Tag Archives: South Korea

De-Escalation? Koreas Agree To Hold High-Level Talks Next Week, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

Maybe Scott Adams is on to something. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

North Korea is on a roll: just hours after it emerged that in a diplomatic victory for the Kim regime the US and South Korea agreed not to hold military drills during the Olympics, moments ago Yonhap reported that in the latest sign of de-escalation between the neighboring rivals, South and North Korea agreed on Friday to hold high-level talks next week to discuss Pyongyang’s potential participation in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics as well as ways to improve ties.

dsf

North Korea notified Seoul that it has accepted South Korea’s latest offer for talks next Tuesday, according to Seoul’s unification ministry.

“The two sides decided to discuss working-level issues for the talks by exchanging documents,” Baik Tae-hyun, ministry spokesman at the ministry, told a press briefing.

The meeting, on 9 January, will focus on finding a way for North Korean athletes to attend the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea in February, the BBC adds. As we reported previously, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said this week that sending a delegation to the games would be “a good opportunity to show unity of the people”.

The meeting is expected to be held at Panmunjom, on the border. The so-called peace village, in the heavily guarded demilitarised zone (DMZ), is where the two sides have historically held talks.

The move came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed willingness to send a delegation to the Olympics to be held in the South next month and said the country is open to inter-Korean talks over the matter during his New Year address. The South proposed Tuesday for a high-level meeting in response.

And, as discussed earlier today, the agreement came as the South and the United States agreed late Thursday to delay their joint military drills during the Winter Olympics.

To continue reading: De-Escalation? Koreas Agree To Hold High-Level Talks Next Week

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments

Tagged ,

America’s Renegade Warfare, by Nicolas J.S. Davies

Posted on November 17, 2017 | Leave a comment

One of the weird things about modern warfare is that it kills large numbers of civilians, but those deaths are essentially ignored, while most military deaths generate all sorts of attention. From Nicolas J.S. Davies at antiwar.com:

Seventy-seven million people in North and South Korea find themselves directly in the line of fire from the threat of a Second Korean War. The rest of the world is recoiling in horror from the scale of civilian casualties such a war would cause and the unthinkable prospect that either side might actually use nuclear weapons.

Since the first Korean War killed at least 20 percent of North Korea’s population and left the country in ruins, the U.S. has repeatedly failed to follow through on diplomacy to establish a lasting peace in Korea and has instead kept reverting to illegal and terrifying threats of war. Most significantly, the US has waged a relentless propaganda campaign to discount North Korea’s legitimate defense concerns as it confronts the threat of a US war machine that has only grown more dangerous since the last time it destroyed North Korea.

The North has lived under this threat for 65 years and has watched Iraq and Libya destroyed after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs. When North Korea discovered a US plan for a Second Korean War on South Korea’s military computer network in September 2016, its leaders quite rationally concluded that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only way to guarantee their country’s safety.

What does it say about the role the US is playing in the world that the only way North Korea’s leaders believe they can keep their own people safe is to develop weapons that could kill millions of Americans?

The Changing Face of War

The Second World War was the deadliest war ever fought, with at least 75 million people killed, about five times as many as in the First World War. When the slaughter ended in 1945, world leaders signed the United Nations Charter to try to ensure that that scale of mass killing and destruction would never happen again. The U.N. Charter is still in force, and it explicitly prohibits the threat or use of military force by any nation.

To continue reading: America’s Renegade Warfare

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

Tagged , ,

The True Danger of the North Korea Crisis: It Could Cost America Its Allies, by Robert Kelly

Posted on October 16, 2017 | Leave a comment

Would the US wage a war that might kill millions of South Koreans or Japanese without consulting South Korea or Japan? It would be a colossal mistake, but the US government has made a lot of colossal foreign policy mistakes lately. From Robert Perry at strategic-culture.org:

If Washington takes action without consulting its allies, the alliances themselves could fray

Tough North Korea rhetoric from the U.S. administration continues. Major South Korean media increasingly talk as if U.S. air strikes are likely, and theexpert community seems increasingly resigned to them as well. Despite constant criticism of his incendiary language, President Donald Trump continues to suggest that major action against North Korea is imminent—most recently by suggesting that we are now in a period of ‘calm before the storm.’

I have argued in these pages that such strikes would be an enormous risk. We do not know what the North’s redlines for retaliation against such a strike are. We do not know if the strikes would so unnerve the North’s elites that war was next, that they would respond with enormous force, possibly including nuclear weapons. An expert study of this scenario suggests appalling casualty numbers. We also do not know what China’s thresholds are for intervention. China is treaty-bound to help North Korea if it is attacked. It may not, but if a U.S. air strike against North Korea spirals into a major conflict, then the likelihood of Chinese intervention rises.

It is also worth noting that even if the Chinese and North Koreans do not respond to air strikes, North Korea will almost certainly deploy human shields as soon as the bombs start to fall. And the North has so many targets that the United States would like to hit, that any ‘air strike’ would look a lot more like a major air campaign and not a quick ‘surgical strike,’ as in Syria earlier this year. An air campaign against sites with human shields means a high civilian death toll. The North Koreans will not make this easy for us at all.

White House officials, most importantly Secretary of Defense James Mattis, continue to suggest that diplomacy is the preferred outcome. And there are options to continue to buy us time against the North Korean nuclear and missile programs: missile defense, sanctions, continuing to cajole China to push North Korea harder and so on. Nevertheless, the pressure to something dramatic regarding North Korea is rising. If war is inevitable — it is not, but for the sake of the argument—it is better to fight now, before they have more weapons, and before those weapons can more evidently strike the continental United States. Even Kim Young-sam, South Korea’s president at the time of the 1994 nuclear crisis, has retrospectively regretted his decision not to strike then.

To continue reading: The True Danger of the North Korea Crisis: It Could Cost America Its Allies

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, War

Tagged , , , ,

The Russia-China plan for North Korea: stability, connectivity, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on September 17, 2017 | Leave a comment

Barely reported in the Western Press, Russia, South Korea, and North Korea are exploring various ways to connect their countries. From Pepe Escobar at atimes.com:

Moscow has been busy building agreements that would extend Eurasian connectivity eastward. The question is how to convince the DPRK to play along

The United Nations Security Council’s 15-0 vote to impose a new set of sanctions on North Korea somewhat disguises the critical role played by the Russia-China strategic partnership, the “RC” at the core of the BRICS group.

The new sanctions are pretty harsh. They include a 30% reduction on crude and refined oil exports to the DPRK; a ban on exports of natural gas; a ban on all North Korean textile exports (which have brought in US$760 million on average over the past three years); and a worldwide ban on new work permits for DPRK citizens (there are over 90,000 currently working abroad.)

But this is far from what US President Donald Trump’s administration was aiming at, according to the draft Security Council resolution leaked last week. That included an asset freeze and travel ban on Kim Jong-un and other designated DPRK officials, and covered additional “WMD-related items,” Iraqi sanctions-style. It also authorized UN member states to interdict and inspect North Korean vessels in international waters (which amounts to a declaration of war); and, last but not least, a total oil embargo.

“RC” made it clear it would veto the resolution under these terms. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the US’ diminishing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Moscow would only accept language related to “political and diplomatic tools to seek peaceful ways of resolution.” On the oil embargo, President Vladimir Putin said, “cutting off the oil supply to North Korea may harm people in hospitals or other ordinary citizens.”

To continue reading: The Russia-China plan for North Korea: stability, connectivity

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments

Tagged , , ,

The Korean Crisis: A Way Out, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on September 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

This may be an opportune time for the US to leave the Korean Peninsula altogether. From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:

The latest North Korea nuclear test coincides with leaks from the Trump administration that Washington is demanding renegotiation of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and is preparing to withdraw from it – and therein lies a possible, albeit unintentional, resolution of the crisis on the peninsula.

The relationship between South Korea and the United States is unique in the history of empires. In the past, imperial powers have extracted resources from client states, protectorates, and outright colonies, setting up mercantilist arrangements that basically plundered their territories in the “Third World” for the benefit of domestic producers. The British empire is – or, rather, was – the exemplar of this system of exploitation.

Britain’s American cousins have stood this extractive system on its head. Instead of forcing open markets and granting monopoly status to domestic producers, the Americans have reversed the terms of exploitation. In exchange for allowing US troops to occupy their territory, America’s Asian protectorates have been granted tariff-free access to our markets. And despite the “free trade” label attached to these agreements, the playing field is anything but level: in the case of South Korea, for example, non-tariff barriers to trade – such as safety standards – have been allowed to stand, particularly in the case of automobiles and appliances. Similar disparities are encoded in our trade agreements with Japan.

And so the American empire is unique in world history in that, instead of economically exploiting its vassal states, it allows its vassals to protect their own industries behind trade barriers while they are given relatively free access to the US market. The result has been the hollowing out of the US industrial base, with once prosperous cities like Detroit in ruins. This isn’t “free trade” – it’s a trade policy distorted by militarism and imperialism.

Over 30,000 US troops now occupy the southern portion of the Korean peninsula. They have been there since the non-conclusion of the Korean war, which ended in a stalemate and an “armistice’ which continues to this day. We are still technically at war with the North.

To continue reading: The Korean Crisis: A Way Out

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History

Tagged ,

Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy, The Times They Are A-Changin’ in North Korea, by John Feffer

Posted on August 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

North Korea has been a thorn in the US’s side since the 1950s, but everything the US has tried—repeatedly—to unseat the regime has come to naught. The US could always bomb North Korea and otherwise make war, but the retaliation, even if it stopped short of a nuclear attack on the US, would be fearsome. So here’s a thought: negotiate, with South and North Korea at the center of discussions about the fate of their peninsula. From John Feffer at tomdispatch.com:

The United States has beaten its head against the wall of North Korea for more than 70 years, and that wall has changed little indeed as a result. The United States, meanwhile, has suffered one headache after another.

Over the last several weeks, the head banging has intensified. North Korea has tested a couple of possible intercontinental ballistic missiles. In response, Donald Trump has threatened that country with “fire and fury,” one-upping the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang. And North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is debating whether to fire a missile or two into the waters around the American island of Guam as a warning of what his country is capable of doing.

Ignore, for the moment, Trump’s off-the-cuff belligerence. Despite all their promises to overhaul North Korea policy, his top officials have closely followed the same headache-inducing pattern as their predecessors.

Threaten that all options are on the table? Check.

Apply more sanctions, even tighter ones, fiercer international ones? Check.

Try to twist China’s arm to rein in its erstwhile ally? Check.

As Trump flirts with the same default position of “strategic patience” adopted by the Obama administration, two other options beckon: talk or attack.

So far, the prospects for negotiations have been rather dim. True, Trump has directed some backhanded compliments at Kim Jong-un (a “smart cookie”) and broached the possibility of talking person-to-person with the North Korean leader. Backchannel discussions with that country’s U.N. mission in New York have made modest headway over the last several months on issues like the detention of American citizens. But President Trump is, by nature, erratic, and a purposefully understaffed State Department and distinctly under-informed National Security Council are not exactly firing on all diplomatic cylinders.

To continue reading: Trump and the Geopolitics of Crazy, The Times They Are A-Changin’ in North Korea

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History

Tagged ,

Is North Korea Showing the Emperor is Naked? By Pepe Escobar

Posted on August 16, 2017 | 1 comment

North Korea may be in the perfect position to show the limits of US power. From Pepe Escobar at lewrockwell.com:

Amid the thick fog of (rhetorical) war between Washington and Pyongyang, it’s still possible to detect some fascinating writing on the (unbuilt) wall.

A case can be made that President Trump is using North Korea to kick the 24/7 Russia-gate narrative out of the US news cycle. It’s certainly working. After all, in Exceptionalistan weltanschauung, the prospect of war and its possible rewards certainly trumps hazy accusations of Russian hacking and election interference.

Capitol Hill would never even consider an attempt to impeach a president — on top if it surrounded by generals — while American geopolitical primacy is in danger. Besides, Congress has already made it explicit Trump does not even need permission to bomb North Korea.

So, according to this working hypothesis, if Robert Mueller finds anything seriously damaging to the Trump brand, the president might actually consider a bomb North Korea/wag the dog operation.

Meanwhile, anybody paying attention to what Edward Snowden has disclosed in detail knows hackers of all persuasions are fine tuned to all Mueller-related IT systems and cell phone communications. They will know what Team Mueller has managed to find on Trump in real time — and plan their contingencies accordingly.

As for the rhetorical war itself, a US intel source used to thinking outside the Beltway box points to the crucial variable, South Korea; “South Korea will not maintain its alliance with the US the day they believe that the US will attack North Korea to protect itself at the expense of the death of thirty million people in South Korea. South Korea is in secret talks with China for a major security treaty because of the US position that they will bomb North Korea in their own defense irrespective of the destruction of South Korea which the US would regard as most unfortunate.”

To continue reading: Is North Korea Showing the Emperor is Naked?

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

Tagged , ,

Is the American Empire Worth the Price? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on August 11, 2017 | 1 comment

Patrick Buchanan proposes letting South Korea deal with North Korea. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson observed, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

And the prospect of a future where Kim Jong Un can put a nuclear weapon on a U.S. city is going to cause this nation to reassess the risks and rewards of the American Imperium.

First, some history.

“Why should Americans be first to die in any second Korean war?” this writer asked in 1999 in “A Republic, Not an Empire.”

“With twice the population of the North and twenty times its economic power, South Korea … is capable of manning its own defense. American troops on the DMZ should be replaced by South Koreans.”

This was denounced as neo-isolationism. And, in 2002, George W. Bush declared the U.S. “will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

Bluster and bluff. In 2006, Pyongyang called and raised and tested an atom bomb. Now Kim Jong Un is close to an ICBM.

Our options?

As Kim believes the ability to hit America with a nuclear weapon is the only certain way he has of deterring us from killing his regime and him, he will not be talked out of his ICBM. Nor, short of an embargo-blockade by China, will sanctions keep him from his goal, to which he inches closer with each missile test.

As for the “military option,” U.S. strikes on Kim’s missile sites could cause him to unleash his artillery on Seoul, 35 miles south. In the first week of a second Korean war, scores of thousands could be dead.

If North Korea’s artillery opened up, says Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the U.S. would be forced to use tactical atomic weapons to stop the carnage. Kim could then give the suicidal order to launch his nukes.

To continue reading: Is the American Empire Worth the Price?

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military

Tagged ,

Our Options in Korea: Only One Is Lawful and Peaceful, by Paul W. Lovinger

Posted on July 22, 2017 | 1 comment

Negotiation may not be the perfect option in Korea, but it’s better than any of the others. From Paul W. Lovinger at antiwar.com:

Peace talks follow a war. Why not hold those talks first and skip the war?

Donald Trump, who boasts of his art of the deal, said on May 1 he would be honored to meet with North Korea’s leader.

Now he accuses the North of “very, very dangerous behavior,” contemplating “pretty severe things” as the military provides “options.” And the top U.S. general in South Korea, Vincent Brooks, warns he can commence war at any time.

What changed? Moon Jae-in won election as South Korean president in May, upon promising better relations with Pyongyang. On July 4 the North announced its launch of a long-range missile. Is our military more worried about the North attacking America or about peace displacing us from Korea?

Military’s “options” probably don’t include a peaceful solution. But it’s the only sure way to avoid disaster. The 1950–53 Korean war killed millions – without nuclear weapons.

If Trump still believes in his deal-making skills, let him go to Pyongyang, a la Nixon to Beijing.

He’ll be welcomed.

The Tokyo-based paper Chosun Sinbo, known as a Pyongyang mouthpiece, says “avoiding armed conflict and seeking ways to find a clue to settle it via diplomatic negotiations have become a pressing issue that the international community can no longer turn away from.”

Talks with North Korea could achieve compromise, as in past years. Both sides might halt displays of force: Northern missile tests and US-South Korean military exercises. North Korea might possibly suspend its weapons development, as we end sanctions and deliver food.

Don’t expect Northern dictator Kim Jong-un to destroy nukes overnight. He needs them, not to attack, which means suicide, but to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadaffi. Kim distrusts a nation that overthrew governments in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Panama and seeks Syrian regime change.

Besides, what moral authority remains after A-bombing civilians and making thousands of huger bombs? Trump reaffirmed Obama’s plan for a trillion-dollar program to “modernize” our nuclear weapons and their delivery system (violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and – like North Korea – boycotted the UN proceedings for a nuclear-abolition treaty.

To continue reading: Our Options in Korea: Only One Is Lawful and Peaceful

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments

Tagged , ,

An America First Korea Policy, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on June 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

Patrick Buchanan proposes letting South Korea worry about its own defense against its much less wealthy and economically powerful northern neighbor. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:

“The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems and is something that has to be dealt with, and probably dealt with rapidly.”

So President Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden this week.

But how this is to be done “rapidly” is not so easy to see.

North Korea has just returned to us Otto Warmbier, a student sentenced to 15 years hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster. Otto came home comatose, and died within days.

Trump’s conundrum: How to keep such a regime from acquiring an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, which Kim Jong Un is determined to do.

Having seen us attack Iraq and Libya, which had no nukes, Kim believes that only nuclear weapons that can hit America can deter America. He appears willing to risk war to achieve his goal.

Trump’s options as he meets South Korean President Moon Jae-in?

First, the decapitation of the Kim dynasty. But the U.S. has been unable to accomplish regime change for the 64 years following the Korean War. And killing Kim could ignite a war.

Then there is a U.S. pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear sites and missile arsenals. But this would surely mean a war in which Americans on the DMZ would be among the first to die, as thousands of North Korean artillery and mortar tubes fired into the suburbs and city of Seoul, which is as close as Dulles Airport is to the White House.

Asked by Congressman Tim Ryan why we don’t launch a war to end this threat, Defense Secretary James Mattis replied that, while we might “win … at great cost,” such a war would “involve the massive shelling of an ally’s capital … one of the most densely packed cities on earth.”

To continue reading: An America First Korea Policy

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,