PolyMatter: How Singapore Stays Neutral

UnHerd: The defector taking on Kim Jong-un

Park is a remarkable and resolute man. Once he was a rising young bureaucrat from a well-connected family, a fervent believer in the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea for more than seven decades. Today he is public enemy number one in the North, having fled to the South and dedicated his life to defeating the brutal regime that brainwashed him along with 25 million other citizens. He has survived assassination attempts, death threats and even missile responses to these nocturnal launches of clandestine materials. In recent days, he has been denounced again as ‘human scum’.

Yet he is also detested by South Korean authorities who see this diminutive dissident as a danger to their stability. They have launched legal actions and legislative efforts to thwart his activism. And now he is at the centre of rising tensions in the region. [...]

Yet the North’s fury also indicates the success of the activities pursued by Park and other dissident groups as they send in contraband to corrode the hermit kingdom from within by undermining belief in the bloodstained Kim dictatorship. I have heard from several dissidents about how they would watch foreign soap operas and films secretly to see the clothes, the cars and the food that strongly challenged their own government’s claims about life being so much better under their thumb. I also met a woman jailed for eight years for watching foreign films, and a party cadre — a member of the state censorship team — who defected after being caught sharing seized books and films with his friends. [...]

President Moon has promised a crackdown on such efforts and tried to sue Park and his brother, to the anger of the conservative opposition party. Yet many of his countrymen look down at dissidents and show little interest in the suffering of North Koreans trapped in the bubble of the world’s most barbaric state. The balloon launches also infuriate people living near the border when they fall short and spew rubbish over homes in the area — although satellite trackers found some flew almost 500 miles to Vladivostok in Russia.

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PolyMatter: Where is Kim Jong-Un?

The Red Line: The Geopolitics of North Korea

There are few geopolitical flashpoints in the world more dangerous than North Korea, and with instability at the top of the regime we can add another layer of complexity to an already shaky situation; one that few people truly understand.

USA, China, Seoul and Pyongyang all have competing goals and needs to keep their own domestic politics in check, but some of those goals infringe upon others, and with a few minor missteps the Korean peninsula could easily break out in full war again. The difference this time is that there are 60+ nuclear weapons to factor into the equation.

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WorldAffairs: North Korea, Russia and the Nuclear Threat

As we’ve learned from this pandemic, human beings can act quickly in the face of immediate danger. However, we’re not so good at taking action against slow-moving threats. The threat posed by nuclear weapons is now as high as it’s been since the Cold War. This week on WorldAffairs, we talk about North Korea with veteran aid worker Katharina Zellweger, Pulitzer-nominated journalist Jean Lee and North Korean defector Joseph Kim. We also discuss Russia and nuclear proliferation with Dr. Ernest Moniz, who served as Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration.

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PolyMatter: How North Korea Makes Money

The Guardian: Inside the bizarre, bungled raid on North Korea's Madrid embassy

Diplomatic defections are one of North Korea’s most visible problems, and in recent years there have been two high-profile cases. Just a few months before the embassy raid, in late 2018, the acting ambassador to Italy had abandoned his post and gone into hiding. Two years earlier, the deputy ambassador in London, Thae Yong-ho, became the most senior North Korean official to defect to South Korea. [...]

After the attackers fled, in the days and weeks that followed, details about their identities and aims started to trickle out, leaving as many questions as answers. The group seemed to be largely comprised of Korean Americans, South Koreans and North Korean defectors. But who were they? What did they want? Why did they fly across the world to attack an embassy in Europe? And what was the significance of the fact that one alleged member of the group turned out to have impressive connections within Washington? [...]

Far from being the bunkered fortress that one might expect, the Madrid embassy is a low, beige and brown building, surrounded by rough land, with rickety- looking security cameras and the sort of low walls that a bored teenager might be tempted to jump. It is an easy, isolated target, sitting on an island of scrubby, undeveloped land in a remote corner of Madrid’s exclusive Moncloa-Aravaca neighbourhood. That, Lankov told me, might help explain why it was chosen for the raid. Apart from three embassy cars, a thief would have found little of value inside. North Korea is poor, and economic sanctions are hitting hard. The cash-strapped embassy housed just one diplomat, his family and three “administrative staff” (plus one staff member’s wife), who also did the gardening and acted as doormen. In sweltering Madrid, the embassy has a single air-conditioning unit that is wheeled out for visitors. The building’s insurance policy lapsed last year.

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WorldAffairs: Understanding the Leadership of Kim Jong Un

Since becoming the supreme leader of North Korea in 2011, Kim Jong Un has solidified his power base at home, clearing out his father’s top advisors and expanding the nation’s nuclear program. While he’s often characterized by his odd behavior, he has successfully maintained domestic dictatorial rule while also exerting international pressure to establish state legitimacy. Anna Fifield, Beijing bureauchief for The Washington Post and author of “The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Jong Un”, talks with Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, about how a better understanding of North Korea’s leader might lead to improved relations with the closed-off nation.

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The Atlantic: The Day Denuclearization Died

There were many remarkable aspects of the U.S. president’s surprise meeting with the North Korean leader at the border, but perhaps the most notable was the absence of the issue that brought Trump and Kim together in the first place one year ago: Pyongyang’s development of a nuclear-weapons arsenal that directly threatens the United States and its allies, and which Trump’s advisers once vowed to remove by 2021. [...]

As Adam Mount of the Federation of American Scientists pointed out, Trump repeatedly described the personal connection he has established with North Korea’s dictator not as a means to denuclearization, but as an end in itself. “The relationship that we’ve developed has meant so much to so many people,” Trump says in a highlight reel from his trip to the demilitarized zone that contains no reference to Kim’s nuclear program. [...]

Theatrics aside, the third Trump-Kim meeting was the product of deflated ambition. Trump and Kim initially agreed on something general, then disagreed on the specifics, and now were essentially agreeing to disagree. While the first summit, in Singapore, yielded a vague North Korean commitment in writing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” and the second summit, in Vietnam, ended with no agreement when U.S. demands for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief couldn’t be reconciled, the third appears to have featured little substantive discussion altogether. [...]

Yesterday, National Security Adviser John Bolton denied a New York Times report that the Trump administration is now aiming to verifiably freeze North Korea’s production of nuclear-weapons material, and thus prevent Kim’s arsenal from becoming more dangerous than it already is. (Bolton specifically said the National Security Council is not working on such a plan, leaving open the possibility that the effort could be under way elsewhere in the government.)

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The Guardian: Trump in North Korea: history as farce first time round

This is what substitutes for progress in Trump’s reality TV diplomacy. If progress comes of this, then the ridiculous pageantry will be forgotten. But Trump’s fawning over Kim has already squandered leverage and humiliated America. [...]

It would all be comical if it came from a Hollywood studio. But this is real life, with real lives at stake. Trump has embarrassed himself and what the US stands for by defending Kim’s human rights abuses. He even defended Kim over the murder of a US citizen, Otto Warmbier. Last year Trump wished the American people would treat him more like the North Korean people are forced, at gunpoint, to treat Kim.[...]

The most important question is where this leaves us on the nuclear front. There’s still a possible deal on the table. When Kim and South Korean president Moon Jae-in met in Pyongyang in September and when Trump met Kim in Hanoi, Kim offered to close the Yongbyon nuclear facility in exchange for sanctions relief. Details need to be ironed out but the bones of a deal are there. An interim deal, if implemented, would be significant and could lay the groundwork for more progress.

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The Atlantic: Trump Invites Kim Jong Un to Yet Another Summit

All the buildup and made-for-TV drama, however, has distracted from one salient fact: North Korea has not given up its nuclear weapons. In fact, it likely has more nuclear-weapons material now than it did a year ago, when Trump became the first American leader to meet with his North Korean counterpart. What the fevered anticipation does underscore is that progress on North Korean denuclearization rests largely on Trump and Kim’s personal relationship—even though this dependence contributed to the collapse of their second summit, in Vietnam last February.  [...]

As recently as this month, Trump-administration officials such as National Security Adviser John Bolton and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Robert Ashley Jr. have stated that North Korea hasn’t yet decided to give up its nuclear weapons. Last week, Steve Biegun, Trump’s special representative for North Korea, acknowledged that the two sides still haven’t agreed on a common definition of the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” which Kim committed to work toward during the first summit, in Singapore. “We’ll never get to our destination if we don’t know where we’re going,” Biegun said during a conference at the Atlantic Council. “The progress has not been as much as we would have liked.” [...]

So far, however, this problematic history appears to be repeating itself. After the humiliation in Vietnam, the North Koreans shifted into “silence mode” and a “severe [internal policy] review,” one senior South Korean official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations, told me in April. North Korean officials and state media denounced Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for sabotaging the nuclear talks with their hard-line positions, implying that they considered Trump (and perhaps Biegun, who has thus far escaped Pyongyang’s wrath) as their only viable American interlocutors. Biegun reportedly received no answer to a letter he wrote to Choe Son Hui—a savvy North Korean diplomat with extensive experience dealing with Americans—requesting a resumption of working-level talks. Rumors have swirled about Kim purging members of his negotiating team, and it’s not even clear at this point who Biegun’s counterparts are.

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Foreign Policy: Moon Jae-in Is the Grown-Up at the Table

The Hanoi summit fell apart as both North Korea and the United States entered the summit with maximalist demands, with no alternative smaller deals on the table. In the working-level talks leading up to the summit, North Korean delegates demanded that the United States remove strategic assets from Hawaii and Guam—a delusional request, even as an opening gambit. The U.S. negotiators made clear that even the demand that North Korea ultimately made at the Hanoi summit—namely that the United States lift the five United Nations sanctions in exchange for dismantling the nuclear facility in Yongbyon—would be a nonstarter, as those sanctions provide most of the U.S. leverage. Yet on meeting with Trump in Hanoi, Kim made the same demand with no fallback position. It’s not clear why. Perhaps Kim thought he could pull a fast one by Trump, or the Pyongyang brain trust was drinking its own Kool-Aid as to the value of the Yongbyon nuclear facility, an aging complex that would likely have to be scuttled soon at any rate. [...]

The Hanoi summit was not a total failure, since it at least clarified the parameters of what is being offered and the asking price of each party. The summit also showed a deal was within reach, putting to bed the persistent claim in Washington foreign-policy circles that no deal with North Korea can be possible. In the post-summit press conference, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho stated the negotiation came down to “one more step” that the U.S. delegates demanded in addition to the demolition of the Yongbyon facility. In an interview given in Russia, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui claimed that Trump was willing to consider sanctions relief on a “snapback” basis, making the relief reversible if North Korea did not make progress in denuclearization. It appears that, despite the initial maximalist stances, the two countries managed to narrow the gap but could not quite overcome the difference in the initial asking prices. [...]

A plausible deal aimed at North Korea’s denuclearization can look like the following: North Korea would freeze all production of long-range missiles and fissile materials, dismantle Yongbyon, and allow U.S. inspectors on the ground to ensure compliance. Pyongyang would also host a U.S. liaison office, which could look after the safety of the U.S. inspectors. In exchange, the United States would grant exemptions to South Korea-led joint economic projects, declare the formal end of the Korean War, and host a North Korean liaison office in Washington. As U.S. inspectors identify additional nuclear facilities in North Korea and oversee their dismantlement, the United States would gradually normalize the relationship with North Korea and ease sanctions on a snapback basis. The end result, in the best-case scenario, would be to have the denuclearized North Korea be another version of Poland or Vietnam—a former enemy that is now a U.S. security interest.

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The New Yorker: How Trump Made War on Angela Merkel and Europe

European leaders now worry that Trump’s illiberal aims go well beyond his insistent demands on Merkel to pay more for nato and stop shipping so many cars to the U.S. “Many European leaders have told me that they are convinced that President Trump is determined to destroy the E.U.,” a former senior U.S. official told me. Trump has begun publicly calling the E.U. a “foe,” and promoting the resurgence of nationalism, which Macron and Merkel see as a direct threat. Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, in a recent speech at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels, attacked the United Nations, the E.U., the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and derided what he called Europe’s flawed vision of multilateralism as “an end to itself.” [...]

The foreign-policy establishment, in both Washington and Berlin, told Merkel and her advisers that Trump was sometimes unpredictable and volatile, but not an existential threat. He was ignorant, but would be constrained by his staff. He didn’t really mean what he said. One veteran of Republican Administrations recommended “strategic patience,” telling a senior German diplomat to ignore the tweets and focus on policy. Other Europeans received similar advice and came to similar conclusions. Rob Malley, a senior Obama adviser on Europe, who now heads the International Crisis Group, said, of the French, “Their view was that you shouldn’t take irreversible steps as the result of a reversible Presidency.” [...]

Russia figured heavily in the dinner conversation at the Adlon: Trump was threatening to abandon the Ukraine policy and embrace Putin. Obama’s lobbying that night to get Merkel to run for a fourth term was, I’ve been told by German sources, critical in her considerations. “I think the Chancellor listened very carefully to what [Obama] said,” a senior German official told me. As Rhodes recounts in his memoir, “The World as It Is,” when Obama left the country, on November 18th, he thought he saw a tear rolling down Merkel’s face as she said goodbye. Obama turned to Rhodes and said, “Angela, she’s all alone.” Two days later, Merkel announced that, because of “insecure times,” she was running again. However, she cautioned those who hoped that she would be a foil for Trump and the Trump-friendly forces throughout Europe: “No person alone, not even the most experienced, can turn things to good in Germany, Europe, and the world, especially not a Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.” [...]

The irony is that, for all of Trump’s bluster and threats, the Trump Administration’s positions on these issues, aside from the Iran nuclear deal, are consistent with his predecessor’s. Obama also pushed for greater European defense spending, set in motion nato troop increases in Eastern Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and objected to Nord Stream 2. Many German leaders oppose the pipeline project, too, and favor more defense spending. Where Trump is different is in how far he is willing to push his allies to accomplish long-standing American priorities, not to mention his public denunciations, abrupt policy shifts, and willingness to insult his allies. This behavior has thoroughly alienated Germans, who are sharply divided on many issues but united in their dislike of Trump and their resistance to just about anything he champions. The Pew Global Attitudes survey this year found that only ten per cent of Germans had a favorable view of Trump. When Trump “tells the German public on television that you owe me, the German public says, ‘We owe this guy? Don’t pay him a dime,’ ” Wolfgang Ischinger, the former Ambassador, told me. “It makes it harder to agree on anything. It is poisonous for the relationship.”

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The Atlantic: The Beginning of the End of the Korean War

Indeed, by the estimation of the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, North and South Korea have already fully implemented about one third of the more than two dozen reconciliation agreements they reached in a pair of summits between the nations’ leaders in April and September. By The Atlantic’s count, of the 13 commitments made during those summits that specified a time frame, the Koreas have successfully hit five deadlines, are on track to meet four more, and missed another by only a month. Having just received the UN Security Council’s blessing to carry out a joint field study on connecting their railroads, they are now scrambling to organize a ceremony inaugurating the project before the end of the year.[...]

Of course, several of the meatiest measures require U.S. consent and are on hold. North and South Korea, for example, can’t collaborate on economic and tourism projects or actually get inter-Korean roads and railways up and running until international sanctions against North Korea are eased. They’ve also encountered resistance in calling for the leaders of the two Koreas, the United States, and perhaps China to formally declare an end to the Korean War, which came to a halt in an armistice in 1953. (Trump-administration officials worry about prematurely reducing the pressure on North Korea and undermining the United States’ military alliance with South Korea.) [...]

The Koreas have suspended certain military exercises near the military demarcation line (MDL) separating the countries, cleared hundreds of land mines in the area (millions remain), and linked a road as part of an effort to excavate the remains of soldiers who died during the Korean War. They have covered up coastal artillery and warship-mounted guns and established a no-fly zone in the vicinity of the border. They are now exploring ways to jointly secure the iconic border village of Panmunjom and allow unarmed guards, civilians, and foreign tourists to move about on either side of the MDL there for the first time in more than 40 years. [...]

Nowhere is this disconnect clearer than with economic sanctions against North Korea. Whereas Pompeo has referred to international sanctions as “the core proposition” that “will give us the capacity to deliver denuclearization,” Moon recently made the case to European leaders that these sanctions should be eased as a form of encouragement when Kim takes significant steps toward relinquishing his nuclear program. (North Korea, which abruptly canceled a November meeting with Pompeo, has threatened to make no further concessions on its nuclear program and even resume its weapons buildup unless sanctions are lifted.)

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CityLab: The Improbable High-Rises of Pyongyang, North Korea

On September 9, North Korea celebrated the 70th anniversary of its founding in its usual manner: with a vast military parade. But ballistic missiles––a mainstay of the autocratic nation’s famously theatrical displays of might––were conspicuously absent. In their stead, uniformed construction workers marched and torchlight parades spelled slogans like “economic construction.”[...]

Since assuming control over North Korea following his father’s death in 2011, Kim Jong-un has personally inaugurated one new apartment building each year, gaining the nickname “builder-president” in the process. This construction preoccupation is hardly new: Partly as a mechanism of social control, Kim Il-sung built cultural centers in small towns across the country, and Kim Jong-Il went on a monument-building spree during the country’s dark “special period.”[...]

It may be slight stylistic improvement over the nation’s previous obsession with Stalinist and Brutalist styles, which alternated from oppressively gaudy to oppressively spartan, but construction quality in North Korea remains suspect. Like earlier projects such as the infamous 3,000-room, never-opened Ryugyong Hotel, many of the new developments likely sit empty, serving as Potemkin show projects. But visitors have reported that even in occupied buildings, interiors are often shabby, with poor access to basic amenities like hot water. In 2014, a brand-new 23-story tower collapsed, reportedly leading to the execution of Choe Yong-gon, then deputy minister of construction and building materials.

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Politico: Trump’s wet kiss to Putin seals a new world order

The president’s regard for Putin — who on Monday affirmed his preference for Trump in the 2016 election — contrasted sharply with his increasingly tough talk toward Europe, language that chips away at international order, to still unclear affect. A similar dynamic played out last month in Singapore, when Trump left flustered allies, including Canada, behind after departing the G-7 summit to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom he called “tough” and “very smart.” [...]

For Trump, who often expresses his views on trade and economics as a zero-sum game, his friendliness toward a country or region can be measured by the degree to which they are seen as an economic threat to the U.S., experts noted. By that measure, Europe and Canada are far scarier than Russia — despite it being at the center of years of Republican attacks on Democrats over security issues. [...]

“We can no longer completely rely on the White House,” Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, told the Funke newspaper group. “To maintain our partnership with the U.S.A we must readjust it. The first clear consequence can only be that we need to align ourselves even more closely in Europe.” [...]

Trump opened Monday blaming American “foolishness and stupidity” and the investigation into Russian election meddling that he dismisses as a “rigged witch hunt,” for historically strained relations with Russia. Despite earlier listing Russia in his list of adversaries, his Europe trip seemed to give Putin few reasons to be displeased overall.

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Al Jazeera: As Trump engages Putin, his deal with Kim collapses

Yet, there is little evidence to suggest his "fire and fury" diplomacy is working. Trump's self-proclaimed success in engaging North Korea is on the verge of becoming a failure, exposing the paucity of his strongman diplomacy. [...]

In late June, reports emerged detailing Pyongyang's expansion of nuclear facilities and its arsenal in advance of the Singapore summit. Trump was quick to respond to growing doubts about the results of his diplomatic efforts with North Korea, saying talks were "going well".  [...]

The problem is that if Trump were to choose to return to his prior brinkmanship, threatening North Korea with "preemptive war", the US will almost certainly find itself isolated this time. After all, Trump has helped transform the image of the North Korean supreme leader from a mad villain into a young peacemaker. [...]

And if Kim, the leader of small, impoverished North Korea, is able to play Trump and get what he wants out of him, then what can we expect from a strongman like Putin?

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The Guardian: With criticism of May's Brexit, Trump detonates a diplomatic grenade

His outburst to the Sun – a Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News channel supplies many of Trump’s views and staff – could certainly be seen as bad manners, perhaps an act of revenge for the baby blimp set to take to the London sky on Friday. [...]

He is aware that May, like Merkel, is weakened and vulnerable domestically, and his past record suggests that he despises weakness. He has consistently expressed admiration, by contrast, for dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte.

More than a year into his presidency, no one is quite certain whether this is due to an instinctive fascination with autocrats and the great man theory of history – or a deeper, more sinister effort to reorder the world in favour of rightwing demagoguery. [...]

May, meanwhile, standing before the media and live TV cameras, will face calls to emulate Hugh Grant’s prime minister in the 2003 film Love Actually, who informs the American president: “A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.”

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Vox: What does “denuclearization” mean?

President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un struck a historic deal to work toward “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. The trouble is they don’t have a shared vision of what “complete denuclearization” looks like.

And while handshakes were exchanged and agreements were signed after unprecedented talks in Singapore, no country with a nuclear program as advanced as North Korea's has ever denuclearized. 

Social Europe: Spectre Of Munich 1938 Hangs Over Singapore

The similarity between Donald Trump’s gushing endorsements of Kim Jung-un and Vladimir Putin this past weekend is vintage appeasement. Trump’s crass disdain for the suffering millions, who live under rule-of-law violating regimes, in North Korea, Russia, Syria, China, Turkey, Hungary, and his bullying of the people of Canada („I’ll make Canadians pay for the words of their PM”) is not fake news, but harsh reality. It’s identical to how Chamberlain threw the people of Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe, and the democratic resistance in all of those countries under the bus in 1938, thereby emboldening the fascists to double down on their opponents everywhere. Kristallnacht, the first step to the massacre of the Jews, was launched in November 1938 by Hitler, even before the ink had dried on the Munich ‘peace’ document. [...]

Ultimately one has to ask: why is Trump doing this? Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s answer, unfortunately, will not do. Donald Trump and his bullies have not lost their minds but are using them according to their own logic. They are fully at home on a playing field that rejects fair play, where strong-arm tactics and the use of deceptive language dominate. This is why Trump is tougher on Trudeau than on Putin, why he shall never confront China, and will sacrifice the entire Western Alliance if he’s allowed to do so and realign America with the authoritarian tide sweeping across the world. He is non-ideological. He uses the language of the evangelists, strictly for tactical purposes, to get out of the traffic jam on his way to his bank or to a Stormy Daniel. He will not back regime change in the direction of Western liberal values, because that is counter to his interests. He’ll offer a protective umbrella to any fly-by-night authoritarian wannabee, because they are the “tough cookies” he understands, they are the ones he can wheel and deal with in the same way he wheeled and dealed with the sharks in the New York real estate market, intimidating his suppliers, not paying his bills, ripping off anyone he could along the way. Grab’em by the pussy and see ya later alligator.

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