Donald Kirk has been covering Korean Peninsula issues for decades.
The last thing the Americans can afford is involvement in a significantly wider war in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, two regions where the combatants are fighting limited but bloody proxy wars. America is in no mood to offer more than multi-billion dollars worth of arms, along with advice, either to Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza or to Ukraine, fighting off the Russian invasion with highly mixed results.
The specter of pressure points from Ukraine to North Korea raises a disturbing question. Is the U.S. prepared for a multi-front war?
There are no winners and no losers in the war in Gaza. Sure, the Israelis, fighting with massive infusions of American funds and arms, can rampage through Gaza, exterminating the hideouts, the tunnels, the lairs of the evil Hamas. No, the world won’t applaud their victory.
Certain parallels between the North-South confrontation on the Korean peninsula and the response to the Hamas attack on Israel are more than a little disquieting.
A photo exhibit on the first floor of Seoul City Hall provides graphic evidence of how Seoul and the area up to Panmunjeom looked in that bleak period before the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on July 27, 1953. The exhibit is all the more remarkable because the images were taken on old-fashioned Kodachrome film that’s long since fallen into disuse in an era of digital cameras and mobile phones.
Kim Jong-un’s magical mystery tour through the Russian Far East may have added a frightening dimension to the standoff between alliances in Northeast Asia. Russia appears poised to shower North Korea with fighter planes, warships and the technology to put satellites into orbit while North Korean factories, hidden around the country, pump out millions of artillery shells for Russia's beleaguered forces in Ukraine.
By Donald KirkHistory is playing games. Who, as Saigon was falling to the forces of “North” Vietnam in April 1975, would have looked into a crystal ball and seen an American president 50 years later talking with Vietnam's top leaders about aiding their Communist regime?Biden, as the American-supported “South” Vietnamese were falling to the “North” Vietnamese, was 32, in his first term as a senator from Delaware and not known for a strong position on American involvement in the war. Unlike John Kerry, who also got elected as a senator, then ran for president and served as secretary of state, Biden never served in the armed forces. Student deferments spared him from the military. Kerry, wounded in Vietnam while a lieutenant in the Mobile Riverine Force, was a fiery anti-war zealot after he got out of the Navy.Biden, accompanied by Kerry, will be in Hanoi on Sunday and Monday. Biden and Vietnam's No. 1 leader, Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the ruling Communist Party for the past 12 years, are likely to agree on a “comprehensive strategi
By Donald KirkPresident Biden should be credited with a terrific public relations success. In less than one day, he got the leaders of South Korea and Japan to appear in full accord on mutual defense against all the bad guys in the region, mostly North Korea but also China.The word “historic” came up innumerable times in all that Biden, South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said and did in just a few hours in the fresh air of Camp David, nestled in low-lying mountains north of Washington. If the three made real history, however, it was mostly because they got together, inked a couple of documents and shook hands.Maybe the image of the leaders of South Korea and Japan looking so friendly was significant, but a reading of what they actually signed shows the vacuity of the tryst. In a mix of fawning double-talk and self-congratulations, they actually agreed on nothing substantive.The biggest laugh may be the fuss they made over some kind of hotline over which they could talk right away about anything that was bothering them. Come on.
By Donald KirkAustralian anthropologist Grant McCall had a vision for peace that extended from the south Pacific to the Korean Peninsula. A symbol of his quest for goodwill and tranquility in Korea was the Jeju King Cherry tree. And his dream of the way to pursue peace was to plant some of them in and around the resort area of Wonsan on North Korea's southeastern coast.Grant's dream was no doubt impossible while the North's leader, Kim Jong-un, insisted on engaging in rhetorical threats and ordering missile tests. Still, Grant was optimistic. Why not, he suggested, run cruise boats from that new base on Jeju's southern coast all the way up the east coast to the port of Wonsan, where Kim is ordering the construction of a much-enlarged tourist complex not far from his own palatial home by the harbor?Grant's notion seemed whimsical, if not farcical, but the long-range future of North-South relations is unpredictable. Might Grant's dream come true 10 or 20 or more years from now? Don't rule it out. In the twists and turns of modern Korean history, we've had no end of surprises, not all b
By Donald KirkAnniversaries ending in zero or five are likely to focus special attention on the lessons of history. None is more portentous than the 70th anniversary this week of the signing of the truce that halted the Korean War on July 27, 1953.The date is an occasion for reminders of the horrors of the war, the danger of a second Korean War and endless debate on whether the truce should morph into a peace treaty or at least an end-of-war declaration. Until then, we're told, the Korean Peninsula is a battleground in a war that's never ended.This claim is absurd. War means armed forces killing enemies, destroying cities and villages, also wiping out civilians in the crossfire. Since 1953, there have been incidents, such as the mining of the corvette ROKS Cheonan in 2010 with the loss of 46 South Korean sailors, or the downing of an American reconnaissance plane in 1969 with 31 airmen on board or the capture of the spy ship USS Pueblo in 1968 three days after a North Korean recon unit had come within 100 meters of the Blue House. Miraculously, none of these incidents led to a resump