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Fri, September 22, 2017 | 15:53

Opinion > Columnists > Donald Kirk >

Trump's war of words

It wasn’t exactly a declaration of war, but it did come close. What else to make of President Trump’s remark that the U.S. might “totally destroy North Korea”? It was one thing to belittle Kim Jong-un as “rocket man” but quite another to threaten annihilation of a country torn apart by U.S. warplanes in the first Korean War. If nothing else, Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly will be remembered as one of those classic moments at which a head of state spoke for shock effect to a more or less captive audience. His words were reminiscent of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 banging...

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-21 17:03

The art of compromise

President Moon Jae-in has to be a master of the art of compromise. He was all for the latest watered-down UN sanctions that cut down but don’t cut off the flow of oil from China and Russia to North Korea. The US would far prefer to see all the oil traffic ended, but the deal had to be the best anyone could hope for considering the foreign ministers of both China and Russia had told South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha they were not going to go for a deal that left North Korea with no oil. No telling exactly how the North would react to a total ban on oil imports, but it would be rec...

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-14 18:05

Hanging tough against N. Korea

Donald Trump doesn't get it. He warns South Korea about "appeasement," but who’s appeasing whom? Yes, President Moon Jae-in, hero of the candlelight protests that lofted him as the liberal darling into the presidency after the ouster of the conservative Park Geun-hye, would love to go down in history as the one who brought about reconciliation on this conflicted peninsula. No, that's not going to happen any time soon, much to the chagrin of some of the ideologues and idealists who were counting on him to say yes to just about anything North Korea wants. The North's sixth nuclear test shows M...

Donald Kirk | 2017-09-07 17:47

Advocating for 'peace'

One demand you don't hear South Korean leaders making whenever North Korea pops off another missile is, “Oh, let's sign a peace treaty, and everything will be okay.” That's partly because, if there's one party with whom North Korean strategists don't want to include in any such treaty, it's South Korea. They see the south - they spell it with a lowercase "s" - as not just a junior partner but a "lackey" of the U.S. They want to assert their superiority if not sovereignty as the only true Korean government with which the U.S. should be dealing in any "permanent" peace in place of the armistic...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-31 18:15

Bombing the North with leaflets

Donald Trump’s notion of “fire and fury” for North Korea inspires cheers, fears and jeers. Is he threatening the biblical “fire and brimstone,” or does his rhetoric more closely resemble Shakespeare’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Yes, there are those who think the American president is an idiot, but you also find some who admire him for getting Kim Jong-un to back down. Kim did call off ordering a missile to hit somewhere off Guam, didn’t he? That’s true enough _ though it’s not likely the fearless, “Respected” leader has given up on that idea while th...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-24 17:53

Gesturing for peace

Small gestures would be so helpful in bringing about reconciliation with North Korea. Take, for instance, the cases of the three U.S. citizens still held in the North. They are all Korean-Americans, two of them former teachers at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the other a businessman who once ran a trading company in the Rason special economic zone on the North’s far northeastern coast. Actually, freeing these three would be more than a small gesture but would be relatively minor compared to Kim Jong-un’s decision to pull back from the immediate threat of test-firing med...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-17 16:28

Visions of peace

GANGJEONG, Jeju - Upstaged by THAAD - that’s the sad fate of the gaggle of dutiful protesters who pray and hold signs aloft and march in front of the main entrance to the gleaming new Republic of Korea naval base on the southern coast of this island paradise. They claim most of the villagers here adamantly oppose the base, which they say accommodates U.S. warships as well as those of the South Korean Navy, but you don’t sense much real anti-base zeal despite the tattered banners and posters or the fervent prayers of the faithful. No way do the protests match those of the zealots demanding re...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-10 17:56

Brainstorming North Korea

WASHINGTON - North Korea pops off another ICBM, and suddenly the U.S. media is full of talking heads offering views and solutions. They range from the extremes of annihilating North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities to, “Oh, just sign a peace treaty and everything will be okay.” It’s hard to know which extreme is more troubling, but then the moderate positions don’t offer much consolation either. We’re done with “strategic patience,” if we can take the word of the Trumpsters, so what has a chance of working? Right, President Trump says he’s “handling” the problem but gives no clue as to...

Donald Kirk | 2017-08-03 17:02

Escalating sanctions

WASHINGTON _ Americans are so fixated on the issues of healthcare and Russia that tightening sanctions on North Korea almost escapes notice. One minute the networks are vying with one another on what passes as “analysis” on President Trump’s efforts to replace Obamacare with Trumpcare, and the next they’re covering the latest “revelation” of whatever Trump and his family members and friends might have asked or told the Russians. Foreigners should be forgiven if they simply cannot understand what’s going on. Certainly Trump isn’t coming clean on all the ins and outs of his relationship with R...

Donald Kirk | 2017-07-27 17:45

Moon's war of words

WASHINGTON - The standoff on the Korean peninsula is entering a new phase. While President Moon Jae-in calls for talks with North Koreans, he is also honoring the U.S.-Korean alliance and insisting the North give up its nuclear program. Can Moon have it both ways? He’s besieged by protesters who expect him to abandon totally the policies of his conservative predecessors and support North Korea’s strategy of weakening the South from within. Against leftist demands, for instance, he is holding on to THAAD, the terminal high altitude area defense system that consists of one counter-missile batt...

Donald Kirk | 2017-07-20 17:37

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