Long time Korea analyst Victor Cha is making some bold predictions:
But there is bigger storm brewing behind these dark clouds that is threatening to the core of the U.S.-South Korea alliance. It has three components. The first is a nuclear deal with North Korea that is almost certain before Christmas now that John Bolton, the most influential voice in the Hanoi summit’s collapse, is out of the White House. This deal will probably not be a good one, in that its scope will be limited mostly to the Yongbyon nuclear facility; it will not be verifiable; and the U.S. will give too much in lifting sanctions.
But both presidents Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump, who have both staked so much of their credibility on a deal with Kim, will not just accept a suboptimal deal, but will declare with it an end to hostilities on the Korean Peninsula in the form of a peace declaration. (……)
The perfect storm in the winter of 2019-2020, therefore, is a peace deal with North Korea and a failed cost-sharing negotiation that causes Trump to act on his beliefs. Specifically, his anger over Seoul’s refusal to pay no more than a fraction of the demand, coupled with an end-of-war declaration, will cause Trump to act on his 30-year long instinct to draw down or fully withdraw forces from South Korea. As ludicrous as this scenario may sound to experts, Trump would boast that the deal with North Korea is the “best deal ever” with his good friend Kim Jong-un; that he has ended the Korean War; and that he can now “bring the boys home” because there is peace in South Korea and the “ungrateful” South Koreans do not want to pay for U.S. troops. Moreover, he will tell his political base during the campaign that this move is saving money wasted on foreigners and therefore he is putting “America first.”
Chosun Ilbo
You can read more at the link.
This is just the trial balloon for what I expect to be a Moon administration strategy to aid North Korea if a denuclearization deal isn’t struck with the U.S. The ROK will just call all aid “humanitarian aid” in order to avoid sanctions:
The Seoul city government has become the first local government in South Korea to win the right to independently carry out humanitarian aid projects for North Korea, a unification ministry official said Tuesday.
Last month, the government revised related regulations to allow local governments to act as independent aid providers to the North. Previously, they had to join hands with private entities to engage in humanitarian activities for the North.
Yonhap via a reader tip
You can read more at the link.
The case of the repatriation of two North Koreans that supposedly murdered 16 other fishermen before defecting to the South continues to cause controversy:
In the investigation that followed, the two North Koreans asked to defect to South Korea, but the government eventually chose to repatriate the two sailors.
They were handed off to the North’s authorities through the Koreas’ land border at Panmunjom on Thursday, while the boat they used was also given back to the North on Friday.
Given the extraordinary circumstances of the case – unprecedented in inter-Korean history – the decision to expel the sailors continues to be subject to heavy controversy over its legality.
Lawmakers of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party, who were the first to make the issue public before the government announced the expulsion decision, raised doubts as to just how three people were able to murder 16 others on a small boat, which measured only around 15 meters (49 feet) long and weighed 17 tons, and were able to evade North Korea’s own naval surveillance to escape to the South.
South Korea’s lack of a judicial procedure on the alleged crime also invited protests from civic groups, which cited that the sailors had the right to a trial given that the South Korean Constitution does not recognize North Korea and considers all its residents as citizens of South Korea.
To these questions, the Unification Ministry said South Korea’s regulations governing refugees from North Korea also explicitly forbids Seoul from giving shelter to North Koreans who have committed “serious non-political crimes” which include murder, terrorism or illicit drug trafficking.
Joong Ang Ilbo
You can read more at the link, but it seems to me that if these two legitimately admitted to murdering 16 people, are these two really refugees that citizens in the ROK would want to harbor? The question becomes did they legitimately admit to the murders or did the ROK government simply take the word of the North Korean government before handing them over?
Yes it is probably a good idea to plan for a provocation cycle after the New Year because it is does not appear any denuclearization deal is close to being negotiated:
The United States is trying hard to coax North Korea into restarting nuclear talks, as South Korea is also quite “serious” about the year-end deadline set by Pyongyang, a top Cheong Wa Dae official said Sunday.
The North has emphasized that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump should change tack and put forward fresh offers based on a “new calculation method” by the end of this year or face an end to the already troubled dialogue process itself.
Regarding the North’s own deadline, “The South Korean government is also keeping an eye on (relevant situations) quite seriously,” Chung Eui-yong, head of the presidential security office, told reporters. (…….)
South Korea is also coordinating closely with the U.S. so that denuclearization talks can proceed smoothly, getting “various contingency plans” ready for use, he said without elaborating.
The South Korean government’s position is that security conditions on the peninsula should never return to the level before 2017.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but I would not be surprised if the Moon administration’s response to a North Korean provocation would be to unilaterally violate sanctions to pay off the Kim regime and say it is for humanitarian reasons.
Even if North Korea could not yet fire an ICBM from a mobile launcher continued testing will ensure they achieve the capability relatively soon:
SEOUL, Nov. 6 (Yonhap) — North Korea is not believed to be capable yet of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) from transporter erector launcher (TEL) vehicles, the chief of South Korea’s defense intelligence agency said Wednesday.
The issue has been a source of controversy in Seoul, after Chung Eui-yong, chief of Cheong Wa Dae’s National Security Office, has said it is “technically difficult” for the North to fire ICBMs from mobile launchers. Conservative critics accused Chung of being naive.
“The chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Kim Yong-hwan) said that he does not believe that North Korea has such capabilities,” Rep. Lee Hye-hoon, the chief of the intelligence panel, told reporters during a parliamentary audit into the agency.
Kim was also quoted by Rep. Lee Eun-jae of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party as saying that North Korea tried to fire an ICBM from a TEL but failed to do so due to some unidentified problems.
Wednesday’s comment is contradictory to his earlier assessment. During an audit into the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) earlier this month, Kim said that North Korea’s ICBM technology “has been advanced to the degree where the missile can be fired from a TEL.”
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but for the three ICBM tests in 2017 they fired the missiles from test stands after transporting them on mobile launchers. I cannot imagine the North Korean scientists have not improved their ICBM designs to attempt a TEL launch whenever they get the green light to resume testing.
This is the most bizarre North Korean defector story I have read. This could be dramatized into a movie plot:
South Korea deported two North Koreans back to the communist nation after learning that they killed 16 fellow crew members on their fishing boat and fled to the South, the unification ministry said Thursday.
The two in their 20s were sent back to the North at around 3:10 p.m. through the truce village of Panmunjom, five days after they were captured near the Northern Limit Line sea border in the East Sea on Saturday, according to the ministry.
It marks the South’s first deportation of North Koreans through Panmunjom.
“We decided to deport them after determining that accepting them to our society could pose a threat to the lives and safety of our people and that such criminals cannot be recognized as refugees under international law,” Lee Sang-min, the ministry’s spokesperson, said at a press briefing.
The government also plans to send back the fishing boat of the North Koreans, a ministry official said.
Officials said that it took a couple of days for the South’s Navy to seize the North Koreans as they attempted to run away after crossing into the South.
During an investigation, the North Koreans confessed that they and another crew member first killed the captain of the fishing boat in late October out of anger over his harsh treatment before killing the other protesting crew members one by one later, according to officials.
They were also quoted as saying that all the bodies were dumped overboard.
They initially intended to return to North Korea and seek shelter. When the boat arrived at a North Korean port on its east coast, however, one was captured by local police, causing the other two to get scared and flee, the official said.
Yonhap
This is all an attempt by the North Koreans to separate the ROK from the U.S. by trying to get them to not enforce sanctions:
South Korea offered Monday to hold working-level talks with North Korea about a long-suspended tour program at the North’s Mount Kumgang, after Pyongyang demanded Seoul remove all of its resort facilities from the mountain in a threat to end the joint business.
The North made the demand Friday, following up on leader Kim Jong-un’s directive that all South Korean-built facilities should be removed from the mountain resort and the North should build an international tourist zone of its own there.
The order was seen as an ultimatum designed to test Seoul’s willingness to restart the project before he seeks development on his own as the South is unlikely to resume the program anytime soon due to international sanctions on Pyongyang.
Yonhap
North Korea even sent out their useful idiots in South Korea to help them in this effort:
Meanwhile, a coalition of pro-unification civic groups in Seoul urged the government to promptly resume talks with the North to restart not only the Mount Kumgang tour program but also the now-shuttered inter-Korean industrial park in the North’s border city of Kaesong, regardless of sanctions on Pyongyang.
“For the past year, the government said it would push the projects through close consultations with the United States, citing sanctions on North Korea. But it only ended up confirming the United States’ undisguised opposition” to the projects, the coalition said in a statement.
“We must swiftly put in all efforts to turn the crisis we face into a last opportunity,” it said. “We should not miss this significant opportunity for progress in inter-Korean relations.”
You can read more at the link.
