South Korea and North Korea recently announced plans for a third summit meeting between their two leaders, to take place in Pyongyang in September. From family reunions to fielding a joint sports team in the upcoming Asian Games, the two Koreas are moving forward with steps to further détente on the peninsula.
By contrast, the United States has done very little in the two months since the Singapore summit between President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to advance the relationship.
The United States appears to be waiting for the North to take the next step. But the Trump administration is ignoring the reality that to reach a final deal on the eventual denuclearization of North Korea, the United States must give something substantial in return.… Seguir leyendo »
El encuentro entre Donald Trump y Kim Jong-un pasará a la historia como una de las páginas más siniestras del Imperio Americano. Singapur 2018, Múnich 1938: ¿cómo no comparar estas dos infamias? En Múnich, el Gobierno británico y el francés entregaron los Sudetes checos a Adolf Hitler con la esperanza, debido a su cobardía y a su incomprensión del adversario, de comprar la paz. Winston Churchill declaró entonces: «Entre la guerra y el deshonor, habéis elegido el deshonor, y tendréis la guerra». De la misma manera, Trump, aunque no lo sabe, ha sacrificado en Singapur el honor de EE.UU. y la vida del pueblo norcoreano, esclavizado por uno de los regímenes más demenciales del mundo.… Seguir leyendo »
North Korea has arrived as a nuclear power, and there is no going back. Once the reality-show theatrics of the Singapore summit meeting subside, we are left with the reality that North Korea was just recognized as a de facto nuclear weapons power.
President Trump went to the meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea to try to take the keys to Mr. Kim’s nuclear kingdom. Whatever the terms of the statement released at the end of the meeting, Mr. Kim has not committed to anything concrete. He is not surrendering North Korea’s nuclear weapons and has walked away the big winner.… Seguir leyendo »
If success is to be defined in terms of starting a high-level negotiation process, then the summit meeting of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un was a success. But if success is defined in terms of content, then the summit has failed because it did not deliver any substance that went beyond what has been agreed previously.
President Trump did mention that North Korea will destroy a missile engine test site as a practical step – and they have already destroyed the warhead test site. But this is not necessarily an indication of long-term policy change. Neither leader made a public commitment that North Korea will halt its nuclear weapons programme – a promising indicator would have been Kim Jong-un agreeing to provide an inventory of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.… Seguir leyendo »
On Saturday evening in Seoul, images of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea embracing North Korea’s Kim Jong-un lit up tens of millions of smartphones. The Presidential Blue House announced that Mr. Moon had just met with Mr. Kim on the northern side of the border — their second encounter in a month. At a press briefing Sunday morning, Mr. Moon explained that Pyongyang had made the request, via the inter-Korean hotline, to speak “informally.”
It was a bold recovery for Mr. Moon, who had been perceived as a tragic middleman since President Trump canceled a planned summit with North Korea last week.… Seguir leyendo »
I almost died in North Korea, once, and I don’t mean during my diplomatic trip in 2014 to free two Americans imprisoned there.
It was 1985, and I was the chief of intelligence for United States forces in South Korea. I was in a helicopter, on my way to check out what we suspected was a North Korean tunnel, when I heard a sound like popcorn popping and saw white puffs below us. This was followed by a loud alert in my earphones — “Red dog fox! — indicating someone had crossed the Demilitarized Zone. That someone was us.
After some evasive maneuvering, our pilot returned us to South Korean airspace and then home.… Seguir leyendo »
When drinking in Korea, things turn perilous on the cry of “One shot!” It’s a call made in English that means “Bottoms up!” Everyone in the group has to dispatch their drinks in one fell swoop. No one gets a pass. Rarely does the cry come but once.
En route to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., last June, the newly elected South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, told reporters on the presidential plane that he favored a “one-shot” approach to the North Korean nuclear problem—something dramatic, overarching, and beyond the careful and not very successful diplomacy of the past.… Seguir leyendo »
John Bolton will assume office Monday with his first controversy as President Trump’s national security adviser awaiting him. Six weeks ago, he outlined his advocacy of an attack on North Korea in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.”
“Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea,” he wrote, “we should not wait until the very last minute” to stage what he called a pre-emptive attack.
Mr. Bolton’s legal analysis is flawed and his strategic logic is dangerous. As he did before the 2003 Iraq war, he is obscuring the important distinction between preventive and pre-emptive attacks.… Seguir leyendo »
President Trump has made much of his “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea. One element of that policy — and one that long predates Trump — is a set of tough international sanctions.
Last week, a U.N. Security Council committee added 22 new entities and 27 ships to the North Korean sanctions list. Are these incremental steps having any material effect?
This will be an important question in the run-up to Kim Jong Un’s planned summits with the South Korean and U.S. presidents. While North Korea’s young leader has played a brilliant diplomatic hand, he may have miscalculated the bite that sanctions are about to take.… Seguir leyendo »
There has been a lot of talk lately about Kim Jong-un’s willingness to discuss the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. It’s a cumbersome word and one that has given rise to more than a few misunderstandings.
Many people, including President Trump, seem to hear “denuclearization” and imagine a promise by Mr. Kim to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, recently acquired at great cost. But the term means more than the North’s disarmament. It imposes obligations on the United States, too — even if Americans don’t want to hear that part.
The word “denuclearization” is more or less native to the Korean Peninsula.… Seguir leyendo »
As President Trump prepares for a possible meeting with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, many American are raising warnings that North Korea has walked away from previous arms agreements. But those skeptics should remember that it was the United States, in 1958, that broke the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, when the Eisenhower administration sent the first atomic weapons into South Korea.
By the mid-1960s, the United States had more than 900 nuclear artillery shells, tactical bombs, surface-to-surface rockets and missiles, antiaircraft missiles and nuclear land mines in South Korea. Even nuclear projectiles for Davy Crockett recoilless rifles were for several years based in South Korea.… Seguir leyendo »
Los gobernantes a los que se considera “locos” siempre han sido los más difíciles de evaluar para los observadores políticos. Pero en realidad, rara vez es un problema de psicopatología: por lo general, el rótulo sólo señala una conducta diferente a lo que los analistas convencionales esperaban.
Fue sin duda el caso del líder religioso sirio Rashid al-Din Sinan, en el siglo XII. Durante la Tercera Cruzada, el supuestamente loco “Viejo de la Montaña” (como se lo conocía) logró obstaculizar el avance de los cruzados sobre Jerusalén enviando a sus seguidores a cometer asesinatos selectivos. Tras cumplir las órdenes, los asesinos solían quedarse en el lugar a la espera de ser capturados, bien a la vista de la población local, para que su líder recibiera el debido reconocimiento por el acto.… Seguir leyendo »
The surprise announcement on 8 March that U.S. President Donald Trump would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by May has overshadowed analysis of talks in Pyongyang between North and South Korean officials earlier in the week. But those talks were of deep significance. They positioned South Korea as a conduit to Trump, and set the stage for him to accept Kim Jong-un’s proposal. Moreover, the way the talks in Pyongyang progressed offers clues as to prospects for the forthcoming talks between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the U.S.
When Kim sat down to dinner with the delegation from Seoul, he took the inter-Korean Winter Olympics rapprochement another step forward.… Seguir leyendo »
In the history of nuclear weapons there has been only one country that voluntarily gave up its weapons and the program that produced them, and that is South Africa. That should tell us something about how hard it will be to persuade North Korea to dismantle its large and very sophisticated weapons program.
The South African program was unusual in several ways. It used a method of enriching uranium that had never been tried on an industrial scale, injecting hexafluoride gas at very high velocity into a tube to separate out the fissile bomb-making isotope, uranium 235. What’s more, only white Afrikaners — no mixed-race or black or Asian South Africans — were allowed to work on the program.… Seguir leyendo »
Having successfully tested a high-yield nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach U.S. cities, North Korea appears eager to engage in talks with the United States. Not only that, South Korean officials delivered an invitation to President Trump to meet Kim Jong Un, and North Korea appears to be dangling the prospect of “denuclearization” in front of U.S. officials.
Whether a meeting between Kim and Trump ever takes place remains to be seen. Nonetheless, talks between the United States and North Korea in some form now seem likely. And although the U.S. government has made a variety of statements about the circumstances in which it might talk to North Korea, the possibility of denuclearization makes talks with North Korea more politically palatable for the United States.… Seguir leyendo »
In response to worries that it is planning a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea, the Trump administration has been offering an odd reassurance. Any attack on the regime of Kim Jong Un would not be limited, officials and surrogates are saying, but enormous and overwhelming. That, of course, is not reassuring at all: A massive attack on North Korea would be massively stupid.
The White House calls reports that President Trump is considering a small-scale North Korea military option exaggerated. The administration understands that there is no guarantee Kim won’t respond with his full military might — a nightmare scenario.… Seguir leyendo »
Both during the run-up to the PyeongChang Olympics and during the Winter Games, the tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons have appeared to relax significantly. Reports that Vice President Pence’s bellicose rhetoric derailed diplomacy with the North, however, reveal a harsher reality. After the Olympics are over, the temperature between Washington and Pyongyang will almost certainly spike again. Here are five reasons.
Inter-Korean diplomacy isn’t about nuclear weapons. The cooler temperatures on North Korea come from inter-Korean diplomacy — not diplomacy that includes the United States or other major powers. President Moon Jae-in of South Korea calculated that it was more advisable to have North Korea participate in the Olympics than to let North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spoil things from the periphery, potentially testing missiles or nuclear weapons just 60 miles to the north.… Seguir leyendo »
Malgré les pourparlers actuels entre les deux Corées, la situation de la péninsule reste probablement le plus grand défi que doit relever le monde d’aujourd’hui. En 2017, le régime de Kim Jong-un est parvenu à prouver que son programme d’armement nucléaire et balistique représentait une force de frappe réelle et crédible.
Comme le souligne le secrétaire général de l’OTAN, Jens Stoltenberg, « l’Europe est désormais à la portée des missiles [balistiques intercontinentaux] nord-coréens, et les pays membres de l’OTAN sont déjà en danger ». Le tir du 29 novembre 2017 tend à confirmer ces propos. La participation du Nord aux Jeux olympiques (JO) de Pyeongchang (Corée du Sud) ne change évidemment rien au dilemme sécuritaire sur la péninsule.… Seguir leyendo »
Après un sprint à la conquête de la dissuasion nucléaire, Kim Jong-un avait bien besoin de souffler un peu. Les trois essais nucléaires et les plus de quarante tirs de missiles depuis début 2016 ont eu pour conséquences l’imposition à la Corée du Nord des sanctions internationales les plus sévères de l’ère onusienne ainsi qu’une escalade des tensions en Extrême-Orient. Le prix du pétrole dans le pays a, selon certaines sources, doublé ces trois derniers mois tandis que les rumeurs sur une possible opération militaire américaine se sont multipliées. Il était urgent de desserrer l’étau et de tenter une offensive diplomatique envers les Etats-Unis.… Seguir leyendo »
Para comenzar el año, el presidente de Estados Unidos presumió que tiene un botón nuclear “mucho más grande” que el de ese líder en Corea del Norte.
La próxima semana: Donald Trump y Kim Jong-un compararán la longitud de sus dedos, el número que calzan y el tamaño de su cabeza. Este último es complicado por el hecho de que ambos tienen los peores cortes de cabello en la historia de los líderes políticos. Honestamente, podríamos creer que Kim ha ejecutado a cada peluquero de su país.
Si no fuera porque el planeta corre peligro de estallar, podría ser hasta divertido.… Seguir leyendo »
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