Posted on 05/26/2018 8:49:24 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Last December, I published a surprisingly controversial hypothesis that Korean War II would not be a conventional war, but is a hybrid war to alternately cajole and coerce South Korea into gradual submission to the North’s hegemony, aggressive implementation of a series of joint statements, and eventual digestion into a one-country, two-systems confederation. I argued that this plan would only work if a sufficiently submissive government in Seoul yielded to Pyongyang while going only so far and so fast as possible to avoid a domestic backlash among a population that was, at least until recently, deeply distrustful of Pyongyang. Rather than involving anything as implausible and dramatic as a North Korean occupation, this hegemony would be enforced by South Korean institutions, such as state media, the National Intelligence Service, and the riot police—with occasional assistance from the muscle of hard-left street thugs, like those who are blocking the THAAD sites now and preventing them from becoming fully operational. I argued that the historical conduct of both Pyongyang and Korea’s left also suggested that this plan was not only plausible, but no great secret. This is why I find the controversy to be surprising.
In that post, I made a number of predictions that would allow the reader to test that hypothesis. I argued that the first phase of this plan would involve the control of speech and thought. I also wrote, “If my hypothesis is right, watch for Pyongyang to make more aggressive demands to speed up the implementation of those Joint Statements by this time next year, maybe after the 2018 mid-term elections.” What I did not predict is how soon this would happen, for I could not have predicted things would happen as quickly as they are now. Since that post, both Korean governments have successfully assuaged a majority of Koreans through a “successful” Olympics and the announcement of an inter-Korean summit whose outcome is almost certainly foreordained, or else it would never be conducted in full view of the cameras. As I had also predicted, most of the foreign press was completely taken in by this and shows little sign of awakening. Update: Well, maybe there’s hope yet.
I have long argued that the Korean left is, in reality, illiberal, despite the distracting overlap of some of its policy views with those of western liberals (that the Korean right is illiberal goes without saying). My sense is that this argument mostly fell flat with liberals until very recently, when some of them were jarred by revelations that Seoul has tried to silence potential critics, both in Washington and in Seoul.
The release of Moon Jae-in and Im Jong-seok’s plan for the reunification of Korea is the latest grim validation of my worst fears for Korea’s future. If one applies only a little of the critical reading one should apply to all political propaganda, it almost inevitably charts a path to One Slave Korea. The questions it raises are existential for South Korea’s survival as a liberal democracy. How, for example, can Moon “resolve disagreements within our society,” when just months ago, that society was deeply polarized and demonstrably distrustful of Pyongyang and Moon’s plans to appease it? How can Moon hope to achieve this without taking control of the media and other influential institutions, applying heavier internet censorship, silencing defectors and other critics, and jailing his political opponents?** How can Moon put an end to political disputes and achieve “national homogeneity” to Pyongyang’s satisfaction without extinguishing freedoms that Pyongyang holds in open contempt and has made it its highest national priority to stamp out?
Perhaps because he has already made varying degrees of* progress toward all of those objectives. Of course any vision of homogeneity that Pyongyang would accept necessarily means extinguishing freedom of thought in the South. What else are we to make of the wealth of evidence that Pyongyang has never been more self-isolated or intolerant of dissent?
Contrary to predictions that South Korea’s “vibrant” democracy would never tolerate this, I doubt most South Koreans will object too loudly. For one thing, there’s nothing resembling an effective opposition to rally behind. For another, and as I’ve pointed out, Koreans and Americans have very different ideas of what “democracy” even means. To us, democracy is a structure of laws that safeguards the right of the people to rule from below, through the franchise and the peaceful expression of ideas. In our system, free speech is the right that defines and defends every other freedom. To Koreans, with their brief history of democracy, their long history of resisting authoritarianism, their acceptance of much more censorship than most Americans would tolerate, and their deep nationalist sentiment, it is raucous public protests that are the real hallmark of a democracy. But historically, many of the largest and most raucous public protests have happened in authoritarian states, not democratic ones. They are, just ahead of the right to bear arms, the last resort of people who have lost confidence in the structure of laws and their capacity to rule from below through that structure.
The end state of Moon’s plans isn’t even hidden anymore: a “new economic community on the Korean peninsula” that would necessarily involve massive tax increases and South-to-North subsidies, and a one-country, two-systems confederation with the world’s most tyrannical system of government. Whether all of this would precede the verification of the North’s disarmament is argued too vaguely and inconsistently to be inadvertently vague and inconsistent. Thus, it’s hard to say one way or another whether this would amount to a proposal to violate U.N. and U.S. sanctions on a massive scale, the expression of Moon’s aspiration to lift sanctions before the North fully disarms, an economic inducement for His Porcine Majesty to disarm, or yet another case of the great legal minds in this Blue House not bothering to read U.N. Security Council resolutions before making policy and promises. To be sure, Moon has paid lip service to sanctions, pressure, and denuclearization, but his mentor, Moon Chung-in, has revealed that under his vision, denuclearization would not necessarily precede sanctions-busting subsidies that would make denuclearization an effective impossibility, and guarantee that Pyongyang would retain nuclear hegemony over Seoul—to say nothing of its conventional, chemical, and biological threats. In any confederation in which one side has everything to lose and the other side has the means at hand to destroy that everything, it is easy to predict which side will emerge dominant. That’s why the sequencing of Pyongyang’s disarmament is everything.
But not to worry, Moon’s government says—Pyongyang has agreed to allow some U.S. troops to remain in Korea under this vision. Those of us with long memories know that Kim Jong-il said something similar during the 2000 summit. Those who’ve served within the range of North Korean artillery can clearly see why. The presence of 28,500 American hostages gives Pyongyang a coercive power over the United States that a full withdrawal would deny it. It also gives South Koreans a false sense of security as their government advances plans that might otherwise alarm them. This temporary acceptance of a U.S. presence will not include the presence of missile defenses that might blunt Pyongyang’s power to extort Seoul, or exercises that maintain the readiness and cohesion of the U.S.-Korean alliance. It will last only until the hard left seizes on some incident involving an American soldier at a time of its choosing, to orchestrate mass protests demanding a U.S. withdrawal. But these are not functions that serve U.S. national interests. We should declare our unwillingness to perform them, and it’s only fair to do so before South Koreans go to the polls. The most pragmatic way to do this would be to order a thorough and long-overdue review of the U.S. force structure in South Korea, and whether that structure should involve fewer ground troops, more defenses against missiles and artillery to protect South Korean cities, and removing as many spouses and children of service members as possible.
Again, I’m not oblivious to how conspiratorial it all must seem. But then, on what evidence do skeptics of this view believe that those who staff the top ranks of the Moon administration — men who are veterans of groups like Minbyun, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, and Chondaehyop, with deep ideological and financial links to Pyongyang and a lengthy pedigree of violent anti-Americanism — have moderated their views? At some point, status quo bias must yield to what’s right before our eyes.
Be weary of the South Korean leftist government. Not just the North.
While I’m sympathetic to the South Koreans, I’m tired of their caterwauling. A swift withdrawal from the peninsula might just be the wake-up call South Koreans need to come to their senses. If not, it’s long past time we stopped subsidizing their fantasies. One really annoying South Korean fantasy is the notion that US troops are in Korea because we are somehow extracting some kind of economic tribute. In this fever dream, without those troops in-country, we wouldn’t be getting high quality Korean goods for peanuts.
Too much information.
Josh Stanton is a conservative Republican who’s been writing about Korea for a decade or more. This is Stanton’s bio:
http://freekorea.us/sanctions/sanctions-introduction/#sthash.lmY9Fx1f.dpbs
I wrote this page to help explain North Korea sanctions to those want to understand them better. For those who don’t know me, I’m just a poor Jewish redneck from a small town in South Dakota who went to law school, joined the Army, was stationed in South Korea, became interested in North Korea, got out of the Army, and moved to Washington, D.C. I began studying and writing about sanctions law in my spare time. So that’s the story of how I became South Dakota’s foremost authority on North Korea. (Yes, this is actually my hobby. You’re welcome, humanity.)
Ten years later, through a series of coincidences, the House Foreign Affairs Committee asked me to help design, negotiate, and draft the first comprehensive North Korea sanctions law, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act or NKSPEA, which President Obama signed into law in February 2016. (Afterward, the Committee Chairman, Ed Royce, wrote me this nice thank you letter because he’s such a mensch.)
It’s never hard for reporters to find Korea studies scholars, ex-diplomats, arms control experts, and other aspiring Nobel Peace Prize winners who’ve never read a sanctions regulation but who are certain that North Korea sanctions can’t possibly work. Honest opposition to sanctions for policy reasons is fine, but “expert” opinion that misstates the law and misinforms the public and policymakers is not fine. There’s no excuse for that sort of lazy, half-assed journalism; after all, actual sanctions experts aren’t that hard to find.
The surest sign that an “expert” doesn’t understand North Korea sanctions is when he writes that there’s nothing left to sanction in North Korea, or that years of strong sanctions haven’t worked. In fact, until 2016, U.N. sanctions were mostly unenforced, and U.S. sanctions against North Korea (which are essential to enforcing U.N. sanctions) were weaker than our sanctions against Belarus or Zimbabwe. For a brief period when they were enforced, U.S. sanctions against North Korea were devastating to Kim Jong-il and left the North Korean people no worse off than they’d been before. Sanctions nearly crashed Iran’s economy and brought it back to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, the political will to enforce them against Kim Jong-un has been lacking (though that may be changing).
I wrote this page because, although it’s fun for me to write — and for some of you, to read — fiskings of these fake “expert” opinions, it’s probably more constructive to help those with open minds get a better understanding of the sanctions and how they work. If you just want to understand what the sanctions are, what they aren’t, how they work, and how they can work better, this page is for you. If you find this useful, please share (below), subscribe (sidebar), follow me on Twitter, or read my posts on sanctions.
This article is totally correct. However, I would say that Moon is actually a communist as are all of his top advisors. I am told that when they were in college, they were funded by the north to carry out subversive activities against the proUS government. In fact, Moon actually met with Kim’s father several times in secret to undermine the proUS Korean government. Good news is that Trump knows all this about this clown so he’s only paying lip service to this ahole.
Trump’s singular focus is to disarm NK of its nuclear aresenal. Her will do that by hook or by crook. The rest is up to the oriental machinations of a genuinely perverse people.
Given this author’s lack of presence on the Internet after at least 5 years of publishing, there is no one taking this person seriously at all.
And with good reason, as these are either the paranoid rantings of a certifiable lunatic, or those of someone with a large financial interest at risk trying to protect that interest.
Resolving the Korea problem peacefully is overwhelmingly in the interests of Americans. This person seems to desperately not want that to happen - a sign of someone aligned with the Deep State and not with American citizens.
Well I hear the same from native Koreans and Korean-Americans also. I don’t think denuclearization is the problem, but the vision for the country post-unification. There are strong divides between conservative and leftist South Koreans over the matter.
What a moron this guy is
I didn’t even read it. It’s too stupid
Oh gee
People will choose secret police and slavery over freedom
Duh
Defining the Right as Authoritarian rather than Limited Government. They can never stop their fake narratives.
Unfortunately South Korean politics has not offered the best options and their culture/understanding of democracy (and right wing vs left wing) is different from ours.
The U.S. has offered much protection and economic investment to the country (millions of S. Koreans take this fact for granted) — but America did not “colonize” the place nor impose our language, or interrupt their political process...
And North Korea sympathizers manage to abound in their govt.
This sounds like Nancy Pelosi telling us how Trump will be the end of us all - so much crap it will take extra flushes to dispose of it....
This is an analysis written by a conservative American who has spent much time in Korea and his sentiments are repeated by Koreans and Korean-Americans I have interacted with as well.
This is NOT degrading Trump nor U.S. attempts to denuclearize North Korea.
It is pointing out however, that post-denuclearization, the South Korean government’s vision for a “united Korea” may not be in line with our interests — so to tread carefully. I trust we will.
It is a sad fact that whether in Asia or Europe, our “allies” often can’t be trusted to do the right thing. Look at how Germany and France have been behaving. We pulled out of the Iran nuke deal and now they’re scrambling to save it and undermine our sanctions along the way.
Have you read the Bible? The Israelites did it all the time. God delivered them out of Egypt and within a short time they were longing for Egypt again. Why? Because being "free" and building a society around God was difficult work! At least in Egypt they had food they said...and security.
Have you been to post-Soviet Russia? Putin maintains his popularity by hearkening to his people's nostalgia for Soviet times.
"Democracy" only produces chaos according to the Chinese.
We take the American experience and understanding of freedom for granted. ** The human condition is fundamentally bent towards tyranny. Even as it longs for freedom. ** Our founders understood this too and installed as many checks and balances as possible to keep is from falling back into the precipice of oppression.
I don't trust Moon but unless he has an iron grip on the ROKs, there's no way he turns them into the NORKs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.