Tag: Michael Breen

Tweet of the Day: Michael Breen Targeted for Opposition to Sewol Memorial at Gwanghamun

Michael Breen Discusses Status of US-North Korea Denuclearization Talks

Here is what well known author and Korea expert Michael Breen has to say about the current efforts to denuclearize North Korea by the Trump administration:

The Korea Times roundtable to tackle the aftermath of the no-deal Hanoi summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the U.S.’s Donald Trump is under way at the Times conference room, March 14. From right are Prof. Hwang Jae-ho, director of the Global Security Cooperation Center, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; Asia Times correspondent Andrew Salmon; Michael Breen, author of “The New Koreans;” Michael Hay of HMP Law, who ran North Korea’s only foreign law firm; and The Korea Times digital managing editor Oh Young-jin. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

What does North Korea want? North Korea’s leaders may be rational and consistent, but they are opaque, which leads to a lot of guessing about them. One certainty is that they want sanctions lifted. After that, it becomes unclear. Possibility number one is that they want to come in out of the cold, develop their economy and that for this they are prepared to destroy their known nuclear weapons and facilities, but retain the potential to re-arm.

Another possibility is that they plan no real change and are approaching Trump from a risk management perspective. If that is the case, they might serve up a missile launch when Trump announces his plan for re-election. A third possibility is that they still want to unify the peninsula on their own terms and see nuclear weapons as integral to this aim.

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common ― there is a role for nuclear weapons. A fourth possibility ― that North Korea wants to give up being a nuclear power and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its tail between its legs ― would be nice, but appears to be the least favored by analysts.

It is precisely because it is this last scenario that the U.S. is pushing for that suggests the talks may well fail. I hope I am wrong, but the answer to our question of whether Trump is failing may well be, no, not yet.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but I think it is pretty clear what North Korea wants. First of all they want to keep their nuclear weapons not as a deterrent, but instead to unify the Korean peninsula. Remember their artillery threat on Seoul has been enough of deterrent to prevent a US attack on North Korea for decades. Remember the Kim regime has killed many American troops over the decades with no US counterattack because of this artillery threat.

So clearly the expense and political capital they have put into their nuclear weapons program is intended to give them a military advantage over South Korea. This will all factor into the future confederation that the Kim regime wants to establish with South Korea that they can use their nuclear weapons to help extort the ROK to implement once the US-ROK alliance is ended.

This is why the Kim regime wants “Pretend Denuclearization” in return for dropping sanctions, followed by a peace treaty that would ultimately lead to a US troop withdrawal to make the Confederation under North Korea’s terms fall into place.

Michael Breen on Why Critics Are Impatient with President Trump’s North Korea Policies

ROK Drop favorite Michael Breen writes in the Korea Times that critics of President Trump’s North Korea policy need to show more patience.  Good luck with that ever happening, but he does accurately depict the media environment that is driving much of the negative criticism against Trump:

And yet, a majority of experts have criticized the American president. Why? Failure to secure a more detailed agreement. Talk about impatience.

This criticism is widespread, despite the fact that everyone accepts that, in contrast to many summit meetings where the top leaders sign off on agreements reached between their respective teams, this one was intended to kickstart a process.

So why was the analysis not about a good start?

I believe there are two parts to the answer and they are not easily separated. One is the good faith expert viewpoint and the other is the media environment in which it is expressed.  (…………)

The error in my opinion derives from media obsession with the person of the American president. This both slants reporting and media commentary and influences the way experts deliver their opinions.

If truth be told, media love Donald Trump. He just has to scratch his head and it’s newsworthy. Underlying almost all coverage is a view that he is morally and psychologically unfit to be president. (This is partly because he is a Republican, a party that has almost zero support among news reporters, and partly because, well, he is kind of unorthodox.)

The daily Trump story satisfies on the titillation level ― look what the idiot has done now ― and on the media self-righteousness level ― be warned, this is serious, this man has his finger on the button.

Had Barack Obama held this summit with Kim and achieved the same result, he would probably be up for his second Nobel Peace Prize. But because it’s Trump, I expect that even if the North does de-nuclearize, sign a Korean war peace treaty, and open an embassy in Pyongyang and open the gulag, Trump will still be found wanting.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

 

Michael Breen On Why Former President Park Was Impeached

I think long time Korea watcher Michael Breen is spot on with this assessment of the impeachment of President Park:

Compared to many countries, South Korea is fiercely democratic. But South Koreans want to be better. After each election, the winner is allowed to act like a short-term monarch and everyone blessed with a connection looks for advantage. By the end of the fourth year, the stench of favor is too much, and approval ratings plunge so low that the outgoing president is considered a liability by his own party’s next candidate. Of the five democratically elected presidents before Park, one was jailed, another committed suicide to avoid a prosecution investigation, and the other three saw their family members go to jail. Now, Park is the first to actually be tossed out.

Although disappointing on the policy front, Park, in all fairness, has been no worse than the others on the moral front. In fact, being unmarried—and, as far as we know, never even having had a boyfriend—as well as being distanced from her siblings, she was assumed to be free of the complications that dogged her predecessors. So, when it turned out she had a best friend who enjoyed unheard of privileges, whose daughter rode a horse in the Olympics, and who received unfair entrance to a university, the country went ape.  [The Atlantic]

You can read the rest at the link, but Michael Breen goes on to explain how the establishment knew Park had to go because of how unpopular she had become and the size of the protests against her and thus impeachment was inevitable.