post offered extensive (and often outstanding) coverage of dissidents and government repression. But in recent years, they have been far more interested in covering North Korean defectors and warning the public (repeatedly) about a possible underground nuclear test than exploring the complex internal politics of South Korea. Ironically, these papers are better prepared now to cover Korea than any time in the past 40 years. Since 2020, they have built large bureaus in South Korea and relocated their Asian news hubs from Hong Kong to Seoul, giving them an opportunity for first-class coverage of perhaps the most dynamic country in Asia. “Looking at a five, 10, 20 year horizon, [Seoul] just feels like it’s right in the middle of the action,” Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times’s international president, recently told the Korea Joongang Daily. But in this coverage, the opinions and views of all Koreans need to be heard. That is particularly true when dealing with an issue as critical as the U.S.-Korean alliance, which President Biden has called “a linchpin of peace, stability, and prosperity” but many Koreans now view as a barrier to their country’s future. Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.