Opinion - The Korea Times

Playing the games of war

By Donald KirkAn air of unreality pervaded the atmosphere if not the skies over Osan Air Base this week as three of the niftiest warplanes on the planet zoomed off the runway for wargames intended to strengthen their ability to work together to defeat a common foe. Circumspectly, officers of the American, Korean and British Royal Air Force avoided identifying the foe, but their circumlocutions on that topic were mere technicalities.As everyone knows, the pilots of the U.S. Air Force F16s, the Korean Air Force F15Ks and the RAF’s Typhoon Eurofighters had North Korea perfectly in their minds if not their sights as they staged make-believe dogfights against each other off the Korean west and east coasts. To them, and the generals who ordered them into the air, there was never a doubt as to whom they were training to shoot at.On the ground, the image was far from clear - cloudy if not muddied. The best you might say, as Donald Trump shocked the soothsayers with his brand of nationalism and populism and President Park Geun-hye struggled to keep her job if not her power, was that pol

Nov 10, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Girl talk at the summit

By Donald KirkHillary Clinton knows President Park Geun-hye pretty well. They met whenever Hillary visited Seoul as secretary of state or Ms. Park went to Washington. They have no doubt talked about what they would do about North Korea. Hillary had to be pledging undying U.S. support ― “no daylight between us” ― to show U.S. solidarity (“No daylight between us” is the D.C. equivalent of the Chinese expression, “As close as the lips to the teeth”).You have to wonder, though, if Clinton and Park ever got down to one subject they really have in common. Hillary, when Park knew her, was emailing relatives, friends, colleagues, diplomatic underlings, everyone, on her own private email server. Park was emailing here and there too, notably to a woman no one in Korea outside the ruling circles had heard of. That would be Choi Soon-sil, her sisterly soulmate, the daughter of Choi Tae-min, pastor, shamanist, spiritual adviser to President Park’s father, President Park Chung Hee, until the dictator’s assassination by his intelligence chief 37 years

Nov 3, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Pivoting toward China

By Donald Kirk Rodrigo Duterte was reputed as a killer long before his election as president of the Philippines five months ago. He countenanced the slaughter of hundreds of drug addicts and dealers while mayor of Davao, the major port city on the rebel-infested southern island of Mindanao, and the arbitrary killing of upwards of 2,000 more druggies as president.Duterte’s brutality, though, doesn’t mean he’s interested in battling China on behalf of his country in the South China Sea. In fact, he’s confounded strategists in Washington by appearing to disavow the historic Philippine-American alliance, aligning with the Chinese while tossing out agreements with the U.S. He’s saying, in effect, “Yankee Go Home.”   If his declarations are puzzling, they are easy to understand. Beyond the “nationalist” pride, beneath the bravado, Duterte’s disparaging remarks about the traditional U.S. relationship raise questions about U.S. power everywhere in Asia. First off, would the U.S., despite its “pivot” to Asi

Oct 27, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Russia's stake in North Korea

By Donald Kirk We hear so much about China and Japan competing on and for the Korean peninsula, now and historically, that we overlook one other great Northeast Asian power. That would be Russia, which has a 17-kilometer border with North Korea as the Tumen River flows into the sea.  In the old days of the Soviet Union, trains crossed the river almost every day shipping oil into North Korea for almost nothing – that is, paid for in near worthless North Korean won. North Korean free-loading off Soviet largesse ended with the demise of Soviet rule in 1991, a happenstance that led to the famine that devastated the North in the 1990’s. Bereft of cheap oil, North Korea did not have enough to power industry, operate motor vehicles or heat homes, offices and factories. For North Korea, the only hope was China, which supplies virtually all the North’s oil – enough for survival but not enough to build a strong industrial base. These days, while fretting over North Korea, Russians worry about the fast-rising behemoth with which their vast country sha

Oct 20, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Samantha Power's uphill battle

By Donald Kirk  Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is on a fast track, and that’s not just in terms of her hot-shot career. She’s up against a tight deadline. She’s got until January 20 to persuade the U.N. Security Council to strengthen what she says is already the toughest set of sanctions ever imposed by the U.N. They were supposed to shut off North Korea so tightly, no way could Fearless Leader Kim Jong-un order up more nuclear tests or press the button on more missiles. There was, however, a problem. He was still getting the money he needed, somehow, to pay for more, more, more ― more of everything, including nukes and missiles. Power sounds like a whip-sharp persuader as she talks, as she did during five or six days in Tokyo and then Seoul, about working night and day to get all 14 UNSC members in line behind tougher, better, greater sanctions. She knows she has to work fast. If they don’t come around to her idea of the toughest sanctions in modern history, she might not get any real sanctions at all. In fact,

Oct 13, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Remembering Don Oberdorfer

By Donald Kirk The late Don Oberdorfer would surely have had qualms with the award named for him and presented by U.S. Ambassador Mark Lippert to Noh Hyo-dong, the longtime diplomatic and Washington correspondent for Yonhap News Agency. Why would a top U.S. diplomat be handing out a prize in the name of someone who spent years covering U.S. diplomats in Washington and overseas? Who chose the first recipient of this award? What about separation of church and state ― or rather that of the fourth estate from the powers the media ideally should observe with preternatural skepticism? For all such questions, the awards ceremony Tuesday at the American Center by the sprawling Yongsan Garrison in central Seoul was tasteful and pleasant. The ambassador honored the memory of Don, who died last year, in words that no one would dispute. In decades as a correspondent, initially for the Knight newspapers and then for 25 or so years for the Washington Post, Oberdorfer won a reputation as fair and balanced ― a wise and perceptive journalist who listened to all sides and reported and a

Oct 6, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Double-talk on foreign policy

By Donald Kirk The exchanges between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in their first debate left an uneasy feeling about U.S. foreign policy. While Trump worried about all the money the U.S. has been squandering overseas, Clinton came through with ritual affirmation of U.S. treaty commitments. Their words were empty, less than convincing ― sure to provoke more questions.  Trump actually had more to say than Clinton did about U.S. problems abroad despite her background as secretary of state, the post to which President Obama appointed her as a consolation prize for failing to defeat him for the Democratic Party nomination eight years ago. Trump’s complaints about U.S. financial dealings with foreign countries fall into two categories. First, Trump thinks the U.S. is getting royally shafted on trade relations, whether in one-on-one transactions or big deals like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement on tariff-free trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico.  Second, he believes America’s allies, notably Japan, Korea and Germany, should pay almost e

Sep 29, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Rushing to North Korea's aid

By Donald Kirk North Korea is truly a schizophrenic state. All in a day we hear about the need for generous foreign donors to come to the rescue of thousands of victims of flooding in the hard-scrabble northeast where life is tough in the best of times. Then, in the next breath, the North Korean propaganda machine is pumping out reports of another weird and wonderful missile and the North’s capacity for raining death and destruction on targets from Washington to Seoul. So what are we supposed to make of these conflicting images of life and death in a land with billions to spend on nukes and missiles but none left over for drowning and starving people? Stranger still, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency puts out pictures of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un grinning at a fruit farm and extolling the virtues of a missile but none of him visiting the scenes of the flooding. Is the Onsong district, up by the Tumen River border with China, a no-go zone where he’s afraid to show his fat face for fear of getting jeered at or worse by unhappy people? It&rsqu

Sep 22, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

North Korea against the world

By Donald KirkYou have to credit the North Koreans with chutzpah ― the Yiddish word for “nerve,” brazen arrogance or insolence, all in untranslatable exclamation. The leaders of the world’s 20 strongest, most powerful nations were gathered in a solemn conclave in China, and in Pyongyang North Korea’s Supreme Leader did more than thumb his nose at them by ordering still more missile tests.What timing! What a way for Kim Jong-un to spit out unprintable obscenities, to give the finger to all those movers and shakers whom he either hates or distrusts or both! It would be difficult to say whom he reviles more, the American President Barack Obama as a dangerous hypocrite, the Chinese President Xi Jinping, also as a hypocrite, or South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye, not only as a dangerous hypocrite but also a “puppet “of both the Americans and the Chinese.Credit Kim with getting away with this stuff in masterful style. What can these potentates really do when they’re pretty much constantly at each other’s throats?If President Obama wa

Sep 8, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Loyal son's lonely crusade

By Donald Kirk Time slowly erases the traces of those held in North Korea. The longer they’re there, the easier it is to forget them. Their families, reluctant to invest more psychic energy on those for whom they know the North Koreans have no mercy, give up the quest. As individuals move on, however, you wonder how or why bureaucrats in Seoul say nothing, do nothing. That’s a question Hwang In-cheol often ponders. He’s long since become accustomed to getting much the same response when he asks: Why can’t you please apply some pressure, do something, anything, to find out about my father? Hwang’s father is Hwang Won, who’s been in North Korea ever since North Korean goons hijacked a Korean Air passenger plane on a domestic flight with 50 people on board in December 1969. Hwang was two at the time and has no memory of his father, a producer for MBC, but still has a black-and-white photo that shows him smiling as his father embraces him and a cousin. Alone among family members of the 11 whom North Korea never returned, Hwang refuses to

Sep 1, 2016By Donald Kirk

Donald Kirk

Read more

Playing the games of war

Girl talk at the summit

Pivoting toward China

Russia's stake in North Korea

Samantha Power's uphill battle

Remembering Don Oberdorfer

Double-talk on foreign policy

Rushing to North Korea's aid

North Korea against the world

Loyal son's lonely crusade

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