PolyMatter: Why Statues are North Korea’s Biggest Export

 

The Pragati Podcast: Nuclear War, Deterrence and Peace.

 Nuclear war feels unthinkable, but how much peace does nuclear deterrence guarantee? Do nuclear programmes truly deter or compel adversaries in the real world? And can we imagine a world where 20+ countries have nuclear weapons?

Vipin Narang joins Pavan Srinath on Episode 124 of The Pragati Podcast to dive into the world of nuclear weapons and strategy. He shares the evolution of our understanding of nuclear strategy from early ideas of mutually assured destruction.

The Pragati Podcast is a weekly talkshow on public policy, economics and international relations hosted by Pavan Srinath.

Vipin Narang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT and a member of MIT’s Security Studies Programme. He published his first book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era in 2014, and is currently working on his second book, Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation, in which he explores how states pursue nuclear weapons. He is on Twitter at @NarangVipin.

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Reuters: As president, Biden would not trash all Trump's foreign policy legacy

Indeed, while Trump has sought to portray both Obama and Biden as “soft” on China, the previous administration pursued a tougher line against Beijing than Trump did initially. [...]

Tom Fletcher, a foreign-policy adviser to three past British prime ministers, said he did not expect big changes on China under a Biden administration, but a less abrasive style. [...]

O’Sullivan and others said Biden would likely seek to revive the Iran agreement and Asia trade deal, but not without revisions to secure the sort of “better deal” Trump often talks about getting.

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PolyMatter: How Singapore Stays Neutral

New Statesman: The hot war in the east

In retrospect the hubristic complacency infecting all three communist capitals seems astounding. Stalin, of course, was operating on a policy of limited liability, turning Mao into the banker of last resort as his price for the new Sino-Soviet pact. In Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (Columbia University Press), a magisterial new study using archives from all the key countries, the American historian Samuel F Wells Jr observes that, “At Stalin’s insistence, Mao agreed to give Kim a blank cheque to cash if he got into trouble.” There were shades of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the July crisis of 1914. And the parallels don’t stop there. Kim lacked the logistical capacity for a war lasting more than a few weeks. “Much like the German Schlieffen Plan…” comments the military historian Allan Millett, “the North Koreans planned for a short war since it was the only war they could win.” [...]

Like many crisis decisions by leaders, the president was acting from the gut but also on his reading of the past. “Korea is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman told an aide – alluding to the firm line he had taken on providing anti-communist aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. “If we are tough now,” he added, “they won’t take any next steps.” But, “There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.” The president also took the international dimension seriously, commenting that the UN was “our idea” in 1945 and “in this first big test we just couldn’t let them down”. [...]

As Truman’s biographer Robert J Donovan observes, “war without congressional approval” was “a costly mistake”, for which the president later paid a heavy price when he lost control of the conflict. At this stage in the fighting, political and public opinion was largely supportive. That was true even of a senior Republican such as Senator Robert A Taft, who accused Truman on 28 June of embarking on “de facto war” with North Korea “without consulting Congress” and warned that “if the president can intervene in Korea without congressional approval” he could “go to war in Malaya or Indonesia”. (Taft might as easily have said Vietnam: in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson followed the same tactic as Truman.) Yet Taft added that he would be willing to vote for a resolution of approval if one were put before Congress. The president, however, considered that he had sufficient constitutional authority as commander in chief, and he was confident that the fighting would be over quickly. [...]

Yet Washington had no idea what that job would entail and lacked even rudimentary information about what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. Although Truman had created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, in its early years the CIA lived up to none of those three words. Not only did it fail to deliver accurate intelligence on many of the major crises of the late 1940s – including the Soviet atomic test – its actions were lethargic and, far from being centralised, it operated as a series of rival fiefdoms spread out in ten different buildings across Washington, DC. In the spring of 1950, after a Soviet spy notified Moscow that the US had broken the codes used by the USSR to communicate with its emissaries in Beijing and Pyongyang, the ciphers were changed and the CIA went blind during the crucial months before the North Korean attack.

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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?

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

WorldAffairs: Susan Rice Reflects: Life in the Situation Room

Susan Rice worked for the US State Department during some of the most challenging periods this country has ever faced, from Black Hawk Down in Somalia to the Iran Nuclear Deal. In her new book, “Tough Love, My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For,” she describes the family struggles, ancestral legacies, and personal experiences that led her to the White House and the United Nations. Susan Rice joins Jane Wales, Vice President at The Aspen Institute, to share her experiences, and offer her perspectives on today’s foreign policy challenges.

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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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VOX: John Bolton left because Trump wouldn’t let him start a war (Sept 10, 2019)

When Bolton joined the administration in April 2018, the worry was that the arch nationalist hawk would convince the war-averse Trump to see the world as he did. Here was a guy who for decades called for bombing North Korea and Iran, exercising unilateral American power around the world, and cutting tethers to international institutions.

Bolton actually had a thought-out worldview that in many ways mirrored Trump’s. The question was if the top aide could channel the president’s instincts into actions that he has long wanted an administration to embrace. [...]

He has certainly threatened conflict before, going so far as to risk nuclear war with North Korea to persuade Kim Jong Un to come the negotiating table (remember “fire and fury?”). And he’s more willing to use military force than Obama, twice bombing Syria and escalating airstrikes on ISIS and other terrorists worldwide. He’s even continued and augmented US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Still, Trump has walked back every chance he’s had to escalate to the highest level tensions with adversaries. That was always going to put Trump’s “America First” in conflict with Bolton’s “America Everywhere.”

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The Atlantic: Trump the Bulldozer

But over the past year and change, there’s been a shift: Trump, having shed himself of the aides most likely to try to divert him or change his mind, has followed through on several of the biggest unfulfilled threats I highlighted back then. The catch is that while Trump is getting his way, many of these policies are not turning out as well as the president hoped—as illustrated by severe market jitters on Monday over the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China. [...]

This is the template for what has happened in several of the cases where Trump had appeared to fold but has since followed through. Aides who felt he was acting either against the national interest or against his own interest have been shipped out: Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelly. They’ve been replaced by advisers who either encourage Trump, like Navarro, or are determined to enable rather than encumber him, such as acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and the television pundit Larry Kudlow, who succeeded Cohn.

In retrospect, the May 2018 announcement that Trump would withdraw from the nuclear-nonproliferation deal with Iran looks like a turning point. Trump had lambasted the deal as a candidate, but once entering office, he repeatedly recertified Iranian compliance with the agreement, bowing to the will of his aides. He seemed more ready to fire aides than to keep but overrule them. But starting with his withdrawal from the deal, Trump has begun following his instincts more fully.[...]

Negotiations with North Korea have gotten nowhere after two summits—though to his credit Trump did walk away from the second meeting, in Vietnam, when he felt no progress was being made. And Trump is now pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Iran on what appears to be, as with NAFTA and USMCA, just a rewrite of the deal that was previously in place, though whether anything will come of the push is unclear.

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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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The New York Times: Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran

President Trump was grousing about John R. Bolton, his national security adviser, at his Florida club not long ago. Guests heard the president complaining about the advice he was getting and wondering if Mr. Bolton was taking him down a path he did not want to go. [...]

The disparity was on stark display during Mr. Trump’s four-day visit to Japan that ended Tuesday after he contradicted Mr. Bolton on high-stakes confrontations with both Iran and North Korea. The president declared that, unlike his national security adviser, he was not seeking regime change in Iran and he asserted that, contrary to what Mr. Bolton had said, recent North Korean missile tests did not violate United Nations resolutions. [...]

The president’s supporters, however, said too much was being made of the differences. Mr. Trump has often surrounded himself with advisers who do not agree and encourages the debate, they said. If the disparate messages keep Iran, North Korea and Venezuela uncertain of how far the United States will go, they added, that can work to Mr. Trump’s benefit. [...]

And in some fundamental ways, the two diverge sharply over their approach to the world. Mr. Trump came to office vowing to pull out of overseas wars and has made diplomacy with North Korea a signature initiative. Mr. Bolton has been an advocate of military action and an opponent of negotiations with North Korea.

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The New Yorker: John Bolton on the Warpath

A former American official who worked closely with Bolton suggested that Yale had inspired Bolton’s lifelong contempt for “élites,” whom he regularly lambastes in his writing and on Fox News: “I think John looked around at Yale and said to himself, ‘This is the soft élite. They’ve always had it easy. Mommy and Daddy took care of them. These guys are weak. They’re always looking down on me.’ He has a chip on his shoulder.” His classmates went to hear Muhammad Ali speak about resisting the draft; they argued that the Black Panthers were being unfairly persecuted and inveighed against Richard Nixon. Bolton spent a summer as an intern for Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, whom he later described as “a kind and humorous man, a real Middle American.” (Agnew, after years of corruption allegations, resigned in 1973 and pleaded no contest to tax evasion.) [...]

Bolton’s immersion in the arcana of weapons of mass destruction encouraged an absolutist view. “The first thing he thinks about in the morning is protecting Americans from nuclear weapons,” Sarah Tinsley, who has worked as an aide to Bolton since the eighties, told me. In 2003, as he prepared testimony for an appearance before Congress, he described Syria’s efforts to produce nuclear and biological weapons as an urgent threat—an assessment that intelligence agencies thought was exaggerated. A bitter internal debate ensued; the accusations endangered the Syrian government’s coöperation in hunting suspected terrorists. “We were getting some of our best, if not our best, intelligence on Al Qaeda from Damascus,” Lawrence Wilkerson told me. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, took Bolton aside and “told him to shut up,” Wilkerson said. Before Bolton testified to Congress, much of his language was diluted. Armitage reached out to a team of intelligence officers who vetted public statements made by State Department officials, and asked them to give special scrutiny to Bolton’s. “Nothing Bolton said could leave the building until I O.K.’d it,” Thomas Fingar, who led the team at the time, told me. [...]

In March, 2005, Bush nominated Bolton to be the Ambassador to the United Nations, a move that was widely seen as an expression of contempt for the institution. Bolton had a history of deriding the U.N., once saying that if the headquarters “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Still, Democrats in the Senate anticipated a routine hearing; they were the minority party and could do little to resist. Tony Blinken, who was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the members began to reconsider as they examined Bolton’s work in the State Department. “We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views,” Blinken told me. “If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn’t support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it.” After several days of testimony, Senator George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, declared, “John Bolton is the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be.” [...]

Colleagues from other countries struggled to accommodate him. “On a personal basis, you can joke with him,” the Western diplomat who knows Bolton told me. Working with him was a different story: “Coöperation was possible, but very much on his conditions.” Bolton had spent decades refining an argument that multilateral institutions and international agreements often did more harm than good—that each one represented a loss of American sovereignty. “Bolton has a Hobbesian view of the universe—life is nasty, brutish, and short,” the former American official who worked with Bolton told me. “There are a lot of nasty people out there who want to do us harm. If our country’s interests align with another’s, it’s a fleeting phenomenon, and the moment our interests diverge they will sell us down the river.” Bolton doesn’t ordinarily concern himself with the internal affairs of other nations, or with trying to democratize them, the former official said: “The U.S. has values domestically, but he doesn’t give a shit about the values of others. If it advances your interests to work with another country, then do it.”

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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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