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Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk has been covering Korean Peninsula issues for decades.

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Donald Kirk

Corruption in high places

By Donald KirkCorruption is so endemic in Korean ruling circles that it's hard to remember a time when one politico or another wasn't mired in accusations of fraud, bribery, influence-peddling and all that. In fact, cases come and go with such regularity that we often forget them soon after they dominated the headlines.That's why it's hard to get too excited or amazed by the ordeal of Cho Kuk, a law professor with such a proper leftist past as to have given some people the impression he was totally above reproach. In Korea, as we have learned yet again, not many are squeaky clean, and just about everyone places higher priority on the success of heirs and cronies than on the downtrodden people whom they were purported to love and defend.Corruption crosses party lines. Every Korean president in recent memory was sooner or later the target of investigations and inquests that dug up incredible details of ill-gotten wealth and undeserved acclaim. In some cases, fortunes in the trillions of won and billions of dollars were said to linger in secret accounts at home and abroad.By those stand

Sep 5, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Flag-waving for Trump

By Donald KirkMore American flags fly on a typical Saturday afternoon in central Seoul than in an American downtown on the Fourth of July.The sight of those flags, held high in parades of conservatives and rightists protesting the quest of President Moon Jae-in for reconciliation with North Korea and the imprisonment of his disgraced predecessor, Park Geun-hye, arouses mixed emotions. Aside from a few academic cranks, most Americans tend to be impressed by the pro-American sentiment among older Koreans who remember the U.S. defense of the South in the Korean War.In an uncertain world, though, one wonders if this confidence in Uncle Sam to rush to defend South Korea in a dreaded Second Korean War is misplaced. Not the least reason for uncertainty is how President Donald Trump really feels about South Korea.There he was, at the G7 gathering in Biarritz, not only saying how well he gets along with Kim Jong-un but also decrying the recent joint U.S.-South Korea war games as a waste of money. Oh, and he hasn't backed down from his alleged demand that South Korea pay $5 billion for having

Aug 29, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Waging rhetorical war

By Donald KirkMANILA ― The Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, has a lot in common with President Donald Trump. He upsets people with tough talk, flays his foes with harsh words, and is accused of numerous offenses against women, against the media, also against the U.S. And he's been courting the leader of a country with which his predecessors in Malacanang, the historic Spanish-built presidential mansion and office complex, have not always been on good terms.The object of Duterte's affections since his election three years ago has been China's President Xi Jinping, whom he has visited in China and then hosted at Malacanang last November. Both of them called that meeting a “milestone” in relations between the two countries but have yet to get down to serious business about China's claim to the entire South China Sea, including small islands occupied by Philippine forces.Now, however, it's getting to be crunch time. The Philippines charges China with having sent military vessels around small southern Philippine islands, and Philippine leaders, but so far not Duterte, a

Aug 22, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Stocking up on missiles

By Donald KirkSo much is said and written about North Korea's missile tests that it is possible to forget they are hardly the most dangerous threats posed by flying “projectiles.”That's not to minimize their importance, or to side with Donald Trump when he dismisses them as short-range, not in violation of anything, while praising Kim Jong-un for the love letter he got from him the same day Kim ordered another set of tests.There are two points here. The first is, we have a lot more to fear from Russia's burgeoning missile ambitions, and China's too, than from North Korean missiles. Second, North Korea is basically throwing its direly needed resources away on nukes and missiles, whatever the range, when there's no way Kim is about to have them affixed with warheads and fired for real.Saving that second point for later, the Russian danger has just increased with Trump's decision to jettison the INF treaty. Banning Russia and the U.S. from making land-based missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was?reached by President Rona

Aug 15, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

American silence on Jeju 4.3

By Donald KirkJEJU ― You have to wonder what a typical U.S. embassy does with a petition pleading a cause that some people don't want to know about.That's the question asked by activists crusading for the families of victims of “4.3,” the revolt on the idyllic island of Jeju that began on April 3, 1948, in which about 30,000 died in clashes with the Korean army and police. Two years ago, members of the 4.3 Victims' Family Association dropped off their petition with 100,000 signatures at the U.S. embassy in Seoul blaming the U.S. for backing the revolt and demanding reparations.Hur Sang-soo, president of the Korea Social Science Research Institute, delivered the petition, including all those signatures in four boxes, to a guard at the U.S. embassy but has no idea where it went from there. What does the embassy think of this petition? Has anyone read it, glanced at the names, maybe sent it on to Washington for the State Department to consider?You can imagine diplomatic double-talk in reply, maybe someone promising to “consider the matter.” But no, Song Seung-moo

Aug 8, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Hong Kong and democracy

By Donald KirkMass protests on the streets of Hong Kong are provoking distinctly mixed responses in countries that would seem to place the highest priority on democracy.In Washington, President Donald Trump and many of those involved in the U.S. foreign policy establishment dare not risk ringing endorsements of the protesters and the causes for which they are fighting. Trump, in a trade war with China, wary of China's rising profile around the rim of Asia, is not going to side enthusiastically with protests in Hong Kong. He already has enough problems with President Xi Jinping over China's huge trade surplus and military buildup.The dilemma for Koreans is even worse, perhaps more sharply defined. Yes, more than a million Koreans turned out nightly on the streets of Seoul and other large cities in 2016 waging their Candlelight Revolution against Park Geun-hye, the conservative president who finally was impeached, tried, jailed and convicted for crimes ranging from corruption to influence-peddling. No, just because they demonstrated passionately for Park's removal and the democratic el

Aug 1, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

'It can't happen here'

By Donald KirkWar is actually never that far away in this corner of the world. We've grown so accustomed to near-crises and mini-crises that we tend to shrug and say, “It can't happen here,” which, as it happens, is the name of a bitterly satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis published in the 1930s.What did happen after publication of “It Can't Happen Here” is that much bad stuff happened. No, it didn't quite happen as in the novel, about a politico who bears, all these years later, an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump. Much worse happened than the takeover of America by a dictator who could have been fantasizing the future Trump in his dreams, so amazing was his harsh repression of dissent, his noisy appeal to populist instincts, all in the spirit of “Make America Great Again.”The novel, however, did not anticipate far more truly tragic events. All too soon, the world was to plunge into a wave of slaughter such as we had never seen and would hope never to see again. What could have been worse, all in the space of a few brief years, than the executio

Jul 25, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

South Korea versus Japan

By Donald KirkTOKYO ― Korean and Japanese relations have plunged to their lowest depths since the Korean War, and there's apparently no reconciliation in sight. The governments in Seoul and Tokyo are engaged in a game of dare and double-dare in which each tries to out-threaten the other with hurtful measures and harmful results.The Japanese, banning the export of vital, chemical ingredients for semiconductors manufactured by Korean electronics giants such as Samsung, clearly think they are hitting South Koreans where it hurts. They go on claiming some of these chemicals are making their way into North Korea while South Korea's President Moon Jae-in pursues what Japan's arch-conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sees as a dangerous policy of appeasement with a regime that's never going to relinquish its nuclear warheads and the missiles that could send them hurtling at Japan.There is, moreover, much more behind Japan's de facto ban.What a great way, the Japanese are convinced, to go after those Koreans after all the stuff they've been doing to us over the years. Most recently, the Ja

Jul 18, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Undiplomatic bad-mouthing

By Donald KirkLONDON ― You can hardly imagine the embarrassment of the Brits over one of the all-time tempests in diplomatic teacups. It was one thing for the highly proper British ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch to send a memo back to the foreign ministry in London calling President Donald Trump's White House “dysfunctional,” “unpredictable,” “faction-riven.” “clumsy and inept” but quite another for the whole world to know what he had written.It was as though Sir Kim had been overheard spreading the most awful gossip, engaging in the most terrible language, without the least notion that anyone would ever know what he had said or written. The British media is going crazy over exposure of Kim's confidential words in a cascade of speculation over who leaked what to whom, how and why. Plot theories abound. Could it have been the Russians, in one of their patented crypto attacks, or were domestic foes of the British establishment doing their utmost to undermine the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the United

Jul 11, 2019By Donald Kirk
Donald Kirk

Trump's crazy stories

By Donald KirkSometimes you have to wonder why Donald Trump spins so many untruths and half-truths and why or whether he thinks he can simply get away with that stuff forever.That's why a couple of his boasts last Sunday seemed so unnecessary, so easily questioned, so pointless. The one I liked most was his claim that we would have been at war right now if Barack Obama's stay in the White House had been extended or if someone like Obama had been elected in his place. That was a jibe against not only Obama but also Hillary Clinton, who would probably have been reasonably firm about North Korea.At least twice I heard him saying that the Korean standoff had been “a fiery mess” when he took over from Obama ― indeed “We would have been at war with North Korea.” In nearly two and a half years as president, he boasted, “We have had peace.”It's very difficult to disprove a hypothetical. One cannot say for sure that we would not have been at war, though I seriously doubt it. It was Trump's reference to “a fiery mess,” though, that seemed especia

Jul 4, 2019By Donald Kirk
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