Opinion - The Korea Times

Running with the nuclear football

By Donald KirkDonald Trump at times engages in such flights of rhetorical fancy that a lot of people think he’s crazy or anyway unpredictable. How can you be sure of a president who talks about destroying North Korea, who holds out “the military option” ― but professes to want to avoid conflict?There are two schools of thought about the Trumpster.  Just about every college professor, like the columnists for the New York Times and Washington Post, thinks he’s unhinged and we’d better watch out, no telling what will happen. Then there are those who believe he’s crazy like a fox, that he may act and talk crazy but deep down he knows what he’s doing.It may be too early to pronounce judgement on Trump’s sanity. He’s only been in office for eight or nine months. It’s possible to say he’s on a steep learning curve, a shakedown cruise, any analogy, but here’s an issue that people worry about. That is, does he really have his finger on the nuclear button? Can he flick a switch and send bombers off on a nuclear strike

Oct 12, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Declaring war and peace

By Donald KirkNorth Korea has been crying wolf so often it's hard to get too excited by the "declaration of war" North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho made in New York this week.Did not the North Koreans declare war after the release of the film "The Interview" three years ago that made Kim Jong-un look like the vainglorious, cruel dictator he is? And did we not hear war declarations while North and South Korean troops confronted each another in a near-shootout across the DMZ two years ago?Those outbursts paled, however, beside the "declaration of nuclear war" in 2003 a year after George W. Bush had included the North in an "axis of evil." Having pulled out of the nuclear non-proliferation agreement, North Korea took umbrage at Bush for having called the North a "target for a nuclear strike."Leave it to NK News in Seoul to have tabulated how often the words "declaration of war" has appeared in dispatches by the North's Korean Central News Agency. The term, by NK News count, has come up more than 200 times over the past 20 years in contexts ranging from U.N. sanctions imposed after

Sep 28, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Trump's war of words

By Donald KirkIt 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 a shoe, promising to “bury you,” or Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat in 1974 wearing a pistol belt, saying he carried “an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s pistol in the other.”Just as such words rang hollow, bearing little relationship to the ability of those loud-talking figures to carry out their rhetorical threats, so Trump’s remarks also seem a little removed

Sep 21, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

The art of compromise

By Donald KirkPresident 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 reckless to think they would see the light, halt their nuclear and missile programs and agree to talk over all the other festering issues between the South and North.The liberal Moon also has to balance the scales between hugely disparate factions at home. In a left/right standoff, rightists, waving Korean and American flags, demand the extremes of a nuclear South Korea, a South Korean military that’s ready to “decapitate” Kim Jong-un, plus a number of other

Sep 14, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Hanging tough against N. Korea

By Donald KirkDonald 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 Moon is not getting anywhere in his quest for dialogue, and he knows it.Confounding many of his more left-leaning followers, Moon is talking as tough as the conservatives who ruled for nearly ten years until Park's downfall. He's chatting with the hated Japanese, and he's vowing no more advances in North Korean "technology" for fixing a warhead onto a missile capable of "delivering" a warhead to the U.S. He's also calling for strengthening the South Korean armed forces in the fac

Sep 7, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Advocating for 'peace'

By Donald KirkOne 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 armistice that's maintained the peace on the Korean Peninsula since July 1953.Advocates of a "peace treaty," however, don't want to acknowledge the existence of "peace." They prefer to see Korea as "technically at war," and they carry on as if they wish war would break out just to prove their point.Sorry ― South and North Korea are not at war, "technically" or otherwise, despite North Korea leader Kim Jong-un's habit of ordering missile shots that annoy everyone and do nothing to

Aug 31, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Bombing the North with leaflets

By Donald KirkDonald 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 thousands of U.S. and South Korean troops play annual war games in defiance of a torrent of rhetoricSo what to do? Might a quick hit, a “pre-emptive strike,” maybe even “massive retaliation,” be the way to wipe out the terrorist of the North? As the dust is settling, would not millions of North Koreans rise up in rebellion and install a more reasonable and humane leader? Why, they might

Aug 24, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Gesturing for peace

By Donald KirkSmall 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 medium-range missiles in the direction of Guam, the island territory on which the U.S. has strategic air and naval bases. For days people have been wondering if President Trump would really respond with strikes on North Korea that might set off Korean War II.The danger of Kim ordering more missile tests, much less another underground nuclear test, is by no means over. As U.S. and South Korean forces plunge into two weeks of annual war games, North Korea is sure to pour out a

Aug 17, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Visions of peace

By Donald KirkGANGJEONG, 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 removal of the counter-missile battery known as THAAD for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense from a former Lotte golf course south of Seoul.That observation would not be appreciated by the legendary Catholic priest, the Rev. Mun Jeong-hyun, who’s been leading the protests here for the past ten years and still shows up every day for prayers and then for carving out little stone figures symbolizing the cause. “CIA, CIA,” he shouted when he saw me back here a

Aug 10, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Brainstorming North Korea

By Donald KirkWASHINGTON ― 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 what he means.Actually, Trump is so busy attacking his critics while fending off demands for his impeachment that you have to wonder how much time he has for Korea. Therein, of course, lies one particularly disturbing scenario.What if he decides a pre-emptive strike would be just the thing to divert attention from the unwelcome scrutiny he’s getting on the home front? He’s got retired marine generals as his

Aug 3, 2017By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Read more

Running with the nuclear football

Declaring war and peace

Trump's war of words

The art of compromise

Hanging tough against N. Korea

Advocating for 'peace'

Bombing the North with leaflets

Gesturing for peace

Visions of peace

Brainstorming North Korea

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