In 1962, US commanders ordered a Marine named Don Heathcote to spray chemicals in the Okinawan jungle near his base as part of a series of biological warfare tests secretly carried out by the Pentagon during the Cold War.

Years later, Heathcote told a reporter that he did so without safety equipment and that while the herbicide killed the vegetation, it also damaged his health. “They diagnosed me with bronchitis and sinusitis connected to chemical exposure,” Heathcote said. Gerald Mohler, another Marine, was told to camp in the area, and said he later suffered from chronic breathing problems and neurological damage. “Were we Marines used as guinea pigs on Okinawa?” he asked the same reporter. “I think so.”

Jon Mitchell, the investigative reporter for the Okinawa Times who interviewed Heathcote and Mohler, has spent years documenting the Pentagon’s brazen use of the Pacific as a testing site and dumping ground for dangerous weapons. “Wherever the United States military goes, it contaminates and damages the environment and human health,” he told me.

He warns that the proposed US military expansion in the Asia-Pacific—its largest since the Vietnam War—will aggravate an environmental disaster caused by 75 years of American wars and intervention. “The Pacific islands have been militarized since World War II by the American military and are now the edge of the American Empire,” he said. “They suffered in the past and will inevitably suffer in the future.”

Mitchell’s recent book Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military’s Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange, explores this largely unknown legacy. Based on hundreds of declassified US documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with US veterans and whistleblowers, it documents the Pentagon’s use, testing, and storage of chemical, nuclear, and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Pacific and the disastrous impact of its flawed handling and storage of such weapons.

Mitchell is originally from Wales and lives in Yokohama. At a time when think tanks are pressing for increased US military presence in the Pacific, his stories of the damage inflicted on Pacific islanders and US veterans should be required reading for every foreign policy wonk in Washington, D.C.

“For decades, US military operations have been contaminating the Pacific region with toxic substances, including plutonium, dioxin, and VX nerve agent,” Mitchell explains in his introduction. “Hundreds of thousands of service members, their families, and residents have been exposed—but the United States has hidden the damage and refused to help victims.”

he dangerous lurch toward military confrontation in Asia underscores Mitchell’s concerns. The US Indo-Pacific Command recently unveiled to Congress that it is seeking $27 billion in additional spending to station additional troops and weapons to counter what it says is a growing military threat from China.

The plans, which also draw on $4.6 billion appropriated by Congress for its Pacific Deterrence Initiative, include a precision strike missile network on the “island chain” running from Okinawa to the Philippines, the first US Marine base in the Pacific since the Korean War, a missile defense system on Guam, and a radar system on Palau in the Marshall Islands. The Pentagon is also seeking funds to “reorganize” the 27,000 Marines based in the Pacific region into small units in Guam, Japan, and Hawaii that can operate inside the range of Chinese rockets.

The harm that could follow from this expansion can be seen in Okinawa, the focus of much of Mitchell’s book. It h0uses 70 percent of the total number of US bases in Japan, where 50,000 American soldiers make up the Pentagon’s largest overseas contingent. Through his tenacious reporting, Mitchell has uncovered story after story about the use and misuse of WMDs on the island prefecture, which was occupied by the US military after the bloody battle for Okinawa in 1945 and handed back to Japan in 1972.

In 2011, Mitchell was the first reporter to interview US Air Force technicians on Okinawa in charge of the storage of nuclear weapons, which included over 1,200 warheads at Kadena and Naha Air Force Bases as well as at US Army ammunition dumps in Chibana and Henoko. He also broke stories about the US testing of biological weapons and its storage and transshipment of Agent Orange—the defoliant used over Vietnam—on Okinawa.

He wrote in his book that all the Air Force technicians he spoke to “agreed that the presence of nuclear weapons on Okinawa made it a key target in a preemptive or a retaliatory strike; one of the veterans described Okinawans as ‘human shields.’” Until that research, “nobody understood that Okinawa has a central part in US WMD testing, usage, and storage throughout the Pacific,” Mitchell told me.

His reporting extends beyond the Cold War. Mitchell uncovered the US military’s accidental use of depleted uranium rounds at an Okinawan live-fire range in 1995 and 1996, its dump of radioactive waste into sewers beneath US bases in mainland Japan in 2011, and hundreds of recent environmental accidents at US bases on Okinawa that were not reported to Japanese authorities.

His book also describes years of high-decibel noise pollution from the American jets flying near residential areas in Okinawa. Such long-term exposure is a serious health risk that can cause heart problems, disrupt sleep patterns, and damage cognitive skills in children. One Japanese university study estimated that noise from Kadena was responsible for an average of 10 deaths a year, with 17,000 people suffering from disturbed sleep.

The problem is particularly acute at the US Marine Corps Air Station at Futenma, which the United States promised to close in 1996 after massive protests from Okinawan citizens. This month, the Ryukyu Shinpo reported, a fleet of FA-18 combat jets held day and night trainings at the contested base. “Though a quarter of a century has passed“ since the agreement to shutter the base, the paper remarked, “the severity of the situation only continues to increase.”

The US military presence on Okinawa “is an environmental justice problem; that’s what the American people must understand,” Mitchell told me in clipped but angry tones. “I really hope my book helps people understand how badly the island has been contaminated, especially because so many American veterans are sick.” Through his research, he has documented claims from more than 250 veterans that Agent Orange was stored on Okinawa during the 1960s and ’70s.

His investigations have won him high praise in Japan. “Mitchell’s work has encouraged us to reject the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy and see commonality so we can help each other,” Hideki Yoshikawa, an anthropologist and activist who directs the Okinawa Environmental Justice Project, told me. “Getting to the truth is the critical first step in our fight.”

arlier this month, the importance of US bases to America’s Pacific strategy was underscored when Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga was the first foreign leader to meet with President Joe Biden at the White House. In a joint statement, the two leaders affirmed their “ironclad support” for the US-Japan military alliance and agreed that Japan would complete construction of a new US Marine air base at Henoko in northern Okinawa as the “only solution” to replace the unpopular Futenma facility.

But, as Mitchell points out, the US military is building the Henoko base, the scene of daily demonstrations, upon a pristine coral reef. “Their environment has been decimated by the American military,” he said.

The Pentagon, through US Forces Japan, denies most of Mitchell’s claims. “The statement that the U.S. does not clean up contaminants is simply false,” a USFJ public affairs officer wrote in a lengthy e-mail. “The GOJ [Government of Japan] has never indicated to the U.S. in any bilateral forum that the Okinawan environment has been ‘decimated.’” The American “response to environmental spills is some of the most aggressive in the world,” the PA officer added. “The health and safety of everyone in and around US installations is one of our top priorities and we take matters of environmental stewardship very seriously.”

USFJ also denied, as it has in the past, reports to Mitchell from US veterans about the storage of Agent Orange on Okinawa. In its response to me, the command referred to reports from Dr. Alvin Young, a military consultant who has spent years trying to convince the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affair that herbicides did not make veterans sick. (A 2016 investigation by ProPublica about him was titled “Dr. Orange: The Secret Nemesis of Sick Vets.”)

A 2013 report from Young’s “independent consulting firm,” USFJ said, verified “the memories of US veterans regarding actual events of the period,” which included “the unloading of large 55 gallon drums from a ship and the spraying of pesticides in jungle operations” in Okinawa. But the investigation “found no record that validated any allegations that Herbicide Orange was ever shipped to or through, unloaded, used or buried on Okinawa.”

Despite USFJ’s claim that environmental protection is a “top priority of US leadership,” the Pentagon has tried to undercut Mitchell’s reporting. In 2016, he discovered through a FOIA request that the USMC Criminal Investigation Division was monitoring him. Around that time, certain websites wouldn’t open from Mitchell’s computer, and he soon found out that the US Air Force was blocking his ISP from accessing its home page. It was, he said, “an apparent attempt to hobble my ability to file FOIA requests online.”

Reporters Without Borders investigated and confirmed Mitchell’s claims and found that other Okinawan journalists were affected. After the organization reported the incidents, the USAF sites were restored to all users.

Through FOIA, Mitchell also documented that the State Department and the CIA have closely followed his reporting and speaking engagements in Japan. In his interview, he was unperturbed by the surveillance.

“For me, such tactics are a sign of success,” he told me. “They show my work is reaching the attention of the US authorities.” He was “particularly pleased” that the CIA had translated a Japanese TV report about his investigations into Agent Orange on Okinawa. “Now that they’re aware of these injustices, perhaps US policy-makers will be courageous enough to step in and right these wrongs.”

nd there are many wrongs. One of the most riveting stories in his book concerns the US military’s storage of chemical weapons on Okinawa. The Pentagon, he writes, began placing these weapons during the Korean War and “incrementally” added more over decades. In 1961, according to declassified US Army reports, the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized US commanders to expand the arsenal to include 13,000 VX land mines and almost 60,000 shells of sarin agent. The chemical weapons were part of an operation called “DOD Project 112 (Red Hat)” in which Heathcote was involved.

But with the island’s humid climate and salty air, the containers began to rust and leak. In July 1969, Americans at the Chibana depot were ordered to sandblast a large sarin bomb to prepare for its repainting when it sprung a leak; 23 service members and one civilian were hospitalized after they started to get short of breath. The leaks, multiple soldiers told Mitchell, were confirmed when rabbits placed at the storage site began to die from the poisonous air.

As Mitchell recounts, the US military did not make the Chibana accident public. But a reporter for The Wall Street Journal heard about it and reported the existence of the chemical weapons on Okinawa. The article caused a global furor and forced President Richard Nixon to renounce the first use of chemical and biological weapons. “That really terrified Okinawans,” he said. “They had no idea the US had 300,000 chemical weapons stored in Okinawa.” But the US government was mostly concerned with the bad publicity. CIA reports obtained by Mitchell suggested that Japanese leftists were exploiting the incident for “a good propaganda ride.”

Mitchell has also reported extensively on water pollution on US bases. During the 1960s, he said, the water near Kadena was so contaminated that “it literally could be set on fire.” In his book, he documents 650 environmental incidents between 1998 and 2016 at Kadena, largely caused by leaks of fuel and firefighting foam. “These incidents have ranged from small fuel leaks of only several liters that stayed on the base to large spills discharging tens of thousands of liters of fuel and raw sewage into local rivers,” he writes. “Military incompetence has repeatedly endangered local water.”

More recently, Mitchell documented severe water contamination in drinking wells around Yokota Air Base, the headquarters of US Forces Japan near Tokyo where American presidents and other senior US officials land when they visit Japan.

In 2000, officials from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government “found no evidence the pollutants came from inside the base.” But Mitchell argues that Japanese government reports carry little weight, because its officials are prohibited from entering US bases to carry out inspections. The problem, he contends, is the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement signed in 1960. “Thanks to this agreement, the American military does not need to clean up contaminated land,” he said. “They do not need to allow Japanese officials to inspect the bases.” In contrast, in the United States “you can go to EPA web pages and find out what bases are contaminated with what.”

Asked about the SOFA clause that prevents Japanese officials from inspecting US bases, USFJ responded with a qualifier. While the “basic language” of SOFA has not changed “since its inception,” it said both the US and Japanese governments agree that the agreement “works well to serve the interests of the two countries.” In the end, it concluded, “the Commander of US Forces Japan is designated as the DoD Lead Environmental Component for Japan, and therefore will ensure US military operations are carried out in a responsible manner that will protect the environment now and for future generations.”

Statements like that, along with the lack of US press coverage, reflect “the disdain on the part of the American elite towards Okinawa,” Mitchell said. “Most American newspapers don’t report about these daily injustices to the people of Okinawa; they don’t report about the contamination; they don’t report about the weapons of mass destruction.”

To make the situation worse, “the American military has dismissed the testimony of servicemen, saying they are mistaken or were lying,” he told me. “So documents are vital.”

For that reason, he has donated most of his FOIA material for permanent display at universities and study centers in Okinawa, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C. “To criticize the military is one of the last remaining taboos of the American mass media,” he says. “The Okinawan people deserve better, so I’m committed to providing justice for them.”

Since taking office on January 20, President Biden has taken several steps on foreign policy that mark a sharp break from the global posture of the Trump administration. On February 4 at the State Department, Biden announced the end of US participation in Saudi Arabia’s offensive war in Yemen, drawing praise from Senator Bernie Sanders and raising hopes that he might end that nightmare altogether.

Progressives were also cheered by Biden’s appointment in January of Rob Malley, the seasoned negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as his envoy to Iran. In his speech at State, Biden explained that his administration is committed to working “in common” with key allies while “engaging our adversaries and our competitors diplomatically, where it’s in our interest.”

But those promises could be undercut by Biden’s policies on Asia, which are shaping up to be the most hawkish in years. Last week, in his first appearance at the Pentagon as president, he made clear that US actions in Asia will be focused almost exclusively on deterring China and its rising military and economic power.

Days before, the US Navy sent two aircraft carrier groups into the South China Sea, a move guaranteed to increase tension with Beijing. More dangerously, as I predicted just days after the election, Biden’s apparent return to Obama-era pressure tactics against North Korea could spark another crisis with the Kim Jong-un regime in Pyongyang, China’s closest ally.

To coordinate his new militaristic approach in the region, Biden has appointed Kurt Campbell, a career diplomat and business lobbyist steeped in the traditional Cold War posture toward Asia. Campbell, a prominent anti-China ideologue, is the new director of “Indo-Pacific Affairs” at the National Security Council. He is working for Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, whom Campbell served with in the Clinton-led State Department.

Campbell has been preparing for his position for years. During the Obama era, he made his name as the chief architect of the “Pivot to Asia,” which shifted the focus of US military forces from the Middle East to the Pacific. With Antony Blinken and Avril Haines—now, respectively, Biden’s secretary of state and director of national intelligence—Campbell played a key role in the Obama administration’s attempt to stop North Korea’s nuclear programs with a combination of military pressure, secret cyber-attacks, and sustained economic sanctions.

Campbell is also known as one of the most pro-Japan officials in government. He is a key figure in a policy faction that sees Japan and its right-wing ruling Liberal Democratic Party as the linchpin of the US alliance system in the Asia region. Like many officials and think tank “experts,” he views South Korea—now under its most progressive government in years—as a subordinate partner to US and Japanese efforts to force North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and contain the growing military power of China.

That policy is manifest in a US initiative championed by the Obama administration to create a de facto military alliance between South Korea and Japan as part of the enlarged “Indo-Pacific” region. That push for a three-way alliance, which intensified under Trump, has become a major source of tension with South Korea, which has been at odds with Japan over its obstinate refusal to acknowledge responsibility for crimes committed against Korean women and industrial workers during World War II.

Campbell’s stance has been endorsed by anti-China hawks in Washington and Tokyo. He “will supercharge the incoming administration’s standing in Asia,” Michael Green, a former adviser to President George W. Bush who holds the “Japan Chair” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Japan Times. CSIS, where Campbell was once affiliated, is a military think tank lavishly funded by the Japanese government, and has pushed in recent years for a more aggressive posture toward North Korea.

Campbell, who was President Obama’s top diplomat on Asia before joining a business consultancy focused on Asia, is also a major player in the so-called Washington “blob” as cofounder of the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish military think tank that has become a kind of farm team for the Biden administration.

Campbell founded CNAS in 2007 with Michèle Flournoy, the former Pentagon official and national security investor who was briefly considered by Biden for secretary of defense. Campbell is one of least 13 people affiliated with CNAS who have been hired by the new administration, according to a report released last week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (among them are DNI Haines and Victoria Nuland, a controversial former CEO of CNAS, who is Biden’s choice for undersecretary of state for political affairs).

CNAS, the report says, is funded by many of the military contractors that supply US forces in Korea and Japan, including General Atomics, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. According to CEPR, the think tank “publishes research and press material that frequently supports the interests of its sponsors without proper disclosure; and even gives its financial sponsors an official oversight role in helping to shape the organization’s research.”

That fits well with Campbell’s profile at the NSC, where he will be carrying out policies favored by CNAS and its military donors.

Biden’s North Korea policy is currently under review and he will make no moves until he is confident that “our allies and our partners [are] with us,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said last week. But Blinken’s comments so far indicate his preference for a pressure campaign against North Korea until Pyongyang takes specific steps to end its nuclear program. That could be problematic: It was Trump’s refusal to provide any interim sanction relief to Kim Jong-un that led to the collapse of their denuclearization talks two years ago in Hanoi. In January, Kim warned that North Korea will continue to build nuclear weapons and ICBMs until there is a fundamental change in the US position.

That seems unlikely in the near term. “The stage is set for another nuclear standoff,” said Hyun Lee, the national organizer for Women Cross DMZ, at a press conference earlier this month. “It is not a question of if; it’s a question of when. We cannot afford another crisis in nuclear brinkmanship like the one we had in 2017.”

In her presentation, Lee took a page from Biden’s playbook. “We can build back better” on the Korean Peninsula, she said, by “reinvesting in diplomatic efforts” to end the Korean War through a peace agreement, as proposed in a new report released by Korea Peace Now. Such a treaty is also supported by South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who has been pressing Biden through his new foreign minister, Chung Eui-yong, to resume talks with Pyongyang.

“The Korean Peninsula peace process is not a choice, but a path that we’re obligated to take,” Chung declared on February 9. But convincing Campbell, whose job during the Obama administration was to keep US allies in line, could be difficult. Consider the actions he took against the only Japanese leader in recent history who dared to challenge American strategic policy in the region.

In August 2009, Japanese voters overwhelmingly rejected the LDP and chose Yukio Hatoyama, the dovish leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), as prime minister. Hatoyama won on a promise to reduce the massive US military presence in Okinawa and make public the secret agreements the militaristic LDP had made with Washington during the Cold War, including one dating back to the US occupation that allowed US naval forces to bring nuclear weapons in and out of Japan anytime they chose.

Hatoyama’s pledge to remake the alliance didn’t sit well with the Obama administration, which was just embarking on Campbell’s “Pacific Pivot.” It dispatched Campbell, then the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, to Tokyo. In an arrogant series of meetings detailed in secret diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, Campbell bluntly informed Hatoyama that the DPJ’s demands were “unhelpful” to the US-Japan alliance and threatened America’s ability to confront “the dramatic increase in China’s military capabilities” from its bases in Japan.

As I reported in The Nation, Hatoyama was forced to back down from his earlier demands. Instead, he agreed to a “compromise” on Okinawa that kept the US Marines in place until Japan built a new base for them in a less inhabited part of the island (that project has yet to be completed and remains a source of tension). Hatoyama resigned in humiliation a year later, and by 2012, the LDP was back in power and doing America’s bidding in Okinawa and elsewhere.

Campbell’s role as an enforcer of US interests with Japan is likely to be repeated in Korea by another key appointee on Asia, Jung Pak, a longtime Korea analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency In January, after a stint as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, she was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, where she will take a leadership role in dealing with the Koreas. During the Trump years, Pak became known for her tart criticism of President Moon for straying beyond US policy in his attempt to forge the peace with Kim Jong-un.

Perhaps that’s why she was hired so quickly by Blinken and his team. In his press remarks last Tuesday, State’s Ned Price stressed the importance of South Korea and Japan’s being on the “same page” as Washington. And on Thursday, in his first phone call with Foreign Minister Chung, Blinken reiterated Price’s point in even more detail. According to the State Department’s readout of the conversation, the new secretary of state “highlighted the importance of continued trilateral U.S.-ROK-Japan cooperation, underscored the continued need for the denuclearization of North Korea, and stressed President Biden’s commitment to strengthening U.S. alliances.” That sounds very much like orders not to deviate from American strategy, not a warm endorsement of friendship with an old ally.

The fruits of renewed advocacy for a broader US-led alliance system in Asia can already be seen. It was no accident that Biden called Japan’s prime minister, the LDP’s Yoshihide Suga, almost a week before he called Moon—a snub that was noted instantly by Hankyoreh, Seoul’s progressive and pro-engagement daily newspaper. “Precedent shows that all four of the past US presidents, upon their inauguration, have spoken on the phone with the Japanese prime minister before the South Korean president,” it noted.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon warned last week that South Korea’s rift with Japan threatens US strategy in the Pacific. “Trilateral cooperation” is “vital to the maintenance of regional peace, prosperity, and stability [which includes] addressing the North Korea nuclear, WMD, and ballistic missile threat and maintaining the rules-based international order,” a Pentagon spokesman said.

Still, the Moon government is happy with the state of the bilateral alliance and is reportedly on the verge of a new agreement with the United States on defense cost-sharing, a volatile issue during the Trump administration. “I think it will be extremely easy [for South Korea and the United States] to synchronize their positions,” Chung said in his first speech as foreign minister. But he added that “the Korean Peninsula peace process is not a choice, but a path that we’re obligated to take.”

If Biden and his NSC decide after their review to open talks with the North, they have appointed several officials skilled in diplomacy who would work with Campbell and Blinken.

They include Wendy Sherman, the new deputy secretary of state, who coordinated an innovative approach to North Korea for the Clinton administration that nearly succeeded in ending its missile program in 2000. Sung Kim, the former US ambassador to South Korea and the Philippines who played a key role in the Trump administration’s early negotiations with Kim Jong-un, was asked in January to remain as assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific, but only on an acting basis.

In other words, the traditional Democratic tug-of-war between hard-liners and pro-engagement forces has begun. Hopefully, the outcome will advance the cause of peace and not the military-industrial complex that much of Biden’s team seems to represent.

Correction: The text has been corrected to note that Yukio Hatoyama was leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, not the Democratic Justice Party.

The friendly interplay last week between Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, and Joe Biden, the incoming president of the United States, signaled subtle but important differences about how to make peace with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

On Thursday, Moon, who has made engagement with the North the hallmark of his presidency, followed other world leaders in congratulating Biden for his election victory. In a 14-minute telephone call, he pledged to “communicate closely” with Biden’s incoming administration “for a forward-looking development of the alliance, the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the establishment of lasting peace.”

The president-elect responded in kind, reaffirming the US security commitment to South Korea and expressing his desire “to strengthen the US-ROK alliance as the linchpin of security and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.” Both statements were designed to show that their alliance, formalized in 1954 just after the Korean War, is still alive and kicking.

Biden’s use of the term “Indo-Pacific” with Moon, however, was surprising. It was coined by the Pentagon during the Trump administration to describe America’s expanded regional alliance system in Asia. Known within national security circles as “The Quad,” the NATO-like grouping now includes the United States as well as the pro-American governments of India, Japan, and Australia. The now-renamed US Indo-Pacific Command, the foundation of the new four-way alliance, is widely understood to be aimed at containing China.

South Korea—despite its own bilateral alliance with the Pentagon—has not formally joined the Quad but instead has been seeking a middle ground between the United States and China. By suggesting that South Korea be part of it, therefore, Biden was indicating in a subtle way his tilt toward multilateralism, Trump’s bête noire. But Biden’s gesture could also indicate a harder line toward both China and North Korea that the South doesn’t support and could further complicate the US-ROK alliance, said Henri Feron, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a fierce critic of US policy.

“Biden could clash with Moon Jae-in’s engagement strategy, in much the same way as George W. Bush clashed with [former President] Kim Dae-jung 20 years ago,” he told The Nation in an interview. Kim, who led the democratic opposition during South Korea’s period of authoritarian rule, was the architect of Seoul’s “Sunshine Policy,” which led to the first-ever summit between North and South in 2000. But he saw his policies crumble when Bush rejected diplomacy and placed the North on his “axis of evil” list, along with Iran and Iraq.

In that context, Biden’s comments Thursday may explain his unusual preelection overture to South Korea. On October 29, just five days before the election, he published a “special contribution” in Yonhap, the Korean government-owned news service, to differentiate himself from Trump. The outgoing US president won grudging respect in South Korea by negotiating with Kim in 2018, but he also alienated many by demanding that South Korea quintuple its sizable financial contribution to the 28,500 US troops on its soil.

Biden sought to distance himself from that policy and impress South Korea with his interest in a negotiated resolution with the North. “As President, I’ll stand with South Korea” by strengthening the alliance “rather than extorting Seoul with reckless threats to remove our troops,” he promised. He also acknowledged “the pain of division” in Korea and promised to engage in “principled diplomacy” toward the goal of “a denuclearized North Korea and a unified Korean Peninsula.”

That contrasted sharply with Biden’s condemnation during the campaign of Trump’s one-on-one talks with Kim, whom he called a “thug” and even compared to Adolf Hitler. Moreover, Biden’s endorsement of “principled diplomacy” would mark a break from the policies of the Obama administration, which refused for eight years to seriously engage with North Korea as part of its “strategic patience” approach, which viewed the North as an illegitimate, “rogue” state ready to collapse at any moment.

Biden’s message in Yonhap was seen in Korea as “a sort of indirect message to the Moon Jae-in government,” a reliable source in Seoul who is close to the South Korean president told The Nation. “I believe Biden is far better than Trump in dealing with the alliance,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The Moon government will accommodate when and if US demands are reasonable. As to the ROK-US alliance, I do not see any major problems.”

On the other hand, this source acknowledged, most of Biden’s team, including his top adviser Antony Blinken, played central roles in Obama’s failed policies, which relied heavily on sanctions and military pressure to force North Korea’s hand. “There seems to be a danger of the return of old ‘strategic patience,’” he told me. “Too many hard-liners who do not have a proper and updated understanding of North Korea seem to be surrounding Biden.”

“I hope the administration stays in touch with the Moon government closely and allows Seoul to interact with Pyongyang before Biden’s inauguration,” he wrote. “The North will be happy to talk to Biden’s USA if the latter abandons a unilateral maximum-pressure approach.” He added, “Of course, the North should abstain from undertaking missile and nuclear testing.” Some US experts fear those tests could start up again anytime.

On November 9, the progressive Hankyoreh urged the incoming administration to adopt a new policy and avoid pressuring South Korea to join its anti-China coalition. “We must persuade Biden not to return to strategic patience,” the newspaper said in an editorial. While Biden offers “an alliance-focused foreign policy that’s more predictable than Trump’s maverick behavior,” his administration “is also likely to push harder for South Korea to join its campaign to contain China through trilateral military cooperation with the US and Japan,” it argued—presciently, it turned out.

Besides Blinken, who was Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Biden’s top picks for national security posts reportedly include Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official and current defense consultant and investor, and Avril Haines, who was deputy director of the CIA during the Obama administration and one of Obama’s key advisers on Korea. All were well-known hawks on North Korea, but also played critical roles in expanding the US regional military alliance in Asia.

Their attitude toward the North was summarized a few years ago by Jeffrey Bader, a Brookings Institution scholar once known as the “architect” of the Obama-Biden policy toward North Korea. “Many of us believed that the most likely long-term solution to the North’s nuclear pursuits lay in the North’s collapse and absorption into a South-led reunified Korea,” Bader wrote in his 2012 memoir about the Obama administration.

President Moon, who was the chief of staff to the late President Roh Moo-hyun during an earlier period of engagement with the North, is well aware of Obama’s record on North Korea (he made that clear when I interviewed him in 2017). On Monday, he told Korea reporters that he will soon open “multi-sided” communications with Biden’s team to ensure there is no “vacuum” in the alliance.

Moon also expressed hope that “the two Koreas, as parties (directly) concerned regarding the Korean Peninsula issue, will be able to play a more important role” in the peace process. That seemed to underscore his wish, stymied by Trump, to expand economic and cultural ties with North Korea as a way to build the atmosphere for a peace settlement on the peninsula.

Many in South Korea believe that Biden’s long history with Korea, including his friendship with Kim Dae-jung and support for Korean Americans seeking to unite with their families in North Korea, bodes well for the future. Through his surrogates, Biden has signaled that he would talk to Kim, but only after his government and foreign policy team had completed the necessary groundwork for a serious negotiation. Biden has also pledged to expand humanitarian assistance to the North and make it easier for international organizations to provide that help.

“Joe Biden understands that the North Korea issue is pretty complicated and you can’t just solve it with a couple of leader-to-leader summits,” Brian McKeon, a close Biden aide and former Pentagon official, told Yonhap News in October. “I think he would be willing to meet with (Kim) if it was part of an actual strategy that moves us forward on the denuclearization objective.”

The first test of Biden’s pledge to work with Seoul to create a “lasting peace” in Korea will come when he meets soon with President Moon, as they pledged to do in their call last week. The Korean leader badly wants the United States to resume its talks with Kim Jong-un, and his supporters are urging him to get that process moving.

In a rather audacious move on Friday, Representative Lee Nak-yon, the chairman of Moon’s Democratic Party, said he would urge Biden to reaffirm the joint statement of principles signed by President Trump and Chairman Kim at their 2018 summit in Singapore as the “starting point” for his future negotiations.

The Trump-Kim statement, which is often criticized for lacking specifics, committed the United States and North Korea to build “new relations,” cooperate with the South “to build a lasting and stable peace regime,” and work toward “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

“It has legitimacy and authority, and to its content the South and North Koreas and the U.S. have all agreed,” said Lee. How Biden responds to such a proposal will explain a lot about his intentions.

Without a fundamental change in US policy, South Korea could be left on its own. During Trump’s talks with Kim, President Moon failed to impress the US government and the hawkish think tanks that drive American policy with the importance of ending the Korean War through a peace treaty, which North Korea has been seeking for years and US peace groups believe would be an important breakthrough for the Korean Peninsula. The Democratic leadership has not shown any interest, either.

Biden’s people “fail to acknowledge the unresolved state of the Korean War and what role that plays in the continuous standoff” on the peninsula, said Christine Ahn, the founder and executive director of the pro-engagement Women Cross DMZ. “Despite paying lip service to diplomacy, a Biden administration seems ready to continue the failed hawkishness that has driven North Korea policy for decades,” she said in an interview just before Biden’s election. A congressional resolution calling for a peace agreement in Korea now has 52 sponsors, including the first Republican, Ahn said.

Biden’s likely national security adviser Blinken underscored Ahn’s concerns in a detailed interview with CBS News on September. A Biden administration, he said, would “work closely with allies like South Korea and Japan” and encourage China to “build genuine economic pressure to squeeze North Korea to get it to the negotiating table. We need to cut off its various avenues and access to resources—something we were doing very vigorously at the end of the Obama-Biden administration.”

Starting off with that kind of pressure would be a fatal mistake, said Feron of the Center for International Policy. “Unless Moon can convince Biden to send conciliatory signals to Pyongyang, it is likely that we will soon see North Korean long-range missile tests and a renewed escalation in military tensions,” he predicted. Feron also pointed to recent remarks on the alliance from Lee Soo-hyuck, South Korea’s ambassador to Washington, that underscore the tension between Seoul and Washington over these issues.

“Just because Korea chose the U.S. 70 years ago does not mean it has to choose the U.S. for the next 70 years, too,” Lee told a subcommittee of the Korean National Assembly in October. “Korea can choose to keep siding with the U.S. only if it is able to love the country and if it serves the nation’s interests.” That seems to be a good summary of where the two countries stand today, on the brink of a new era in Washington.

As Joe Biden kicks his presidential campaign against Donald Trump into high gear, concern is growing inside the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that the foreign policy and political outreach teams he has assembled don’t come close to reflecting the change—and reduced military spending—they hope to see after the November election.

The unrest is building as Senator Bernie Sanders, whom many of the dissidents supported, is privately expressing doubts about the direction of the Biden campaign and asking the former vice president to reach out more to the left. But Sanders has said little about foreign policy or national security since Biden secured the nomination, leaving the floor to rank-and-file Democratic activists.

They are particularly concerned about the influence of people like Antony Blinken, the chief foreign policy adviser to the Biden campaign. He was Biden’s top aide when he voted in 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“We don’t want the same people who took us to war in Iraq to be the stewards of our foreign policy,” says Marcy Winograd, a longtime anti-war activist in Santa Barbara, who was elected as a Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention in August, in an interview. “Why would Biden want these people advising him? You’d think he’d want to keep as much distance as possible between himself and people who steered him in the wrong direction in the past.”

Voices like hers are a sizable presence within the party. During the online convention, over 400 delegates signed an open letter to Biden asking him to “hire new foreign policy advisors” and ensure they “have a track record for advocating and implementing diplomatic solutions rather than disastrous military interventions involving invasions, occupations, torture and drone attacks.”

Meanwhile, a group of Muslim Americans, many of them Sanders supporters, have been critical of Farooq Mitha, a former Pentagon official who is Biden’s senior adviser on Muslim American engagement. His high-profile presence in the campaign, along with other former defense officials, has split the Muslim community and detracts from the need to siphon the military budget into technologies needed to fight climate change, said Nadia Ahmad, a Sanders supporter from Florida. “That’s our top national security challenge,” Ahmad, an environmental law professor in Orlando, told The Nation. Mitha declined to comment.

In addition to Blinken, Democratic activists have focused on Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon official and military investor reportedly slated to become secretary of defense; and Avril Haines, the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who will lead the foreign policy side of Biden’s transition team if he wins. She crafted President Obama’s policies on drone warfare as well as the administration’s tough approach to North Korea, which Biden has promised to revive.

Blinken and the Biden team have not responded to the criticism. But in the past, Blinken has characterized the 2002 resolution on Iraq as “a vote for tough diplomacy,” while Biden has said his “mistake” on the Iraq War was to assume President Bush “would use the authority we gave him properly.” (Blinken did not return e-mails seeking comment.)

But policies are not the only issue: Biden’s critics have also focused on the ties of his advisers to the military-industrial complex, which run deep.

After leaving government, Blinken and Flournoy created WestExec Advisors, a “strategic advisory firm” that works closely with military contractors and was modeled after the high-powered consultancy pioneered by Henry Kissinger during the Cold War, according to a recent profile in The American Prospect. Its influence within the Democratic Party is significant.

Flournoy, who also sits on the board of directors of intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, was an adviser to vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, as was WestExec principal Matt Olsen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Obama. Haines, the former CIA official heading the transition team, is also a principal with WestExec.

Winograd, a retired teacher who ran for Congress three times in Los Angeles, including twice against former Democratic representative Jane Harman, is leading the effort to pressure Biden not to appoint Flournoy. Her potential nomination to the Pentagon was endorsed earlier this month by conservative columnist George Will.

In communications with Democrats, Winograd has pointed in particular to Flournoy’s role as cofounder of the Center for a New American Security, which during the Obama years became a champion of the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. Under Flournoy, CNAS also became one of the most hawkish voices on confronting China. (In June, Flournoy suggested in Foreign Affairs that the United States should have “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours” as a way to deter Chinese leaders from aggressive military action.)

“This is a woman who is a war profiteer, is well-invested in militarism, and will expand the military rather than de-escalate on the world stage,” says Winograd. “Flournoy’s a dangerous person and should not be considered as a secretary of defense.”

The conservative tilt to Biden’s foreign policy team was also the driving force behind the Muslim Delegates and Allies Coalition, a new group that “aims to ensure a broad consultation and coordination with the Muslim constituencies across the United States.” Several of its members have led the attacks on Mitha, the Biden adviser, whose role in the campaign has opened a schism within the Muslim community of Democratic voters.

Mitha is one of the cofounders of Emgage USA, the nation’s largest Muslim outreach group, which endorsed Sanders during the primary but later threw its support to Biden. In July, the former vice president addressed the group in a “Million Muslim Votes Summit” held online. Although Mitha has severed his formal connection with Emgage, he still retains close ties to the organization through his family, The Electronic Intifada reported on September 9.

Tensions about Mitha and Emgage came to a head in August after Biden campaign officials disavowed statements made by Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour in favor of the BDS movement, which supports boycotting, divestment from, and sanctions against Israel. That prompted a heated meeting between Muslim and Palestinian leaders, including Mitha and members of Emgage, and Blinken. That meeting left some participants fuming because Blinken, while expressing “regret,” did not offer an apology, according to Ahmad, the Sanders supporter from Florida, who was on the call.

On Tuesday, Ahmad and other members of the Muslim Delegates group released an “open letter to Muslim leaders” asking them to “drop Emgage” and requesting the Biden campaign to remove Mitha from his position with the campaign. As part of their case, they charged that Mitha and another Emgage leader “sought to obtain concessions in the form of more appointments in the Biden campaign and/or transition team in lieu of a public apology. Such an apology was the specific demand of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim American leaders and activists.”

Over 100 Muslim community leaders and activists signed the letter, including Palestinian activists, Sanders supporters, academics, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America. They charged that Mitha and other “high-ranking” Emgage officials and board members have “worked in lockstep” with AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, which they said “engages in deep Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian activity.” The letter also cited Mitha’s work “at the Pentagon during the Obama administration, helping to normalize ties between Israel and Arab nations under the banner of ‘Track II diplomacy.’”

Wa’el Alzayat, the CEO of Emgage, released a statement to The Nation taking strong issue with the letter. While he didn’t respond directly to the volatile charge about AIPAC, Alzayat said that Emgage is “deeply focused on turning out Muslim American Voters.”

That work, he said, “has been, and will be, essential to taking back the White House in 2020. And to say otherwise undermines the efforts of organizers and activists that are part of our Million Muslim Votes campaign.” He added that Emgage “has played critical roles electing Muslim Americans to public office,” including raising funds to support Representative Rashida Tlaib’s recent re-election campaign, who has praised Emgage as “incredibly important.”

Ahmad, who has been active in getting out the vote for Biden in Florida, told The Nation that the criticism of Mitha and Emgage reflects a desire on the part of progressive Muslim Americans to energize voters concerned about the impact of militarism and climate change on their states and communities.

“There needs to be people at the top of the Biden campaign who understand the nuances and concerns of our community instead of being identified with special-interest lobbying groups, especially if they’re working for military contractors or worked at the Pentagon,” she said.

While praising Biden’s pledge to “build back better” by investing $2 trillion in US infrastructure, Ahmad, who has published widely on climate change, told The Nation that much higher amounts—of $8-10 trillion—are needed. “I see a decrease in our military spending as critical to survival of the country and the planet,” she said. If Biden is serious about tackling climate change, he would hire a “cadre of activists for environmental justice. Bernie supporters feel betrayed in a lot of ways.”

Could Biden follow her lead? Possibly: Over the weekend, as fires ravaged California and Oregon, he tweeted, “The science is clear, and deadly signs like the fires out West are unmistakable—climate change poses an existential threat to our way of life.”

But any chance that Biden might significantly decrease military spending was considerably dampened in an interview he gave to Stars and Stripes. “I don’t think [defense budget cuts] are inevitable, but we need priorities in the budget,” Biden told the military newspaper. “I’ve met with a number of my advisors and some have suggested in certain areas the budget is going to have to be increased.”

As US denuclearization talks with North Korea have hopelessly stalled and inter-Korea tensions are rising fast, citizen groups on both sides of the Pacific hope to convince the United States to embrace a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. The campaigns to resuscitate US-Korean diplomacy kicked off on July 27, 67 years after US and North Korean generals signed the armistice that ended the fighting but left the country with an uneasy truce.

The Korean War “never came to a formal conclusion,” Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ and one of the organizers of the peace treaty initiative, declared on Monday at a “bipartisan round table” on resolving the security crisis in Korea. “It’s important to come together across the political spectrum to show consensus for ending America’s longest overseas conflict.” The forum was cosponsored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative.

For South Koreans, changing relations with North Korea is a matter of utmost urgency. They see a peace treaty as the best way to rejuvenate the once-promising reconciliation process initiated by President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong-un in 2018. Those talks broke down in acrimony last year after President Moon failed to persuade the Trump administration to lift US and UN sanctions that have blocked North and South from moving ahead on the cross-border economic projects they initiated at a summit meeting in Pyongyang two years ago.

“Peace efforts on the Korean Peninsula are retreating as the hard-won agreements between the two Koreas have not been implemented properly,” 324 Korean civic groups declared Monday, as they launched an international “Korea Peace Appeal” to collect 100 million signatures favoring a treaty by 2023. “Though it is late, the governments of concerned countries should now come forward earnestly and responsibly to end the Korean War.” The coalition was organized by the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of South Korea’s most influential civil society groups, and several other political and religious organizations.

Their movement is partly a response to recent events. Over the last two months, Chairman Kim and his influential sister Kim Yo Jong have criticized Moon for his dependence on the United States, while their Foreign Ministry has slammed him as “nonsensical” for trying to mediate a deal with Trump. In June, the North Korean military even blew up the North-South liaison offices in Gaesong, just north of the border, to underscore its anger.

A few days later, however, the senior Kim overruled his military and called off plans to deploy more troops along the border. With his diplomacy at issue, Moon has appointed a new national security team to reach out to the North and get the peace process back on track.

That’s also the driving force for American lawmakers. A peace treaty “would go a long way to facilitate the peace process,” US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who successfully introduced a resolution (HR 152) to end the Korean War in Congress last year, said in opening Monday’s forum. “If we take the first step of declaring the end of the Korean War, it could incentivize leaders of the Korean Peninsula to take action.”

Both Moon and Kim have expressed a desire for a peace treaty or, short of that, a joint declaration by the three governments that the Korean War is over. And the fact that Representative Khanna’s resolution on ending the war has 46 cosponsors in the House reflects growing support for the idea here.

But getting the Trump administration or its successor behind a peace treaty could be difficult. Jessica Lee, a senior research fellow in Quincy’s East Asia Program, said that US opposition to a treaty—which extends through the Washington foreign policy apparatus—“comes down to three words—military-industrial complex.”

“We have to recognize that the military-industrial complex was born out of the Korean War and really thrives on a world of threats, both real and imagined,” she explained. To make a treaty possible, proponents must build “a domestic constituency that says, ‘No, these endless wars and the profiteering from war has to end.’”

Daniel Davis, a retired US Army officer who advised the South Korean military in the 1990s, made a similar argument. “The best thing for American national security is to work towards a peace agreement, because the absence of peace means that we have to continue to put billions of dollars every single year into our alliance with South Korea and for troops in Japan,” he said. “We need to move from a wartime mentality to a peacetime mentality.”

Trump, who is in deep political trouble over his handling of the coronavirus epidemic, has shown no inclination to move in that direction or to shake off the influence of John Bolton, the hard-liner he fired earlier this year from his post as national security adviser. In his self-righteous best seller The Room Where It Happened, Bolton made it clear that he despised the very idea of Moon’s engagement policies, which triggered the Trump-Kim talks in the first place.

His contempt seems to have rubbed off on Trump, who he claims threatened to withdraw all US troops from Korea unless Moon agreed to drastically increase South Korean payments for the 28,500 US soldiers it hosts. “The whole diplomatic fandango was South Korea’s creation, relating more to its ‘unification’ agenda than serious strategy on Kim’s part or ours,” Bolton wrote in his book. “It was risky theatrics, in my view, not substance.”

To the consternation of Korean progressives and the Moon government, he ridiculed Moon for “emphasizing inter-Korean relations over denuclearization.” Bolton was also critical of Moon for seeking an “action-for-action” plan that would allow North Korea to show incremental movement toward dismantling its nuclear capability in exchange for concessions from the United States on sanctions.

That never happened, of course. At their second summit in Hanoi in March 2019, Trump, at Bolton’s insistence, balked at an intermediate deal that would have involved the North closing down its large nuclear facility at Yongbyon in return for the lifting of the UN Security Council sanctions imposed on North Korean exports in 2017.

“If Trump had made that deal in Hanoi, we’d be much further down the road” toward peace, Davis, the retired US Army officer, told a June event marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War organized by the conservative Center for the National Interest. North Korea, he added, “sees that as a betrayal.” To get a deal, we “must build trust and acknowledge where they’re coming from.” Earlier this month, Trump sent Stephen Beigun, the deputy secretary of state and his chief negotiator on North Korea, to Seoul in hopes of reviving the talks. But the gesture was widely derided as unrealistic.

“Unless Biegun is bringing some indication that Trump is ready to give in to North Korean demands to lift sanctions in exchange for very limited moves on the nuclear front, I don’t see much basis for another summit or even for any level of negotiations,” Daniel Sneider, a specialist on US relations with Korea and Japan at Stanford University, told the Korea Times. Beigun didn’t, and the North responded, “We have no intention to sit face to face with the U.S.,” Kwon Jong Gun, a North Korean diplomat, wrote for the state-run Korean Central News Agency just before Beigun arrived in Seoul.

In his remarks on Monday, Representative Khanna suggested that Joe Biden might “take up the initiative” with North Korea if he is elected president this fall. Khanna, who backed Senator Bernie Sanders during the primaries, noted that Biden and President Barack Obama “never had Moon as a partner” during the years they were in power. With a progressive president in South Korea driving the peace process, we could “ultimately have an agreement,” he said. “There isn’t a military solution.”

So far, except for saying he might meet with Kim under certain conditions, Biden has expressed little interest in changing US policy in East Asia. Judging from his foreign policy team, he is likely to create a hawkish administration, especially on North Korea. During the debates, Biden often referred to Kim as a “thug”—not exactly a recipe for negotiations.

But, Khanna argues, if Biden carries out his promise to work more closely with US allies, he might be more attentive to South Korea and Moon, and that could make a difference. To that end, Khanna told the forum that he will be traveling to South Korea after the pandemic to meet with President Moon and offer support for his diplomatic efforts.

Clearly, a fundamental shift is needed. Women Cross DMZ and the Quincy Institute will argue in an upcoming report that both Trump’s “maximum pressure” and Obama’s “strategic patience” failed to resolve the crisis, Ahn announced at Monday’s forum. With other peace groups, they will call for a new approach based on a comprehensive peace agreement. “Peace is the precondition for denuclearization and improving human rights, not the other way around,” Ahn said.

“Our inability to end this war,” said Quincy’s Jessica Lee, “has really colored the US–South Korean alliance and the possibility of building an enduring peace in East Asia at large.”

On the afternoon of June 1, as President Donald Trump raged about the Black Lives Matter protests outside his gates, reporters noticed a familiar figure in Lafayette Park across from the White House. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, was scoping out the scene with top military and law enforcement officers. It was an ominous sight, coming just hours after the president promised the nation’s governors that “we will activate Bill Barr and activate him strongly.”1

What happened next would transform the outcry and anger about racial injustice into a national uprising against Trump and his white nationalist agenda. Over the next few days, starting with Barr’s brazen order to clear the park, Washington experienced an unprecedented military operation and occupation. Nearly 8,000 troops from the Army’s National Guard and an astounding array of federal security forces and intelligence assets were assembled to confront the protesters.2

With US military leaders hesitant to use their troops against Americans, Barr has emerged as Trump’s wartime consigliere—an attorney generalissimo for the times. There are few people in Washington more suited for this task: Servility to presidential power, mixed with fealty to the institutions of government control, have long been hallmarks of Barr’s career.3

“You can rise fast when you’re willing to tell your boss whatever he wants to know,” says Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years in the FBI before leaving in 2004. “Barr spent a lot of time working in these agencies, so his knowledge of how they operate is helpful to using them in an aggressive manner.”4

In fact, a deep look into Barr’s career exposes a deep commitment to what Dick Cheney called “the dark side”—the insidious world of covert operations, executive action, and mass surveillance. Moreover, his experiences in the national security state and the private telecommunications industry reveal a man who has operated at the pinnacle of America’s privatized intelligence system since the dawn of the digital age.5

As attorney general for President George H.W. Bush in 1992, Barr authorized one of the nation’s first domestic spying operations. The Department of Justice (DOJ) program, first disclosed by USA Today in 2015, was a giant database that “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.” The bulk collection system was operated secretly by the DOJ’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) until it was suspended in 2013.6

The DEA program “ultimately became a model for the NSA’s phone records collection program,” which the agency used to collect the domestic calls and e-mails of millions of American citizens after 9/11, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote last year in a critical analysis of Barr’s career.7

Barr was part of the NSA spying program, too, not as a government official but as a top executive with Verizon, the company formed from a merger with NSA contractor GTE, where Barr worked for many years. Like Cheney, who was instrumental to the NSA’s secret operation, Barr seems to know every lever of power available to a president willing to use them. (The DOJ did not respond to questions about Barr’s career.)8

William Barr is one of four sons of Donald Barr, a former member of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1968, he enrolled at Columbia University, where his father taught for many years. There, he had his first experience in confronting the American left when a group of radicals seized campus buildings to protest Columbia’s role in gentrifying black neighborhoods and the university’s close ties to the Institute for Defense Analysis.9

The Institute is a military think tank that, according to an insider’s account of the Columbia struggle, developed weapons for the counterinsurgency wars the United States was fighting in Vietnam and across the world. Barr hated the protests. In a recent profile, the historian Paul Cronin remembered Barr as part of a gang of upper-class thugs called the “Majority Coalition” that physically fought and threatened anti-war demonstrators.10

From Columbia, Barr went straight into the CIA, where he worked from 1973 to 1977 as an analyst and assistant legislative counsel. After a stint working on domestic policy for President Reagan, he joined the first Bush administration, where he rose from deputy AG to attorney general. He quickly became known as a determined advocate for the expansive use of presidential and military power. This was also his entrée into the early surveillance state, which began with the domestic spying program he ordered at the DEA.11

In 1993, Barr was hired as general counsel and executive vice president of GTE, the world’s third-largest telecommunications network. After GTE merged in 1999 with Bell Atlantic, it was renamed Verizon, and Barr stayed on as general counsel, where he remained until 2008. This period of his career—where he made the bulk of his $40 million fortune—is typically described as a shift toward antitrust and industry regulation issues.12

ut that’s only part of the story. When Barr joined GTE, he also became counsel for GTE’s government services division. Created in 1984, it had become, through a series of acquisitions, one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, providing secure communications systems to the Army, Navy, and Air Force as well as the NSA. Barr hinted at GTE’s classified work in 1996, when he testified before a hearing of a commission on “the roles and capabilities” of US intelligence after the Cold War.13

“There’s never been a greater need for a robust intelligence capability in this country than now,” he said. “I would include not only the function of collection of intelligence, but also my view that we need a very strong covert action capability.” It was an illuminating choice of words, because both “collection” and “covert” were key to one of the programs that Barr inherited when he took over in 1993.14

In the mid-1980s, GTE’s government unit was tapped by NSA’s Operations Directorate to develop a digital storage system for voice communications collected by NSA listening posts. At the time, of course, the NSA’s secret work and its system of global surveillance were little known to Americans.15

MINSTREL, its code name, “was the largest Automated Data Processing contract to date for NSA at that time,” says Tom Drake, the prominent whistle-blower, who worked on the project as a contractor and later exposed corruption at an NSA program run by military giant Science Applications International Corporation. (See “Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers,” The Nation, March 2013.)16

Drake was hired by GTE in 1989 and soon discovered that MINSTREL’s costs were out of control. The award was for $144 million, “but with lots of cost overruns, NSA ended up spending closer to $250 million.”17

Much of that, he believed, was due to outright fraud. Moreover, the program didn’t work, forcing the NSA to keep extending the contract. When Drake asked a top GTE executive about its failure to deliver MINSTREL on time, he said he was told that “we’re under no obligation to show anything—all we need to show is best effort.”18

In 1991, disgusted at what he’d seen, Drake took his complaints to the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General as well as GTE’s general counsel—Barr’s immediate predecessor. “That’s how I became a whistle-blower,” Drake told me. “This is where, to my horror, I really began to appreciate how run amuck the military-industrial complex had become.”19

MINSTREL, which was just one of the contracts GTE held with the NSA, was eventually canceled, partly because of Drake’s IG complaint. In 1996, Barr helped orchestrate the government unit’s merger with General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). Following its recent acquisition of CSRA Inc., GDIT is now one of the nation’s five largest intelligence contractors, with a strong presence at the NSA.20

After he moved from GTE to Verizon, Barr turned his knowledge of the mechanics of intelligence collection to domestic surveillance. In 2001, the phone giant was one of a handful of companies that participated in Stellar Wind, the massive warrantless-surveillance program launched by the George W. Bush administration.21

“Under Barr’s watch, Verizon allowed the NSA without any court approval to intercept the contents of Americans’ phone calls and emails and to vacuum up in bulk the metadata associated with Americans’ phone calls and internet activities,” the ACLU wrote in 2019.22

Some of Barr’s hard-line policies on dissent may have come into play in recent weeks. On May 31, he activated a network of 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to confront what he called the “violent agenda” pursued by “anarchistic and far left extremists” using “Antifa-like” tactics. “Basically, this was Barr’s attempt to mollify Trump,” said German, the former FBI agent.23

Meanwhile, reports that surveillance drones and airplanes were observed over both Minneapolis and Washington have sparked concerns in Congress that federal agencies might be conducting illegal surveillance. In response, on June 11, a top Pentagon official informed the House that none of the collection agencies, including the NSA, had been asked by the White House “to undertake any unlawful or inappropriate intelligence activities.”24

With Barr in charge, there’s a good possibility that the DEA might be up to its old tricks again. On June 2, Buzzfeed News obtained a memorandum from the agency’s acting administrator, Timothy J. Shea, stating that the DEA had been granted “sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” of the protests. That prompted Representative Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to ask Barr to “immediately rescind” the authorities, which he called “unwarranted and antithetical” to civil rights.25

Meanwhile, the protests in Washington continue day after day, and the crossroads near the White House where Barr’s security forces attacked demonstrators and reporters has been named Black Lives Matter Place. Chances are good that the new title will last much longer than Barr’s ugly legacy of providing legal cover for Trump, arguably the most hated president in the city’s history.26

On May 18, South Koreans paused to mark the 40th anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, one of the most traumatic days in their history. The 10-day revolt was triggered when students and ordinary citizens protesting a military coup by a renegade general were attacked by airborne special forces with a viciousness and cruelty that Koreans had not experienced since the darkest days of the Korean War.

The armed resistance by Gwangju’s citizen militia liberated the city from the marauding troops. The townspeople, freed from decades of military rule, kept their city running, buried their dead, and transformed themselves into a self-organized system of mutual aid they now call the Gwangju Commune.

Those who died in Gwangju “believed that the survivors would manage to open up a better world” and “were convinced that the defeat of that day would become the victory of tomorrow,” President Moon Jae-in declared on May 18 in the city square where protesters were killed in 1980.

But their dream of a just society was snuffed out on May 27 by Korean Army troops, who were released from their usual duties on the border with North Korea to reoccupy Gwangju. The official death toll from the uprising stands at 165, but residents believe that more than 300 people were killed, with dozens still unaccounted for.

Despite that defeat, Gwangju’s resistance is now seen as the first shot in the mass movement that, in 1987, swept aside a quarter-century of dictatorship to create one of the world’s most impressive democracies. After years of hostility by conservative governments and attacks on its legitimacy by South Korean rightists, the Gwangju Uprising is widely celebrated in art, music, literature, and film.

President Moon, who came of age as a political activist during South Korea’s authoritarian era, promised to give momentum to an independent truth commission that is investigating the Korean military’s use of force, including the question of who ordered the firing on civilians and sent a helicopter to strafe a building near Gwangju’s center. The commission, he said in an interview with the Gwangju affiliate of broadcast company MBC, would also seek to identify individuals who sought to “conceal and distort the truth” of the Gwangju Uprising.

That’s a tall order, because that trail leads straight to the United States and its president, Jimmy Carter, who ran for office in 1976 vowing to make human rights the centerpiece of American foreign policy. Sadly, he failed to do that in Gwangju, sparking the worst crisis in US-Korean relations since 1945. What happened there stoked years of anti-American sentiment, and Gwangju has remained a point of contention ever since.

As some Koreans are painfully aware, the Carter administration played an essential role in Gwangju by helping the coup leader, Lt. Gen. Chun Doo-hwan, crush the uprising. At a high-level White House meeting on May 22 that we first reported in 1996, Carter’s national security team approved the use of force to retake the city and agreed to provide short-term support to Chun if he agreed to long-term political change (that, of course, didn’t happen until he was forced out by massive protests in 1987).

The stakes were high, and were exacerbated for US policy-makers by the simultaneous crisis over the Islamic revolution in Iran, which eventually brought Carter’s presidency down. As the once-secret minutes to the White House meeting show, plans were also discussed for direct US military intervention in Korea if the situation in Gwangju spiraled out of control.

Within days of the May 22 meeting, the US commander in Korea, Gen. John Wickham, released two divisions of Korean Army troops from the US-South Korean Combined Forces Command (CFC) to retake the city. Fearing that North Korea could intervene, the Pentagon also asked the Korean military to delay its assault on Gwangju to give the US military time to dispatch an aircraft carrier and several spy planes to the peninsula, according to 1989 testimony by South Korea’s martial law commander at the time.

Under that cover, Chun’s forces reentered the city and killed the remaining rebels. Hundreds more were hunted down and tortured in a military prison in Gwangju (it’s now a museum where former prisoners work as guides).

Chun was tried and convicted in 1996 of treason and murder, but he was later pardoned. To this day, he continues to deny any responsibility for the mass killing. In its official statements about the incident, the United States has consistently described Gwangju as a domestic issue for South Korea. “When all the dust settles, Koreans killed Koreans, and the Americans didn’t know what was going on and certainly didn’t approve it,” a State Department official said in 1996 when the White House meeting was first reported.

Carter, who has won global praise for his humanitarian actions since leaving the presidency, has never spoken publicly about his actions in Gwangju (through an intermediary, he declined to comment for this article). His most extensive remarks came in an interview on CNN on June 1, 1980, when he was asked by the journalist Daniel Schorr if US policy in Korea reflected a conflict between human rights and national security.

“There is no incompatibility,” Carter snapped. South Korea, he said, typified a situation where “the maintenance of a nation’s security from Communist subversion or aggression is a prerequisite to the honoring of human rights and the establishment of democratic processes.” Shamefully, none of this was true.

As two of the principal journalists who have investigated US involvement in Gwangju, we know there is much more to the story. Over the past five years, we have interviewed dozens of participants and survivors of the uprising as well as many of the US officials involved in the decision-making that May.

Now, at a time of growing tensions between Seoul and Washington over North Korea and the cost of US military bases in the South, we have uncovered deeper evidence of US complicity in Gwangju and what the US government knew and when it knew it. The story is much worse than we thought.

• When Carter’s White House made the decision to support Chun’s crackdown on the rebellion, it knew that 60 people in Gwangju had been shot to death and over 400 injured just 24 hours earlier, and that Chun was directly responsible. We learned that from notes taken by a senior Pentagon official who was present at the critical White House meeting on May 22.
• General Wickham, the US commander, was fully briefed on the Korean Army’s planning for the May 27 assault on Gwangju in a May 21 meeting with Gen. Lew Byung-hyun, the CFC’s deputy commander. Lew, in turn, told the US general that he was carrying out the wishes of Chun and the coup leaders. Wickham himself confirmed this.
• The US contingency plans for Gwangju included sending additional US ground forces into Korea, a volatile proposal that has never been disclosed before and indicates how seriously US commanders and the Carter administration viewed the situation. If it had escalated, “we would have been much more aggressive” and asked for “additional support from the Pacific Command to suppress the unrest,” General Wickham told us.
• The prime mover in the May 22 meeting was Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who had been deeply involved over the previous three years restoring once-frayed ties between the US and South Korean militaries and strengthening the Cold War alliance between the US, Korean, and Japanese armed forces.

The Gwangju Uprising was the culmination of a series of events that unfolded in South Korea after the assassination of the former dictator, Park Chung-hee, on October 26, 1979. Fed up with 18 years of harsh dictatorship, Korean students and workers began agitating for a return to democracy. As tensions escalated over the next six months, General Chun and a small group within the military launched a rolling coup, taking over the military, the Korean CIA, and then, on May 17, the government itself.

“This might have been the longest coup d’état in world history,” says Prof. Kwang Ho Chun, a military strategy specialist and professor of international studies at Jeonbuk National University in North Cholla Province.

In the months before the coup, US officials, led by diplomat (and liberal icon) Richard Holbrooke, tried to find a middle ground between the martial law forces and the pro-democracy movement [see Shorrock, “Debacle in Kwangju,” The Nation, December 9, 1996]. “The United States had at least five months to support Korean democracy,” but failed, Professor Chun said in his interview. While the US emphasis during Gwangju on Korean security was understandable, he said, US officials should have recognized that “sometimes democracy can improve a security situation much faster” than military action.

In fact, as the rebellion intensified, Carter and his advisers began to see it as a much greater threat than Chun’s violent takeover of the government. The situation came to a head over a 48-hour period between May 21, 1980, when Chun’s forces opened fire on the people of Gwangju, and May 22, when the United States threw its support behind the Korean generals.

“May 21, 1 pm, was a very critical point,” Lee Jae-eui, an activist and writer who witnessed the massacre in front of Gwangju’s provincial capitol building, told us as he stood on the exact spot of the firing years later.

For three days, Chun’s paratroopers had used boots, clubs, bayonets, and even flamethrowers to terrorize the city, filling the morgues with the dead and overwhelming the hospitals with bodies ripped apart by the violence. Angered and shocked beyond measure, the people, led at first by young students and joined by taxi drivers, bus drivers, shopkeepers, gangsters, and prostitutes, fought back with vehicles and their own handmade weapons.

By midday, hundreds of thousands of furious Gwangju residents surrounded the paratroopers, who had made their stand at the old capitol building. Suddenly, and without warning, Lee says, the troops opened fire.

Repeated volleys from M-16s turned Gwangju’s now-famous Geumnam-ro Street into a scene of carnage. “I saw so many people killed, so many injured, with blood everywhere,” recalls Lee. “I suddenly had a very strange feeling, that I had to join the struggle to fight the military.” The massacre was indelibly sealed in Korean memory in A Taxi Driver, the acclaimed 2018 film starring Song Kang-ho, the beloved character actor from the Academy Award–winning Parasite.

In the hours that followed, Gwangju residents raided police stations and armories in nearby towns and grabbed carbines and other weapons, and by that evening had taken over the city. But tragically, as recounted in Lee’s famous book about the uprising, Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, many of the fighters naively believed that the United States, as the champion of democracy, would come to their aid.

Then came the invasion on May 27. “The citizens of Gwangju felt completely betrayed by the US government and believed that US statements about human rights only extended to the right kind of people and not to them,” says David Dollinger, a former Peace Corps volunteer who was one of the few Americans who remained in the city during the uprising and spent time with the armed rebels in the hours before they were killed.

According to Dollinger, who now lives in London, Gwangju’s hopes for US assistance were raised when people in the city heard reports that a US aircraft carrier had been deployed to Korean waters. But their optimism faded when they learned that troops had been moved from the DMZ and were headed for the city. “By that time, they knew there would be no peaceful ending,” he said. They were right: The Carter administration had already decided their fate in the meeting on May 22.

“At that time, the belief [in Washington] was that 60 were dead and 400 wounded,” said Nicholas Platt, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense and a senior aide to Defense Secretary Brown. Platt is one of the few people still alive who attended the May 22 White House meeting. During an interview in 2017 at his office at the Asia Society in New York, he pulled out a sheaf of notes he had taken during the meeting and allowed us to film him reading them; their contents are explosive.

At the meeting, Platt recalled, “Gwangju was the main issue.” Yet, judging from his notes and the official minutes, there was no discussion whatsoever about what the people of Gwangju had suffered. Instead, the entire discussion revolved around security. “There was unrest in Gwangju and the Korean military was moving troops in,” said Platt. “We were worried whether they would be able to restore order. There were units that had been moved from the DMZ and we thought that might lessen our ability to deal with the North Koreans.”

Lee, when shown Platt’s notes, was shocked to hear that US officials had such detailed numbers on casualties only 36 hours after the firing on Geumnam-ro. “That number was concealed by the coup leaders,” he said last week, and was not even known to the Korean public until South Korea’s newly elected National Assembly held hearings in 1988.

We also interviewed General Wickham about his meetings with General Lew, his deputy commander at the CFC (then, as now, the US commander of the CFC controls all US and Korean troops during times of war). Significantly, they met on the afternoon of May 21, within hours of the mass shooting in Gwangju.

“Lew and I met several times a day on Gwangju,” Wickham said in an interview at his home in Texas in 2017. The gist of his conversations, he said, were then relayed via “secure phone” to the other members of the US country team in Seoul, Ambassador William Gleysteen and CIA station chief Robert Brewster.

“General Lew was worried about Gwangju morphing into warfare around the country, and he wanted to tamp it down the best he could. That’s why he and I talked about how to do that with minimal force [and] what’s the best way to do it,” said Wickham. But, in carrying out the operation, Lew and other Korean commanders understood they were doing the bidding of General Chun and the officers who had seized control of the army in December.

“The coup leaders were saying we have to suppress this, it’s a threat to our coup,” Wickham recalled of his conversation with General Lew (in 1981, after Chun became president, Lew was named South Korea’s ambassador to the United States, maintaining his role as a key liaison with Washington). Brewster and Gleysteen sent the information from Wickham’s meeting to Washington in top secret cables (which we later obtained) in preparation for the White House meeting the next day.

In a critical but highly redacted report, the CIA declared that “the insurrection in Kwangju…poses a serious challenge to the Martial Law Command’s authority.… Violence has spread to about 16 towns within a 50-mile radius of Kwangju, all in South Cholla Province.”

While “trying to negotiate a cease-fire,” the military “probably will have to use force to end the rebellion,” the agency concluded, adding that Korean generals “would be hard pressed to deal with simultaneous uprisings of the same magnitude in other areas.” These words were repeated almost verbatim by Gleysteen in his cables, who added this observation about Chun and his martial law group: “The December 12 generals obviously feel threatened by the whole affair.”

Given the overwhelming focus on a military response, it’s no surprise that, as Platt’s notes reveal, Defense Secretary Brown was the dominant figure in these deliberations. This was a natural progression from his role as the chief US interlocutor with the Korean military before and after Park’s 1979 assassination.

Brown and the Joint Chiefs were in constant contact with the Korean military leadership, even after General Chun seized control of the army in his December 12 coup. As shown in Platt’s notes, Brown’s forceful views overrode others who were deeply concerned about Chun, such as Warren Christopher, then the deputy secretary of state.

“Chun has done real harm and set the process back,” Christopher said at one point in the meeting. His boss, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, agreed, saying that Chun “could become a liability,” and asking, “Aren’t we going to be hostage to them?” When David Aaron, an aide to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, raised the possibility of urging Chun to step down, Brown intervened. “If he goes that will create a vacuum,” Brown said, according to Platt’s notes.

Worse, the defense secretary even seemed to admire Chun and his martial law group. “They have been quite good about using force,” he said. With Chun clearly in control, said Platt, Brown’s Pentagon even established “a special channel” between the general and the Joint Chiefs of Staff through Gen. John Vessey, the deputy chief of staff of the US Army who had been the US commander in Korea prior to Wickham and knew Chun well.

For Koreans, one of the most enraging aspects of this meeting was Brown’s statement, as recorded by Platt, that Koreans would accept the administration’s support for Chun because “Koreans go with who’s winning.” Months later, General Wickham would amplify this thought in public, saying that Koreans were “lemmings” who would follow any strong leader.

Such comments reflect the predominant thinking among US leaders at the time that Koreans were simply not ready for democracy and would easily accept another military strongman, even after 18 years of dictatorship. Brown, who died in 2019, did not respond when we contacted him in 2017.

Brown’s official biography portrays him as a valiant fighter for Korean democracy, emphasizing his forceful meeting with President Chun in December 1980 to persuade him not to execute Kim Dae-jung, the dissident leader who would later be elected president. As for the White House meeting about Gwangju on May 22, 1980, the bio blandly notes that participants “decided that the ROK had to resume authority in Kwangju” before the United States could resume its pressure for liberalization. That’s an interesting euphemism for helping to put down an insurrection against brutality.

This May 11, as this article was being prepared, the State Department, acting “in the spirit of friendship and cooperation between allies,” released several dozen newly declassified documents related to Gwangju to the Moon government in Seoul. Many were first released in redacted form 24 years ago, and most are fairly innocuous, apparently designed to put US policy in the best light possible. But one of the cables illustrates the kind of disinformation that the Carter administration relied on to make its decisions about Gwangju.

On May 18, 1980, Gen. Lee Hui-sung, the martial law commander, told Ambassador Gleysteen that if the uprising in Gwangju was not contained, South Korea ”would be communized in a manner similar to Vietnam.” Given what had inspired the uprising, this statement was ludicrous, but it was apparently enough to convince Carter and his advisers that they were on the right course. A spokesperson for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, asked to comment on Carter’s policy at the time, said she had “nothing to add” to previous US policy statements.

Ironically, the CIA may have had the best understanding in the US government about Chun. In 1987, as anger was building in Seoul over Chun’s repressive rule, the agency informed the Reagan administration that Chun’s crackdown in Gwangju had led many Koreans to believe that his military was a greater threat to their security than North Korea.

“A tarnishing of the military’s image—the result of its close association with the highly unpopular rule of [Chun] and the Army’s brutal suppression of riots in Kwangju in 1980—has convinced many officers that South Koreans have grown antagonistic toward them and complacent about the North Korea threat,” the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence wrote in a secret assessment of the Korean military.

But only after the protests in the summer of 1987 threatened to create another Gwangju did Chun agree to step down and allow direct presidential elections for the first time. Out of that struggle, and inspired by the Gwangju democratic movement of 1980, South Korea’s democracy was born.

The Korean people did it again with the Candlelight Revolution of 2016–17, which led to the impeachment of another unpopular president, Park Geun-hye (the daughter of former dictator Park Chung-hee) and the subsequent election, in May 2017, of Moon Jae-in. The real “winners” of Korean history, in other words, were the citizens of Gwangju. But, sadly, they and many other Koreans had to suffer under military dictatorship for seven more years after their uprising.

Should the United States apologize for what happened in Gwangju in 1980? The Nation put that question to President Moon in an interview in Gwangju three days before his election. Moon, characteristically, rejected the notion. “It doesn’t matter, because we have moved on, and established democracy for ourselves,” he said. An official in Moon’s Blue House, citing the “government to government” discussions going on about the investigation into May 18, would not comment.

But given what we know now about US actions during Gwangju, the time has come for a formal apology, those who survived the uprising say. “They have to give a sincere apology,” says author Lee, who is famous in Gwangju for his continued activism on the issue. David Dollinger, the former Peace Corps volunteer, is adamant on the question.

“When I think about Gwangju, I am brought to tears and am truly embarrassed by my government from that time,” he says. That feeling, in part, reflects his anger over being forced to resign from the Peace Corps after he went public with his critique at the time of the uprising. An apology, he says, “should be done not through documents but by an official of the US government kneeling to the mothers and citizens of Gwangju asking for forgiveness. It should then apologize to all the people of Korea, for not listening to its citizens.”

As the US and global media speculate on the whereabouts and health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, South Koreans are enjoying a rare moment of national pride in the universal acclaim for their government’s extraordinary response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Never in my life have I seen South Korea receive such praise from around the world,” Ahn Jae-seung, a veteran editorial writer at the progressive Hankyoreh, exulted after President Moon Jae-in’s ruling party scored a landslide victory in legislative elections conducted at the height of the outbreak, on April 15. The positive media coverage may be unprecedented “in the history of the Republic of Korea,” he said.

In that vote, Moon’s Democratic Party (DPK) and its allies won 180 seats in the 300-seat National Assembly, giving them a commanding three-fifths majority. The election was a disaster for South Korea’s far-right opposition United Future Party (UFP), which, with the votes of a small conservative party, secured only 103 seats. Moon’s sweep is comparable to the Democrats’ capturing a veto-proof majority in both the House and Senate next November.

Now, with the virus in retreat and the election over, Koreans say they are ready for a renewed emphasis in the Assembly on two ideas close to the hearts of voters: making peace with North Korea and creating a greener future less dependent on fossil fuels. Both are highly popular in a country tired of confrontation and war and sick from the pollution choking Korean skies.

“For the first time in South Korea’s history, the center-left has formed a majority,” Simone Chun, a historian and commentator who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, told The Nation. “With his new mandate, President Moon has an opportunity to leave behind important legacies, especially laying down the foundation for ending the Korean War and building a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”

There is little doubt that Moon has the political momentum to do just that. In a poll released on April 23, 64.3 percent of Korean citizens supported the progressive president, who has made engagement with North Korea one of the pillars of his presidency.

“South Korea is now in a great position to act independently of the United States,” Kee Park, a lecturer on global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the North Korea Program at the Korean American Medical Association, noted in a postelection briefing sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action.

In that sense, the election can be seen as a referendum on Moon’s outreach to the North. During the campaign, the UFP, supported by conservative US commentators, relentlessly attacked Moon and at one point vowed to impeach him after the election for his handling of the coronavirus (the only bright spot for the party was the election of North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho, a former ambassador, to represent the affluent Gangnam district in Seoul).

Overall, the UFP “proved ineffective in taking issue with what it calls the government’s misplaced policies that have dampened economic vitality, failed to denuclearize North Korea and weakened the South Korea-US alliance,” The Korea Herald reported.

The Korea Times observed,“No doubt, the election results will bring about a seismic change to the country’s political landscape.” That first shift may be in the area of climate change. In March, the DPK unveiled a sweeping Green New Deal plan that could make South Korea the first country in East Asia to commit to deliver net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, a long-sought goal of the climate change movement. The party’s plans include a carbon tax, phasing out government financing for domestic and overseas coal projects, and investing heavily in renewable energy sources such as solar and water power.

“The majority win of the ruling party significantly increased the chance of the Green New Deal manifesto becoming law,” Kim Jiseok, a climate energy specialist at Greenpeace Korea in Seoul, told The Nation in an interview. He added, “The Covid-19 situation also presents an opportunity for the government to make major investments to restructure the economy and steer it in the right direction.”

But Kim warned that strong opposition from business, conservatives, and even some progressives could hamper implementation of the Green New Deal, particularly in the area of coal financing and production. According to the US-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, South Korea is the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, “and one of the few developed countries whose [gas] emissions are increasing.”

Even so, Moon and his party will have strong public support if they move to reduce these levels. Last year, in a remarkable poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, more than 80 percent of South Koreans identified climate change as the most important issue, above cyberattacks and North Korea’s nuclear program, in a list of potential national threats. But as tensions with North Korea continue to mount, the importance of the peace process has come to the fore once again.

The importance of dealing with North Korea was underscored over the past few days when US media outlets, including CNN, began floating rumors that Kim Jong-un was being treated for a serious illness and may have even died, suggesting the possibility of another political transition in Pyongyang. After the unverified stories were promoted relentlessly on social media, the South Korea government tried to dampen the speculation with an official denial.

On Sunday, Moon Chung-In, President Moon’s top adviser on North Korea, went on Fox News to say that the North Korean leader had been located in the port city of Wonsan, where Kim and other members of his hereditary government spend their leisure time. The South Korean government’s position is “firm,” he said. “Kim Jong-un is alive and well.”

That seemed to corroborate an earlier story from The Dong-A Ilbo, one of South Korea’s oldest dailies, that Kim had been spotted “walking on his own” in Wonsan between April 15 and 20. It was attributed to a “US government official.” Trump, as usual, muddled the picture on Monday when he told reporters that he has a “very good idea” what’s going on with Kim but “I can’t talk about it now. I just wish him well. I’ve had a very good relationship with Kim.”

That may be true, but the biggest barrier to inter-Korean peace is the US administration. Trump’s refusal to consider changes in sanctions before the North’s total denuclearization was a critical factor in the collapse of Trump’s talks with Kim over the last year. As a result, North-South exchanges have almost disappeared—a situation that President Moon alluded to on Monday, when his government held ceremonies marking the second anniversary of the “Panmunjom Declaration,” signed during his first summit with Kim Jong-un in 2018.

“The reason we were unable to move forward with the implementation of the Panmunjom agreement was not because we lacked the will, but because we could not overcome the international limitations that realistically exist,” Moon said, in a reference to the US and UN sanctions that have prohibited projects, such as linking North and South Korean railways, from moving forward.

At the ceremony on Monday, Moon promised to press on with the peace process with Pyongyang. “We cannot just wait for conditions to improve; we have to find and realize all the things we can do under these realistic limitations, no matter how small,” he said, adding, “The Covid-19 crisis could be a new opportunity for inter-Korean cooperation. At present it is the most urgent and necessary cooperation task.”

For Moon, the key to establishing South Korea’s independence would be to convince Trump that reducing some of the sanctions imposed on the North would help the peace process. That’s the view of Ko You Kyoung of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Korea, who spoke at the same briefing as Kee Park. “Without US cooperation, South and North can’t move forward, because sanctions have obstructed all our efforts,” she said. Kyoung contended that US sanctions on Iran have also prevented South Korea from sending Covid-19 test kits to Iran.

Park, who has been to North Korea 18 times since 2007, recently joined Christine Ahn, founder and executive director of the peace group Women Cross DMZ, in urging Moon to move decisively on the issue of sanctions. “The brokenness of the U.S. approach in resolving the North Korean conflict begs for leadership,” they wrote last week in Responsible Statecraft.

But  Moon’s priority, like that of leaders everywhere, is to stabilize his country’s economy after the shattering impact of the coronavirus. Last week, his government announced a “South Korean New Deal” that will provide nearly $70 billion in emergency funds to prevent mass unemployment. The plan, according to Hankyoreh, will provide aid to seven important industries, including aviation, shipping, shipbuilding, auto manufacturing, general machinery, power generation, and communications, and create 550,000 public-sector jobs.

But while that could boost South Korea’s beleaguered economy, some of the new policies may make the Green New Deal much more difficult to achieve, according to Greenpeace and other environmental groups.

For example, less than two weeks after the ruling party announced the Green New Deal, which included a pledge to end public financing for the coal industry, the Moon administration announced that the Korean Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of Korea would provide over $800 million in emergency funds to Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, one of the world’s largest exporters of coal.

“That’s a massive bailout with no oversight or consideration of what this would mean in terms of new coal power projects and emissions,” said Joojin Kim, the attorney and managing director of Solutions for Our Climate, a Seoul-based nonprofit that advocates stronger climate and air-pollution policies. “So already, we’re seeing a direct contradiction of the ruling party’s Green New Deal commitments.”

The DPK’s pledge for net-zero emissions by 2050, he added in an interview, “should only be applauded when the Democratic Party makes good on its Green New Deal commitments—which we must hold them accountable for.”

Kim Jiseok of Greenpeace Korea offered a similar take, noting that the opposition party “could continue to block progress, possibly in partnership with ruling party reps who are friendly with existing businesses.” Moreover, some government ministries “could be defiant” in opposing the Green New Deal plan, “as they have been working very closely with large corporations.”

“We want the South Korean government to make a right decision by ending overseas coal financing,” concluded Kim. “Until then, we will continue our campaign.”

Still, the elections—which were carried out with extraordinary precautions to protect the health of voters—demonstrated that South Korea has tremendous capacity to achieve its goals. According to Yonhap News, more than 29 million people voted, resulting in a “turnout of 66.2 percent, the highest in 28 years.” (Compare the conditions to Wisconsin, which held a primary vote on April 7 that forced thousands of voters to stand in packed lines; on Sunday, The New York Times reported that at least 19 people who worked or voted that day have tested positive for the virus.)

Other countries simply opted out: In recent months, 47 of them, including the UK and France, postponed elections because of the pandemic. After the vote, Moon declared, “Thanks to the citizens’ full cooperation and participation, we’ve become the only major country in the world to carry out a national election amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

Characteristically, he treated his party’s victory not as a personal triumph but as a tribute to the 304 people, almost all of them high school students, who died in the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014.

That disaster—captured in this gripping film nominated for an Academy Award—still burns in Korean memories as an epic failure of the previous government of Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and removed from office in 2017. Her failure with the Sewol contrasted sharply with the Moon government’s highly organized response to the coronavirus disaster and its protection of Korean voters. “In remembering the children who left with the legacy of social responsibility, I sincerely thank our fellow citizens” who participated in the elections, Moon wrote on social media in a graceful remembrance.

Correction: The source for a quote by the director of Solutions for Our Climate was misattributed and has been corrected.

Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues
He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack

On March 27, Bob Dylan released on the Internet “Murder Most Foul,” his first new song in nearly a decade. Delivered in the aging, tender, and cracking voice familiar to fans who caught his recent global tour, the song unfolds like an epic poem about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and the music, culture, and mystery that still surround one of the most shocking events in American history.

“This is an unreleased song that we recorded a while back that you might find interesting,” Dylan wrote on his website early that Friday morning. “Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” As I’ve listened to the song, over and over, during these last traumatic weeks, I’ve come to see “Murder Most Foul” as Dylan’s gift to the world at another terrible moment in our history, when our leaders have failed us and we are living through a calamity that seems to have no end. Like Kennedy’s murder in 1963, the federal government’s utter failure to protect the people in 2020 is a collapse of biblical proportions.

President Trump’s slow, cowardly, and stupendously foolish response to Covid-19 has allowed this nation to become the epicenter of the outbreak, and surpassed George W. Bush’s monumental blindness to the drowning of New Orleans in 2005. With hundreds of thousands of people in mortal danger and millions without jobs, health care, or hope, the country faces an existential crisis comparable to the Civil War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II, the horror that unfolded after 9/11, and the terrifying future of climate change. High water’s rising, we’re up to our necks, and the specter of death is stalking the land: the perfect setting for a Bob Dylan song.

What we hear in “Murder Most Foul” is the weary voice of a Nobel laureate who’s closing in on his 80s, walking us through our trials and tribulations as only a great poet can do. It’s set to a bowed bass, a mournful violin, a piano, and a smattering of drums that blend together in a lovely, bluesy dirge perfectly fitting to the times and our shattered emotions. Clocking in at over 17 minutes, “Murder Most Foul” is the longest song Dylan has ever recorded, just surpassing “Highlands,” his wry commentary about aging on the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind, released in 1997. On April 8, “Murder Most Foul” became Dylan’s first-ever No. 1 hit on the the Billboard charts—a phenomenal achievement for such a lengthy composition.

The effect of the song, with its pointed lyrics about treachery and betrayal, are similar to the sound Dylan captured in 2012 on Tempest, his last album of original songs. Some of the phrasing also reflects his recent forays into the American songbook of Frank Sinatra that transformed his shows over the past decade into intimate, Paris-style cabarets. Yet there is little joy to be heard in this recording, where the subject is dark and unfathomable: President Kennedy “being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb” by unseen men seeking to collect “unpaid debts” who killed “with hatred and without any respect.”

Backed by the melancholy chords of his piano, Dylan takes us through the terrible images of the Zapruder film of the assassination that he’s seen “thirty three times, maybe more” (“It’s vile and deceitful—it’s cruel and it’s mean / Ugliest thing that you ever have seen”). But, contrary to some of the hot takes you may have read about it, the point of the song is not to publicize JFK conspiracy theories or take us on a nostalgia tour of the 1960s. Like many of his songs, his message is much deeper, and far more profound.

At its most essential level, “Murder Most Foul” marks the collapse of the American dream, dating from that terrible day in Dallas, when a certain evil in our midst was revealed in ways not seen for a hundred years—a day that, for Dylan, myself, and others of our generation is forever seared into our collective memory. The murder and the hidden machinations behind it, he tells us, robbed us of Kennedy’s brain, a symbol for the positive, forward-looking American spirit that he represented, and “for the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that.” And this is the outcome:

I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it’s thirty-six hours past judgment day.

Second, the song is a reminder of the beauty of our music and culture. It’s a tribute to the artists, obscure and famous, who’ve taken us through the hard times, and who continue to lift us up as we brave this new world of Covid-19, social distancing, and the death of thousands by government failure and incompetence. In “Murder Most Foul,” that music becomes the counterpoint, the juxtaposition, to the horror and chaos of both JFK’s very public death and today’s global pandemic. (To get inside its structure, listen to Laura Tenschert’s beautifully narrated podcast about the song on her London-based show, Definitely Dylan.)

Dylan makes the leap from murder to music by conjuring up Wolfman Jack, the legendary disk jockey celebrated in the film American Graffiti, who represents the ghosts of all those DJs from New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, and New York who introduced him to the secrets of American music when he was a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, growing up near Highway 61 in the aftermath of World War II. Starting with the Beatles, whose joyous music would “hold your hand” soon after the assassination, the names of dozens of musicians and singers float through:

Play Oscar Peterson and play Stan Getz
Play Blue Sky, play Dickey Betts
Play Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk
Charlie Parker and all that junk
All that junk and All That Jazz

Sometimes the music and the culture seem to emanate through the voice of Kennedy himself, who could have heard Wolfman Jack on the radio during his years as a senator, when he was hanging out in Hollywood and Las Vegas with Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, and other friends and family of his wealthy, ambassador father.

Play John Lee Hooker play Scratch My Back
Play it for that strip club owner named Jack
Guitar Slim—Goin’ Down Slow
Play it for me and Marilyn Monroe
Play please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling that good.

“Murder Most Foul” references so many musicians that Dylan experts have posted on Spotify a stream of songs that he identifies. There are the Rolling Stones (Altamont), The Who, Elvis (“Mystery Train”) Bo Diddley, Jelly Roll Morton, B.B. King (“play Lucille”), Patsy Cline, Nat King Cole, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Stevie Nicks, Miles Davis, and the dozens of artists who covered “Stella by Starlight” from the 1944 Hollywood classic The Uninvited. And on and on, mixed with images from old movies, famous songs, and legendary figures from the American past—Birdman of Alcatraz, Bugsy Siegel, Pretty Boy Floyd, On the Waterfront (“Play Down in the Boondocks for Terry Malloy”).

Dylan even makes a few allusions to his own songs, including “Blood in My Eyes,” a cover, from his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, of a song by the Mississippi Sheiks, a 1930s African American string band that was led by a former slave fiddler, and “Dignity,” a rollicking favorite from his 2008 Tell Tale Signs bootleg about a time when “the soul of the nation is under the knife.” As the names and the titles fly by, you hear the music and culture that America experienced from the time of the Depression to our current era.

The contrast between the culture of Dylan’s musical past and the Trump-stricken country of today is summarized in his take on Kennedy’s plea to the nation, turned upside down:

Don’t ask what your country can do for you
Cash on the barrel head, money to burn
Dealey Plaza, make a left hand turn
I’m going to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride
That’s the place where Faith, Hope, and Charity died.

These are old, familiar themes for Dylan. That cash is the money that “doesn’t talk, it swears” from his 1965 song “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” which also contains the immortal line, as applicable now as it was then, that “even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” And it’s the same tainted cash that “will never buy back your soul” from his bitter critique of the military-industrial complex in “Masters of War,” his famous antiwar ballad from 1963.

In that sense, “Murder Most Foul” may have been written for Trump’s America, but it’s also the America of the forever wars that began in the era before Trump, when militarism and empire dominated our foreign policy and killer drones became the weapons of choice for Democrats and Republicans alike. And, in Dylan’s mind, the nightmare of today dates back to November 1963 and Kennedy’s death. And that’s where my story picks up, because Dylan’s JFK story—“history told through a radio station,” as Neil Young put it—is the story of my generation as well.

first learned about Kennedy’s “murder most foul” one morning in Tokyo, when my dad walked into my room as the shocking news came through the shortwave static of his Sony transistor radio. The president, our beloved JFK, had been shot in Dallas just a few hours ago, and was dead. “Assassinated? Assassinated?” my mother said, over and over, as we tried to absorb the brutal facts of the terrible event. I was all of 12 years old, and was shocked to the core.

Like so many of my fellow baby boomers, I looked to Kennedy an an idol. He was the young, vibrant leader who personified everything positive and hopeful about the country I had come to love from afar while spending my boyhood in Japan and South Korea, where my missionary parents went as relief workers after World War II. He was the spirit behind America’s exciting space program and the inspiration for thousands of young men and women who enlisted in the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty to help make the world a better place. His murder was the moment I realized that something was seriously wrong with the land of my birth.

Up to that point, America, to my innocent eyes, was a benevolent place, a land of abundance that produced sturdy, well-made cars like the Plymouth station wagon my father loved to drive. The election victory of the boyish, exuberant Kennedy in November 1960 only solidified my faith. Through the radio, I listened excitedly to his call to send Americans to the moon. I even wrote him a fan letter from Korea, and was thrilled beyond measure when I received a response from his assistant, Kenneth O’Donnell, that included a signed photograph of the president.

But with his sudden death, the old, familiar America I knew suddenly vanished, only to be replaced by something sinister, unexplained and mysterious. Most shocking was the blatant nature of the crime, which Dylan recalls in “Murder Most Foul”:

The day that they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing
It happened so quickly—so quick by surprise
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
Perfectly executed, skillfully done.

The details of the assassination and the accused killer as they unfolded in the Japanese newspapers I read were mystifying, and I wanted to know more. Like Dylan, I pored over the Zapruder film stills when they were published in Life magazine. I read everything I could about the event in the school library, scouring every issue of Time and Newsweek when they came out. In the months that followed, the news was especially bad from Vietnam, which I had visited with my family in March 1963. By 1964, President Lyndon Johnson was escalating the war, pummeling the country with bombs and napalm, and by 1965, when US Marines landed by the thousands in Da Nang, “the horror” later spelled out in Apocalypse Now by Marlon Brando was in full force.

That was the time of Freedom Summer and the murders by the Ku Klux Klan of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi. We had already begun our terrifying lurch into the dark and lunatic decade of assassinations: In addition to JFK in 1963 there was Medgar Evers, then Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. America was coming apart at the seams. The nation’s soul had indeed been “torn away.” But, through it all, there was one constant: the music, especially the rock and roll, jazz, and folk I was hearing on the radio.

I was introduced to Bob Dylan by Pete Seeger, who came to play at my American school in Tokyo during his world tour in 1964. After zipping through a repertoire of folk songs and civil rights anthems, Seeger told us of a new talent in New York City “who’s writing the most amazing songs.” He then picked up his 12-string and sang “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s powerful, apocalyptic song from the days of the Cuban missile crisis.

I was stunned by the soaring words; I’d never heard anything like that before, not from the Beatles, not from the Kingston Trio, not from Johnny Cash, not from anybody. That magnificent song, which Patti Smith performed so movingly at Dylan’s Nobel Prize ceremony in 2016, set the stage for everything that was to come from the gifted singer from Hibbing.

His songs seemed perfectly tuned to my surroundings, even in Japan. I’ll never forget first hearing “All Along the Watchtower,” with its haunting line, “Two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl.” It was 1968, and Japanese citizens were protesting, often ferociously, the US military’s use of bases in Japan to attack Vietnam. From my house in Tokyo looking out at the Kanto Plain, I could spot American war planes landing and taking off from a US airbase far to the west. Dylan’s music was ominous—and a fitting soundtrack to what I was living through.

His music has remained closely attuned to the American zeitgeist well into the 21st century. On September 11, 2001, Dylan released Love and Theft, a searing blend of rock and blues perfect for our new, dark era. Its highlight was “High Water (For Charley Patton),” a tribute to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the songs and blues riffs it generated. It included these chilling lines, which we later heard echoed by Bush himself in his hunt for the 9/11 perpetrators:

Judge says to the High Sheriff,
“I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don’t care”
High water everywhere.

Dylan’s eye for the truth came home to me one night in 2014, when I took my daughter Roxanne to see him at Constitution Hall in DC. It was the day after Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri, and most of us were raw with shock and anger. Dylan closed the show with a slow and melodic “Blowin’ in the Wind” that brought tears to my eyes. His perennial question, “How many deaths will it take ’til we know / That too many people have died?” resonated deeply, just as it did when it was released during the civil rights movement in 1962.

I had a similar experience last year that illustrated the power he can hold over an audience. On December 8, I went to The Anthem in DC for what would be Dylan’s last performance before his “Never Ending Tour” was cut short by the coronavirus. Midway through his set, I watched with astonishment as the audience sat silent and spellbound through two songs: “Lenny Bruce,” a loving tribute to the radical comedian (“the best friend you never had”) and “Girl From the North Country,” his touching, prayerful song to a long-lost love from his days growing up in Minnesota. I have never seen a rock and roll crowd so quiet, so awed, so stilled. It was a moving tribute to our last true American troubadour.

t’s with that voice, breaking with emotion, that Bob Dylan, during the pandemic of the century, has dropped this song about Kennedy, the end of the American dream, and the music that has defined and consoled us all these years.

Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung
Play St. James Infirmary in the court of King James
If you want to remember, better write down the names
Play Etta James too, play I’d Rather Go Blind

Those lines, summoning the spirit of the blues and another execution long ago, are the sign of a master songwriter at work. All the songs and musicians he mentions are signposts of that America he once knew, that “old weird America” from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which Dylan drank from when he was just starting out, an America that’s disappeared in the maw of endless war and free-market capitalism that mark the Trump era and the year of the coronavirus.

Viewed through that lens, “Murder Most Foul” is a shout-out to the great music Dylan heard as a youth on the airwaves, learned in the coffeehouses, bars, and concert halls of Minneapolis, New York City, Cambridge, and London—and then passed on to us. It’s the music that, in his eyes, defined the America where “faith, hope, and charity” were our guideposts—the music that helped us defeat fascism, create the New Deal, face down systemic racism, and build the New Frontier that Kennedy never saw. Now is the time, he seems to be saying, to bring back that faith and do everything we can to keep it.

As Dylan knows only too well, that vision can be snuffed out in an instant. “Play the Blood Stained Banner,” he sings as he closes out the song, in a reference to the last flag of the Confederates who ripped the country apart during the Civil War; “play Murder Most Foul.” As I look out on the abandoned and frightened streets of my city and sense the fear and tension rippling through the country, I can only say: “Yes, and play a song for me too, Mr. Bob Dylan.”

On March 12, a startling chyron went up on CNN after a congressional briefing on the rapid spread of the dangerous coronavirus known as Covid-19. “Health officials tell lawmakers only about 11,000 people tested for virus in U.S.; South Korea testing about 10K per day,” it read, as the visibly shocked hosts Jim Sciutto and Poppy Harlow pressed their guests for an explanation.

In fact, the actual figures were even higher. “South Korea has been on average testing 12,000 patients a day—about as many as the U.S. has managed to test over the last two weeks,” the Los Angeles Times reported on March 14. By that time, the government of President Moon Jae-in had tested 261,335 people since January 3, when it reported its first confirmed case of the virus.

Many of the tests, as seen in this video from The Korea Times, were conducted at sites where citizens could be served in their cars, and are highly praised by people who live in South Korea. “The drive-through testing was quick, creative, innovative, free, and protective for all,” Brenda Paik Sunoo, an author and photographer with dual US–South Korean citizenship, told The Nation in a telephone interview from the island of Jeju.

Sunoo, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area and retired to Jeju a few years ago, explained that face masks are also readily available to Koreans in local pharmacies. “We’re allowed two a week,” she said, with distribution based “on the last number of your birth year.” In contrast, masks are in short supply in the United States and are sold out at stores throughout the country.

After statistics and anecdotes like these were broadcast on CNN that day in March, South Korea instantly became the hottest topic of the day. Americans glued to their televisions reeled in shock from the realization that the US government was woefully behind a country that is often portrayed as owing its democracy and economic system—indeed, its very existence—to the beneficence of the United States.

“It is shameful, disappointing, & tragic that the greatest country in the world, the US, has only tested 14,000 people” in comparison to South Korea’s huge numbers, Representative Maxine Waters tweeted on March 16.

“South Korea has proven that #COVID19 can be controlled,” Laurie Garrett, the prominent health and science writer, added on Twitter, pointing out that the country had pushed its epidemic down from a high of 909 new cases a day in late February to just 74 cases by March 16. “How did they get such dramatic results? Testing, testing, testing.”

The contrast is particularly shocking because health authorities in both South Korea and the United States learned of their first coronavirus case on the same day in late January, according to an investigation published by Reuters. Seven weeks later, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tested close to 300,000 people out of a population of 51 million, while the United States is “not even close to meeting demand for testing,” with only 60,000 tests in a population of 330 million, Reuters reported.

South Korea’s rapid rollout of its testing was crucial because “speed is paramount” in outbreak situations, Sanghyuk Shin, an assistant professor of nursing at the University of California at Irvine and the director of UCI’s Infectious Disease Science Initiative, told The Nation. “The longer the delay, the greater the mortality, and the public health response becomes much more difficult,” he said in an interview.

“South Korea started its response early, which was extremely important for slowing the spread” of coronavirus, Shin added. “In stark contrast, the slow pace of rolling out testing in the US has significantly hampered our ability to slow the spread of this virus, and now we clearly have widespread community transmission in the US.” Shin was born in Seoul but grew up in the United States, where he’s lived since he was 8 years old.

Many of the Korean tests were administered in drive-in centers around the country, where the procedure was available for free to any citizen who asked for one and results were available by text or e-mail within six to 12 hours. Moreover, test kits have been provided to “frontline” private hospitals and screening clinics since the beginning of February. As the news of the program spread, South Korean officials explained that their model could be duplicated throughout the world.

“By quickly diagnosing COVID-19, we’ve been able to minimize its spread and provide quick treatment, and that’s kept the mortality rate low,” Kang Kyung-wha, South Korea’s foreign minister, told the BBC. “I hope that South Korea’s experience and approach will not only benefit other countries but also lead to greater international cooperation on preparing for the next [viral outbreak].”

But the news, and Kang’s offer, wasn’t welcome at the White House, where President Trump has been presiding over daily briefings characterized by misinformation, outright lies, racist characterizations of the virus’s origin, and fantastic stretches of defensiveness (most of his claims have been repeated and amplified on Fox News). Time after time, Trump has downplayed the Korean tests—and the need for tests in general—and boasted that his approach was superior.

“Yeah, we can do that,” he replied to a question on March 7 about South Korea’s testing program during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. But, as usual, he falsely claimed that South Korea was only “doing samples,” and “that’s not effective like what we’re doing.”

A week later, Trump again downplayed Korea’s record during his daily press conference at the White House. “I noticed a lot of people are talking about South Korea because they’ve done a good job on one side, but on the other side, tremendous problems at the beginning,” Trump told reporters. “They had tremendous problems and great numbers of death.” His refusal to even acknowledge the Moon government’s success was underscored the day before, when he went out of his way to praise Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for overseeing construction of Japan’s “magnificent” Olympic venues in Tokyo.

“He has done an incredible job, one that will make him very proud,” Trump said of the conservative Abe, whom he often consults before Moon on issues related to North Korea. “Good things will happen for Japan and their great Prime Minister.” In Japan, of course, Abe has been soundly criticized for his own inaction on the coronavirus, and many analysts now believe the Olympic Games, scheduled for July, will be postponed, possibly to next year. Moreover, by March 18, Japan had tested only about 32,000 people, compared to the much larger numbers in South Korea.

But Koreans I interviewed said the tests were just one aspect of the Moon government’s success in combating the epidemic. The most important, most agreed, was South Korea’s national health care system. It was introduced in stages beginning in 1977, when the authoritarian government of Park Chung-hee mandated health insurance for large firms employing more than 500 people.

Then, in 1989, after the country was democratized, national health insurance was extended throughout the nation. “Within the span of 12 years, South Korea went from private voluntary health insurance to government-mandated universal coverage,” Jong-Chan Lee, a South Korean academic, wrote for the American Journal of Public Health in 2003.

Residents of South Korea cited three other factors: the Moon government’s reliance on health and infectious disease experts to transmit daily information to the public; the availability of high-speed Internet and Wi-Fi throughout the country, making for easy communication; and the traditional Korean practice of placing the public need first, above the individual, which is shared by many countries in Asia.

That latter characteristic, Sunoo told me, was critical in the willingness of South Koreans to socially isolate themselves, a practice so woefully lacking in the United States. “Social distancing has been the main weapon of mass protection,” she said. “Coronavirus has been contained because we’re staying at home. It’s less about protecting ourselves, and more about we don’t want to spread this throughout the community.”

In late January, Sunoo’s husband, Jan Sunoo, a labor educator, returned from a visit to Thailand and “self-quarantined” in a separate apartment for two weeks, she said. “Every decision we make we have one single goal: not spreading it.” She said she has been spending much of her time lately advising friends and relatives back home to follow South Korea’s example and warning, like many Italians have, that the consequences of ignoring social isolation guidelines could be fatal.

Convincing the public in South Korea to follow these guidelines was enhanced by President Moon’s decision to make public health officials the official voice of the government. Unlike Trump, who sparked widespread confusion and apathy with his conspiracy-laden pronouncements as the crisis unfolded, Moon ceded the public stage to Jeong Eun-kyeong, a former doctor who heads the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Since the first COVID-19 case was recorded in South Korea, Dr Jeong from KCDC has briefed the public, on air, EVERY DAY for hours, answering journalists questions, explaining everything and detailing next steps,” Laura Bicker, the BBC’s correspondent in Seoul, tweeted, adding: “(She has visibly aged in those weeks) Lots of info = less panic.”

The KCDCP and other health agencies have provided, on a daily basis and via texts, detailed information about Covid-19 patients, including where they have been and where they may have contracted the virus. The government has also strongly advised the population to practice social distancing, even as the number of cases began to fall in mid-March.

“The high level of transparency, the availability of testing, the round-the-clock heroism of doctors and nurses, and the government’s refusal to initiate military-style lockdowns like in China will be seen down the road as parts of a blueprint for how to handle such a crisis democratically,” Seth Martin, a musician and teacher from Washington state who has been living in Seoul since 2015, told The Nation in an e-mail.

The ride has not been completely smooth, however. “In my opinion, the government does not pay enough attention to individual rights, and has fully disclosed the personal details of patients” in public pronouncements, Gayoon Baek, a South Korean historian and human rights activist in Seoul, told The Nation in an interview. “That’s not even necessary to prevent the spread of Covid-19.” In fact, the country does have a history of mass surveillance, which is in part a residue of its authoritarian past.

In response to such criticism, the KCDC recently issued new guidelines to local governments asking them “not to release specific addresses or workplace names so as to protect patients’ privacy,” the progressive Hankyoreh reported. “Local governments are also being asked to stop disclosing patients’ travel path and the places they’ve visited.”

It was also rough going in the beginning of the crisis. In February, as the epidemic in China reached a peak, President Moon angered many Koreans when he predicted that the coronavirus would “disappear before long” and decided against closing South Korea’s borders to China. Right-wing politicians and groups who have been gunning for Moon ever since he was elected in 2017 even supported an online petition seeking his impeachment. It was eventually signed by over a million people.

But since the early stumbling, public anger has ebbed as Moon’s government seized control of the crisis.

“In the early days of the virus, many South Koreans were furious with their government,” said Martin, the musician, who is married to a South Korean artist and lives in a working-class area of Seoul. “Yet, as the scenario played out, it became increasingly clear that South Korea was on top of its game, and the government had actually done a really amazing job of mostly containing the virus without diving into denialism on the one hand and totalitarianism on the other.”

“But look where we are now,” he added. “I spend most of my time now worrying deeply about my friends and family in the Pacific Northwest, where I am hearing daily from loved ones about the dangers and how they fear for the future. We are really lucky to be in such a well-prepared situation under a government that chose to take an aggressive, yet democratic, stance.”

The day after we spoke, Vice President Mike Pence appeared at the White House to tell Americans that “tens of thousands” of coronavirus tests are being performed daily. But even as the death toll from the virus mounted and the number of US cases soared, he added that “if you don’t have symptoms, you don’t need to get a test.” His admonition defied the advice of many health officials in areas hit hard by the virus, including in South Korea.

As of March 19, according to the World Health Organization, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus had exceeded 200,000 globally. Out of those, South Korean authorities said, they had 8,652 cases, with 94 deaths, and had conducted 316,664 tests. In the United States, the CDC reported 10,442 cases, 150 deaths and a total of 44,872 tests—one-seventh the number conducted in South Korea.

For two countries with an entwined history that goes back over 70 years, the contrast in their approaches to one of the worst pandemics in history could not be clearer.

The Trump administration’s inflexibility on sanctions, an apparent turn inward by North Korea, the global threat from the COVID-19 virus, and the political imperatives of the upcoming presidential election have diminished hopes for progress in the Trump administration’s denuclearization negotiations with Kim Jong-un this year.

But a year after those talks collapsed in Hanoi, the pundits and lawmakers who dominate US policy in Northeast Asia have become divided on tactics, particularly over Trump’s exorbitant demand that South Korea pay more for hosting US military bases on its soil. Disagreements extend to the administration’s stance on humanitarian aid to Pyongyang and the way it is handling diplomacy with both Kim’s regime and the government of Moon Jae-in in Seoul.

The mild critiques are hardly a breakthrough, but they do indicate that conservative forces in Washington understand and appreciate South Korea’s agency in the peace process—an important shift in the policy debate. “Alliances are not valued in dollars and cents, and they shouldn’t be seen as money-making operations for the United States,” Bruce Klingner, a former CIA officer who directs Korea programs for the Heritage Foundation, warned last week on two occasions about the US insistence that South Korea increase its financial support for US Forces Korea.

That may not sound like much of a leap, but it marks a change from two years ago, when I heard Klingner accuse Moon of cozying up to China and downgrading South Korea’s ties to the US-Japan military alliance. And, to be sure, there is no split among foreign policy elites over the need to confront Pyongyang about its weapons program. Like Klingner, many of the voices questioning Trump’s policies toward Korea want an even harder line against the North, including greatly expanding sanctions and resuming full-scale US–South Korea military exercises that have antagonized North Korea for years.

Yet their concerns about process reflect an uneasiness that the diplomacy led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is backfiring, and may be alienating South Korea, a key US ally in the Pacific that is determined to find a negotiated peace with Pyongyang. There’s also a sense that the slowdown in negotiations is giving Kim too much time to perfect his growing conventional deterrence force against US forces in Asia and Guam. And in the view of some activists involved in the peace process, these trends could be paving the way for a more pragmatic approach toward North Korea in the future that might involve tradeoffs between sanctions and security that have until now been rejected by the administration.

“It does feel like the winds are shifting toward a stance that we want to find a permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Dan Jasper, the public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker agency that has been providing humanitarian aid to North Korea for many years, told The Nation. “The tectonic plates may be shifting.”

Those shifts, in turn, come as the American public has concluded that North Korea no longer poses the strategic threat it once did. According to a poll conducted in January by the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, only 13 percent of Americans believe that North Korea presents the world’s “greatest threat” to the United States, a huge drop from 59 percent at the height of the crisis in 2017.

Hyun Lee, the US national organizer for the peace group Women Cross DMZ, explained that the current discussion in elite circles is likely due to a pragmatic realization that Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign has failed to stop North Korea’s nuclear and rocket advances. “I think the recognition is creeping in that North is now a nuclear state and that the strategic calculations have become very different for the United States,” she said in an interview. “There’s a whole different discussion going on now because there’s not many good options.”

The state of play on the Korean Peninsula was clear on Monday, when Kim’s military test-fired two short-range missiles from the country’s east coast. They were the North’s first weapons tests since last November and took place a few days after it conducted a “joint strike” military drill in the same area. The tests were in line with North Korea’s pledge in January “to continue to build its defense capabilities” and were “not helpful to the efforts to ease military tensions,” South Korean national security officials said. North Korea’s official KCNA news service explained that the tests were a “long-range artillery firing drill” that highlighted the importance of a “powerful military force and a war deterrence.”

Then, on Tuesday, Pyongyang’s news service published a blistering response to Moon’s criticism by Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong-un’s sister and a top official in the ruling Workers Party. “The drill was not aimed to threaten anybody,” she said in her first official statement carried by KCNA. “Training is the basic mission of the army responsible for the defence of the country and is an action for self-defence.” Kim added, in taunting terms, “As far as I know, the south side is also fond of joint military exercises and it is preoccupied with all the disgusting acts like purchasing ultra-modern military hardware.”

That must not have been pleasant for Moon to hear; the famous sister had been among the high-ranking North Korean guests he greeted when he began his peace diplomacy at the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang. But he and his generals are undoubtedly aware of what she was talking about: South Korea’s latest purchases of advanced weaponry, including a Global Hawk, the giant surveillance aircraft made by Northrop Grumman, and stealth F-35A attack planes made by Lockheed Martin, as I recently noted on this site.

ack in Washington, the latest clash among US hard-liners took place last week, when the Senate held its first hearing on North Korea since the Hanoi summit of 2019. Senator Cory Gardner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia, opened the hearing by expressing his “sincere disappointment” in the State Department for refusing to allow Alex Wong, Trump’s newly designated nominee for chief negotiator with North Korea, to testify.

“This committee has the lead oversight role on the conduct of our nation’s foreign policy and the administration is obligated to testify in a public setting in order for us to effectively fulfill our constitutional duties as a co-equal branch of government,” he said, using words similar to those uttered by Senate and House Democrats during Trump’s recent impeachment trial.

Gardner separated himself from the administration’s demand for Seoul to increase its payments for the US bases in South Korea. “Now is not the time for excessive demands that only serve to exacerbate tensions and uncertainty within the alliance, which only benefits our adversaries,” he declared. His assertion was backed by Klingner. Seoul, Klingner told the subcommittee, “paid 92 percent of the $11 billion cost for building Camp Humphreys, the largest US base on foreign soil, and over the last four years, South Korea has purchased $13 billion in arms from the United States.”

In the question-and-answer period, Klingner and another former CIA officer, Sue Mi Terry, who manages Korea issues for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said under questioning from Democratic Senator Ed Markey that a preventive attack by the United States should be off the table. “I don’t think we should do a military attack to prevent a program they have already completed,” Klingner said, with Terry in agreement. North Korea, Klingner added, “wants to be the Pakistan of East Asia.”

Both witnesses seemed to take the position of the Moon government that the United States could, in certain circumstances, drop some sanctions in return for partial concessions from North Korea. That could happen, Klingner argued, if Kim went beyond his promise in Hanoi to dismantle North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear facility—something it has offered in four previous negotiations—and agreed to the kind of language found in arms control agreements with Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Klingner said that would involve defining terms and “having a very extensively detailed verification protocol” that would identify the location of weapons systems and the responsibilities of both sides. “And then, on the sanctions relief, I would see a distinction between the UN sanctions and the US sanctions.”

He pointed out, correctly, that the UN sanctions—imposed in 2007 after the North’s testing of long-range ICBMs that could potentially hit the US mainland—are “more easily undone” because they are strictly limited to nuclear and missile activity. That makes them “more tradable” in terms of trade restrictions, he said.

So “you could have parameters of, for every five nuclear weapons they give up, they get to export another 100,000 tons of coal or something like that,” Klingner told the panel. On the other hand, US sanctions imposed over the years require much deeper changes in North Korean behavior, including improvement in human rights and an end to money laundering. As a result, they “are much harder to undo” because Congress would have to approve them.

Terry, who often appears with Klingner at congressional hearings, added that US negotiators might consider lifting sanctions that South Korea has sought to soften so it can proceed on tourism and economic projects with the North—something so far rejected by the Trump administration. South Korea, for example, might get exceptions in order to restart a joint project with Pyongyang to rebuild the railroad lines linking North and South. That “would be the easiest way to start something,” she said, even if it meant “there would still be a violation” of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

But, she added, “it is just very difficult to get there right now,” because, in her view, Kim has refused to make meaningful concessions. “North Korea has made it crystal clear that what it cares about is sanctions relief.” She also argued that successful US diplomacy was important to stop proliferation in general in Asia. “South Korea will not always have a progressive government, and conservatives there are talking about building a nuclear capability,” she said.

One notable sign of a shift in Washington is the embrace by conservative groups of the need to provide humanitarian assistance to North Korea, not only to help its dilapidated health care system cope with the threat from COVID-19 but also to provide basic needs to its population. That issue came to the fore a few weeks ago, when the Treasury Department launched an investigation into whether the AFSC’s operations in North Korea were out of compliance with US sanctions.

“When [the Treasury] investigation came to light, we heard from conservatives who support our work and say that was not a good use of resources to go after NGOs,” the AFSC’s Jasper recalled. (The AFSC provides assistance to four cooperative farms in North Korea as a way to support “sustainable” agricultural practices.)

Among those speaking out against Treasury’s action was Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, which is led by a board of some of the most prominent neoconservatives in Washington. “We must be supportive of humanitarian efforts in North Korea and the only way to proceed is to factor in vulnerable groups,” he said at a US Institute of Peace conference on January 31 while Jasper sat next to him.

Meanwhile, in response to COVID-19—which led North Korea to close its borders with China and, over the weekend, send most foreign diplomats home—the Pentagon last week canceled its upcoming military exercises with South Korea. “South Korean military chief Park Han-ki proposed the delay out of concerns for troop safety and Robert Abrams, the commander of the U.S. military in South Korea, accepted Park’s proposal based on the severity of the virus outbreak,” the AP reported.

At the same time, the State Department recently agreed to expedite humanitarian aid to the North to help agencies like the AFSC work with Pyongyang to cope with the virus.

That is critical because “U.S.-led economic sanctions against North Korea have contributed to a weakened healthcare system inside the country,” Jessica Lee, a senior research fellow in the East Asia Program at the newly formed Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in an op-ed on February 26. While saying Pyongyang “should be more open and transparent” about the impact of the virus and “be willing to accept aid,” Lee added that US policy should change, too.

“Washington needs to be more creative and ensure that sanctions and North Korea’s isolation does not prevent it from receiving medical aid or hamper its ability to respond to that pandemic,” she wrote. “After this ordeal has ended, a public debate on the impact of U.S. and U.N. sanctions on the North Korean healthcare system is in order, as the status quo clearly is not serving U.S. national security interests.”

These discussions, in turn, could open the door toward a more humane and realistic approach to Korea by the United States no matter who wins the presidency in November. And they have given impetus to US peace, religious, and humanitarian groups to seize the initiative and press the case internationally for a peace process that would help the two Koreas alleviate Asia’s worst health scare in years, sign a peace agreement, and move toward reconciliation.

Later this month, several advocacy groups led by the Korea Peace Network coalition will convene in Washington for a three-day national gathering to call for an official end to the Korean War, “now in its 70th year.” It will include a rally at the White House and advocacy in Congress to press for passage of House Resolution 152, which calls for ending the war with a formal peace agreement.

That shouldn’t be a hard sell in Washington: In late January, John Rood, the under secretary of defense for policy, told a House hearing that a long-term peace agreement with North Korea is a “desirable” goal and noted that the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting was never intended to “survive decade after decade after decade.” A long-term peace agreement “would be another subject of the negotiations that could be worked out with the North,” he added.

The second day of the national gathering will be devoted to a conference involving community and advocacy groups from around the country (just before publication, organizers announced that the gathering has been postponed because of COVID-19 and rescheduled for late July). It will include a keynote address by Bruce Cumings, the foremost historian of the Korean War, who has been writing about North and South Korea—including for The Nation—for decades.

In a statement distributed by Women Cross DMZ, Cumings, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, placed the war in the context of the broader struggle for peace and justice. “The Korean War was responsible for quadrupling U.S. defense spending and inaugurating the U.S. military industrial complex, so when we talk about stopping U.S. endless wars, we must first address the Korean War,” he said.

Parasite, the astonishing Korean film about the yawning gap between rich and poor in one of the most advanced economies in the world, made history Sunday night by sweeping the top Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best International Feature. Bong Joon-ho, its innovative director, also took the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (with Han Jin-won).

“I’m very ready to drink tonight, until the next morning,” Bong declared in true Korean fashion after accepting his first award of the night for his screenplay. South Koreans are exuberant consumers of alcohol, a habit that makes for raucous social interactions but also reflects the anxieties and stress of a country divided by class and split along national lines.

But on this occasion, Bong’s desire to crack open a beer—or, more likely, a bottle of soju—was a cry of unmistakable joy. “We never write to represent our country, but this is very personal to South Korea,” he said while accepting his award for best screenplay.

The awards capped a remarkable night for Bong, who is now the leading light of the century-old Korean film industry. And it was a triumph for the incredible cast of actors—led by the beloved Song Kang-ho—who transformed Bong’s story of class conflict in high-tech South Korea into a remarkable window into the human condition in the 21st century.

Their recognition was doubly sweet because both Bong and Song had been among thousands of South Korean artists placed on a blacklist by previous authoritarian governments that banned them from receiving state funds.

Parasite’s four Oscars capped an incredible ride that began last year, when Bong won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making Parasite the only film besides Marty (1955) to win France’s top film award and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Last week, he capped his amazing streak by winning the British Film Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language film and Best Original Screenplay.

The universal applause for Bong’s film and the rapturous reception from Hollywood’s elite left the director grasping for the right words in English after his huge win. “It’s really fucking crazy,” he remarked to reporters in the Oscar press room, clasping one of his statues. He shared the honor for Best Picture with his co-producer Kwak Sin-ae, the CEO of the film company Barunson E&A.

One of the most touching moments during the telecast came when Bong turned aside as his screenwriting partner, Han Jin-won, delivered his remarks. As Han spoke in Korean, Bong stared at his statue in awe, as if he was fully grasping his moment in the sun for the first time. Incredibly, Parasite beat out eight highly acclaimed films for Best Picture, including the British World War I masterpiece 1917, a heavy favorite in the run-up to awards night.

Parasite’s sweep is the first time that a film not made in the English language has won Hollywood’s most prestigious awards. It was the first Asian film to win an Oscar for best foreign film since Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon opened the way in 1954. Bong was also the first Asian director to win the Oscar for directing since Taiwan’s Ang Lee won for Life of Pi in 2013.

“Ninety-two years of Oscar history were shattered Sunday night,” The New York Times proclaimed in its lead story. “In the entire history of the Academy Awards, no foreign-language film has ever taken home the best picture Oscar,” The Los Angeles Times noted. The Korea Herald, a major English-language daily in Seoul, proudly declared that Parasite had made “history in its home country and the international film scene.”

Meanwhile, thousands of South Korea’s plugged-in netizens came together on social media to celebrate their country’s recognition as a major film power as news of its award spread through Seoul. South Korean President Moon Jae-in also took note, saying that Parasite’s cast and crew had helped instill “pride and courage in our people as we come together to weather difficulties,” Reuters reported.

The enormity of Parasite’s sweep was apparent for all to see when Bong accepted his statue for best director shortly before Jane Fonda declared Parasite the film of the year. In a moving gesture of solidarity, he paid tribute to Martin Scorsese, whom—to Bong’s obvious and utter astonishment—he had beaten out for an award that the great director himself has won only once, for The Departed, in 2006.

“When I was young and studying cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart, which is ‘the most personal is the most creative,’” Bong said through his interpreter, Sharon Choi. “That quote is from Martin Scorsese. When I was in school, I studied [his] films. Just to be nominated was a huge honor.”

That sparked a standing ovation for Scorsese, who was nominated as best director for his work on The Irishman, his intense but historically questionable film about the mob’s assassination of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa (shockingly, Scorsese was completely snubbed by the Oscar crowd).

Bong, who came of age during the tumultuous 1980s in South Korea, also recognized Quentin Tarantino, the acclaimed director of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, who has never won for his directing. “When people in the US were not familiar with my films, Quentin always put my films on his list,” he said, eliciting a big grin and a peace sign from the director of such noir films as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, which resemble Bong’s best work.

Over the years, Bong has produced an astonishing range of films that have pierced the soul of South Korea and exposed the underside of his country in the same loving way that Scorsese and Tarantino have done for America.

Among them are The Host, also starring Song, about a monster that emerges from Seoul’s Han River after US military scientists at an American base in Seoul secretly dump toxic substances into the city’s water system. More recently, Bong won wide acclaim for Okja, his take on a gentle “super-pig” that gets caught in the global food-processing system, and Snowpiercer, about the dangers of climate change.

Song Kang-ho, whom Bong pulled into a hard embrace while accepting his Best Picture Oscar, has also acted in numerous films that have exposed the hidden history of South Korea and its authoritarian past.

In 2017, he starred in the popular film A Taxi Driver, about an apolitical cabbie whose life is transformed when he takes a German photojournalist to the city of Gwangju as it is engulfed in the citizens’ uprising against military rule that shook the country in 1980 (that film was very personal for me, because I have written extensively about those events). Earlier, he won renown for The Drug King, a wild mixture of Breaking Bad and Scarface that dramatizes the “Made in Korea” meth trade to Japan during the 1970s, against the backdrop of Park Chung-hee’s collapsing dictatorship.

The success of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite underscores South Korea’s rise as a film powerhouse, and it comes at a time when the country has become widely recognized for the universal appeal of K-pop, its homegrown music that, through such supergroups as BTS, has taken the world by storm. These national treasures make South Korea a leading force in shaping global culture, according to Tom Fowdy, a British journalist and commentator who writes extensively about China and the two Koreas.

“South Korea is really challenging the dominance of English culture and language in the arts on multiple fronts,” Fowdy tweeted on Sunday night as Bong’s awards were being announced. “Through music and film, the country has had some extraordinary achievements in recent years. This is what soft power success looks like.”

Asked to compare himself to Korea’s K-pop stars, Bong was typically self-effacing. “I think BTS has 3,000 times the power and influence I have,” he told a reporter. “I think Korea produces a lot of great artists because we are a very emotionally dynamic people.” For the delighted audience in Los Angeles and around the world, that was all too clear.

On February 9, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite will be the first Korean film to ever compete for an Academy Award. In a history-making sweep on January 13, it received six Oscar nominations, including one in the prestigious Best Picture category. Last Sunday, the Screen Actors Guild gave Parasite’s acting ensemble its top award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, selecting it above the legendary lineups for The Irishman, Bombshell, Jojo Rabbit, and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

For Bong, Parasite’s manic and innovative director, it was overdue recognition. His brilliant exposure of the deep class fissures in South Korea has struck an evocative chord in America—and demonstrates that foreign cinema can penetrate the American psyche. “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” he said after Parasite became the first Korean film to win a Golden Globe.

Parasite’s success in the US market is a little surprising, in part because most Americans and the US media show little interest in South Korea’s internal dynamics and complex domestic politics. Yet, despite some criticism, including in this magazine, of Bong’s satiric take on inequality, the film has taught many viewers that there’s an intriguing and even revolutionary side to South Korea outside of K-Pop and the DMZ.

Now, if only someone could make a film to correct the myths and assumptions that have driven American policy on the Korean Peninsula for decades and led to the latest breakdown in the Korea peace process that began with such promise in the winter of 2018.

ust as the South is often stereotyped as a model capitalist economy that would not exist without the beneficent presence of US troops, North Korea is universally viewed in Washington as a kind of Forever Enemy ruled by an irrational family dynasty that, for no apparent reason, hates the United States and belligerently threatens its friends and allies with nukes. Why they built these weapons is rarely addressed. And the roots of the conflict—the division of Korea in 1945 at the hands of the United States and a war that has never formally ended—are generally ignored.

For example: The Great Successor, the acclaimed biography of Kim Jong-un and the nuclear crisis by Washington Post reporter Anna Fifield, doesn’t even mention the fact that the United States first introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s and, after withdrawing them in 1991, still maintains a powerful nuclear force in Northeast Asia. Some commentators dismiss Kim’s fears of the United States—which laid waste to his lands during the Korean War—as sheer fantasy.

“Like all dictators, Kim thrives on conflict with the outside world, especially the U.S., which the hermit kingdom’s state-run media likes to call the ‘savage enemy,’” The Dallas Morning News recently proclaimed, as if Kim’s weapons program was due simply to his need for an enemy. To buttress its case, it threw in a quote from B.R. Myers, whose 2010 book The Cleanest Race is, in my view, one of the most distorted books ever written about the North: “Without the U.S., without that enemy figure, [North Korea] really has no reason to exist.”

It’s as if the United States is an innocent bystander, just doing its darndest to maintain the peace against a belligerent foe that never lets up. That ahistorical approach also pertains to Pyongyang’s diplomacy with Trump. The consensus in Washington’s think tank world is that Kim’s reluctance to immediately get rid of all his nukes after his 2018 summit with Trump—and his testing last year of missiles that could potentially hit US bases in South Korea, Japan, and Guam during a war or to ward off an attack—are proof of his aggressive intent and his insincerity about seeking peace.

Even though no formal agreements have been reached on denuclearization or improving US–North Korea ties, Kim is just “playing” Trump by building up his military forces, the thinking goes. “All these advances, made during a period when the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington was supposedly never better, show that Kim is not interested in disarming,” Eric Brewer, a nuclear analyst and former national security official at the corporate- and contractor-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote this month in a typical comment.

For the most part, the media seem to agree, and the American people follow. According to a poll conducted in November by The Economist, 56 percent of Americans consider North Korea to be an enemy of the United States, up from 51 percent in August.

Many Democratic leaders are in the distortion game too. “Look, we gave [Kim] everything he’s looking for,” Joe Biden declared at the last Democratic debate on January 14 in explaining why he would refuse to meet with the North Korean leader without preconditions. “The president showed up, met with him, gave him legitimacy, weakened the sanctions we have against him.”

Biden also claimed that he would somehow pressure China—which has lately been working with Russia to win support in the UN for a proposal to ease sanctions on North Korea—to force its ally to disarm. None of this was remotely true, but Biden’s claims weren’t challenged by any of his fellow candidates or the press.

hankfully, there is a South Korean who can, as Bong Joon-ho and his ensemble did in Parasite, cut through the fog.

Moon Chung-in is a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei University and a key adviser to President Moon Jae-in on national security and unification issues. An erudite, affable man well-known to US policy-makers, Moon travels frequently to Washington to unofficially convey South Korea’s views. He’s been to Pyongyang several times, most recently in September 2018, when he accompanied President Moon to his exuberant summit with Kim Jong-un, where a major deal was struck to lower military tensions.

There, “I saw the great possibility of peace,” Moon Chung-in said during his latest visit to DC in January. As a result of the North-South agreement in Pyongyang, “there’s been no clashes on the DMZ” since then. The “only violation” of the agreement came in early 2019, he said, when Kim Jong-un ordered a military exercise deploying short-range missiles. But for the North, he said, Trump’s refusal to budge on sanctions as a way to get a deal with Kim is at the heart of their dispute.

“For Pyongyang, Washington’s call for dialogue is nothing but a fig leaf to hide its intention to isolate, contain and strangle the North through sanctions and maximum pressure,” he wrote in The Korea Times. “A catastrophic turn does not appear imminent, but time seems to be on nobody’s side.” In public remarks, he also pointed out that the North is increasingly irked by the criticism of its intentions from US politicians. “Their concern is how American political stakeholders take advantage of North Korea for personal political gain.”

Here’s the problem, from the South Korean’s perspective: Since the first summit in Singapore, the Trump administration, despite pleadings from Seoul, has refused to lift sanctions on the North, even ones that could have helped President Moon carry out economic projects that he and Kim agreed to at their summit in Pyongyang. The lack of progress in the inter-Korean peace process, and South Korea’s own military buildup, have greatly angered Kim and the North Korean leadership, who in the fall of 2019 resumed their harsh public criticism of the South and the United States. The tensions were quite apparent on January 1, when Kim delivered a New Year’s statement and warned his nation to prepare for more hard times ahead.

“The present situation warning of long confrontation with the U.S. urgently requires us to make it a fait accompli that we have to live under the sanctions by the hostile forces in the future,” Kim said in remarks carried by KCNA, the state media outlet. Flanked by hundreds of cadre from his ruling Korean Workers’ Party, Kim talked mysteriously of a “new strategic weapon” he might deliver in the future—but left the door open for dialogue if the United States makes a fundamental change and stops treating North Korea like an enemy.

“If the US persists in its hostile policy towards the DPRK, there will never be the denuclearization on the Korean peninsula,” Kim warned, using a phrase that North Korea has been repeating for years, if not decades. His phrasing was repeated word-for-word this week in Geneva, when Ju Yong Chol, one of Kim’s diplomats at the UN, warned that if America’s “hostile policy” continued, the North would have “no reason to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment that the other party fails to honor.”

Chol added: “If the United States tries to enforce unilateral demands and persists in imposing sanctions, North Korea may be compelled to seek a new path,” which US officials and generals believe could include reviving the tests of long-range missiles that were suspended in 2017.

Unfortunately for the North, Dr. Moon said, many US policy-makers ignore the term “hostile policy,” claiming that Kim’s use of it is just “habitual.” In doing so, he pointed out, they miss a chance to understand how an actual deal might be cut with North Korea under the right conditions.

“‘Hostile policy’ is quite seriously meant,” he told a conference on January 6 organized by the Center for the National Interest, a conservative think tank in Washington. They believe the policy “threatens the security of North Korea and hampers the North Korean people’s right to exist.”

During the Q&A, I asked Moon to explain what he made of the term, and he provided the most specific explanation I have heard in years of covering the issue. “North Korea has been very clear,” he replied.

• First, they mean the “elimination of sanctions,” which to them is “the most important indicator of the hostile policy from the United States.”
• Second, political matters: “Normalize. Make [diplomatic] ties. Set up liaison offices, set up embassies with each other. That would be their most important indicator of ending the hostility.”
• Third, the military side: “A non-aggression treaty, signing a lasting peace treaty. Obviously suspending joint military exercise and training” with South Korea “and not deploying strategic weapons on the Korean Peninsula.”
• Finally, the North wants the United States to help make it “a normal country in the international economic system.” That means “not only lifting sanctions but allowing North Korea to be a member of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Asia Development Bank, and to let North Korea engage in normal trade and financial transactions and allow international investment into North Korea. It’s all very clear.”

Obviously, meeting those demands would require a major shift in policy on the part of the United States, with North Korea no longer seen as a permanent enemy. For the North, they are an essential part of any deal, just as long-term denuclearization is for the United States. That, Moon explained, should underscore why Washington can’t insist on “permanent and irreversible” denuclearization in North Korea—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s favorite phrase—before making any moves to reduce the sanctions. “That won’t work,” Moon said. “It’s why North Korea says you must ‘permanently and irreversibly’ withdraw your hostile policy” before it will come back to the table.

“They’re using your own words,” he said with a chuckle. “So there’s a complete parallel between Washington and Pyongyang.” And that’s why, in his view, both sides “need to be more flexible and realistic.”

In his address to the center, Moon indirectly confirmed reports in my last dispatch for The Nation that a US–South Korea military buildup over the past two years may have damaged prospects for a settlement by aggravating the North. Since Moon Jae-in took power in 2017, he explained, the president has emphasized “peace-keeping,” by which he means “suppressing the possibility of war through deterrence and strengthening the US military alliance.”

This policy emerged as a result of the tensions during the “nightmarish” year of 2017, when war appeared imminent, as well as from military decisions made by “previous governments” with the United States. As a result, South Korea has acquired advanced US weapons, including F-35 fighter jets and high-altitude Global Hawk drones, as I described in my Nation story. Meanwhile, in 2020, South Korea will spend 53 trillion won—about $46 billion—on its military, “slightly larger than Japan,” Moon said.

“Contrary to what conservatives in South Korea claim, we have been cooperating with the United States 100 percent.” But North Korea is “very angry about that,” he said. “We see the idea of peace-keeping as defensive,” but Pyongyang “doesn’t see it that way.” As a result, “peace-keeping has been sort of backfiring.”

But, while South Korea and the United States have worked in tandem to maintain their military readiness, the “peace-building” aspect of President Moon Jae-in’s policies has fallen by the wayside. When President Moon launched his initiative in 2018, he envisioned that the United States and the two Koreas could sign a declaration ending the Korean War and transform the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting into a “viable peace regime,” the professor said.

But the Trump administration has showed no interest in ending the war or signing a peace treaty, so that plan has gone unfulfilled. Meanwhile, the hard line on sanctions “has prevented South Korea’s engagement with North Korea,” said Moon Chung-in. Projects halted included plans to restore cross-border rail links, reopening the Gaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ, and making it possible for South Koreans to visit Mount Kumgang in the North once again.

As a result, Moon said, “inter-Korean relations are completely frozen.” That, in turn, has created a serious political dilemma for South Korea in its cooperation with the United States. “If the US fails to reopen negotiations with North Korea” and settle its conflict with Kim, “it can’t make a breakthrough.” And because South Korea is a democracy, “President Moon’s supporters say South Korea must take an independent stand.” With some prescience, he added that President Moon “doesn’t want to be passive. He wants to be a mediator, a facilitator, and arbitrator, and a pacesetter of the Korean destiny.”

hat process has apparently started. On January 14, President Moon declared in a press conference that he would henceforth stress cooperation with the North over the negotiations between the United States and Pyongyang. “Rather than only watching North Korea–US dialogue, we need to cooperate with North Korea on as many things as possible,” he told reporters at the Blue House. “Since inter-Korean relations are a Korean matter, we need to take more of the initiative in developing them.” As the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh noted, “the gist of these remarks is that inter-Korean relations should be the driver of the peace process on the Korean Peninsula.”

Moon’s speech sparked an extraordinary dispute when Harry Harris, the US ambassador, told foreign reporters in Seoul that South Korea must consult with Washington on any plans for cross-border engagement with the North “in order to avoid a misunderstanding later that could trigger sanctions.” In response, Lee Sang-min, a spokesperson for the Unification Ministry, reminded Harris that South Korea is a sovereign nation that “dictates its own policies” toward the North.

This week, the State Department backed Harris, saying his views “represent” those of President Trump. But the Moon government appears determined to press on, even within the confines of the US and UN sanctions. On Tuesday, Lee Soo-hyuck, the South Korean ambassador in Washington, said Seoul is especially hopeful that the cross-border railway project can be revived.

“I believe the project we should push for most urgently, and is doable, is connecting the railway network between South Korea and the North because it will take the longest [time] to complete,” he told reporters. “The overarching principle of the projects the government is pushing is that we should do the most we can within the framework of international sanctions.”

Despite the differences, Moon Chung-in says it’s imperative for the talks between the three parties—Seoul, Pyongyang, and Washington—to get back on track. “South Korea has heard North Korea’s grievances,” he said in Washington. “It’s time for North Korea to come back to the table and settle” and for both sides to come up with innovative solutions. In his view, that might involve the United States’ adopting a “nuclear arms control paradigm” toward the North, signing a peace treaty, and eventually negotiating a “phased US troop withdrawal” from the South as well as an international fund to support North Korea’s denuclearization. “We need creative diplomacy,” he said.

erhaps the best antidote to the gloom is the sense of humor and humanity that both Dr. Moon and Parasite’s characters adopt toward their brethren to the north.

There’s a hilarious scene in Bong’s film when one of his characters mimics the rapturous voice of Ri Chun-hee, North Korea’s famous anchorwoman, who is often chosen to deliver the supreme leader’s most momentous announcements to his people. But this gentle ribbing shouldn’t necessarily be seen as criticizing the North, Bong said in an interview last year. “There are a lot of comics in South Korea who make sketches on [North Korean] topics and it’s something that’s very common in South Korea,” he said.

In other words, laughing about their situation is one way Koreans cope with the stress of division and war. But perhaps the deeper meaning is about survival in a city divided along class lines and a country split into rich South and poor North. “I think the [Parasite] story is about coexistence and how we can all live together,” Song Kang-ho, the beloved character actor who plays the family patriarch, said in receiving the cast’s SAG award last Sunday. A little laughter—and a lot of truth—about America’s dark fears of the North might go a long way in Washington too.

This week, cries of alarm about North Korea’s possible resumption of ICBM testing—or worse—will reverberate through the media. The coverage began on Sunday, when The New York Times brought out David Sanger, its star national security reporter, for a front-page screamer designed to bring the standoff in Northeast Asia to a Christmas boil.

American military and intelligence sources are “tracking North Korea’s actions by the hour” and “bracing for an imminent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching American shores,” Sanger reported. The crisis was inevitable because, over the past 18 months of sporadic talks between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the “North has bolstered its arsenal of missiles and its stockpile of bomb-ready nuclear material.”

But the Times, as it does frequently in its coverage of these talks, omitted key developments on the Korean Peninsula, including in the South, that have contributed to the current standoff.

Perhaps the most overlooked is the massive military buildup in South Korea over the past two years. On December 9, as tensions were rising once again, the South Korean Air Force released to the media a stunning video recreation of a preemptive attack on the North Korean ballistic missile network that Kim may soon test again.

The four-minute film was first broadcast on JTBC, a major television network. It shows South Korea’s crack pilots—who are heavily supplied with US-made weapons—finding and then pummeling a North Korean ICBM launch site with drones, missiles, heavy bombers, and stealth fighters. Among them are the Global Hawk, the giant surveillance aircraft made by Northrop Grumman, and stealth F-35A attack planes made by Lockheed Martin.

“The glory of victory is promised under any circumstances,” the narrator declares over a background of stirring martial music. The film portrays the Republic of Korea as a valiant, independent force, acting swiftly with its precision strike capabilities to destroy Pyongyang’s long-range Hwasong-14 ICBM, which North Korea first tested in 2017 and which US and ROK officials fear it may test again.

The film is a reminder that South Korea, through its alliance with the United States, has built one of the most powerful armed forces in the world—the seventh largest, according to a recent survey—and outspends its rival to the North, the 18th largest, by a ratio of five to one. It also underscores the determination of President Moon Jae-in, a former special forces soldier who set the denuclearization talks in motion with his famous Olympic diplomacy in 2018, to defend his nation’s security at all costs.

But it’s also a sign of a US-led military buildup in Northeast Asia that has raised tensions in the region to an alarming degree, even as North Korea threatens to resume the ballistic-missile testing that sparked the last crisis on the peninsula, in 2017. The buildup includes:

• The US military’s tests of missiles previously banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the arms agreement abandoned by the Trump administration.
• The massive military machine built by South Korea in recent years, as illustrated in the ROK Air Force video. It has been fueled by massive purchases of sophisticated US weapons that have been pushed by US think tanks with ties to the US arms industry.
• The simultaneous and rapid expansion of US and Japanese military capabilities in Northeast Asia designed to confront North Korea, curb China’s growing military prowess, and enhance Washington’s strategic position in the region.

Taken together, these developments signal a dangerous escalation of tensions—a realization that may even be dawning on US national security reporters.

“The Trump administration’s shadow war with North Korea is set to intensify in the next three weeks, as Pyongyang appears to be preparing an end to its more than 18-month moratorium on testing of its nuclear program, and as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s self-imposed year-end deadline for diplomacy draws near,” CBS News’s Margaret Brennan reported on December 13.

That story was one in a series of alarming reports about the North’s latest testings of new rocket engines at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, which Kim shut down in 2018 as a concession to Trump. Those tests, and a series of 15 short- and medium-range missile launches earlier this year, are universally seen as underscoring Kim’s determination to abandon the denuclearization negotiations and find a “new path” in 2020 unless the United States puts forward fresh proposals that the Kim regime finds acceptable.

“The dialogue touted by the U.S. is, in essence, nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep the DPRK bound to dialogue and use it in favor of the political situation and election in the U.S.,” Ri Thae Song, North Korea’s vice foreign minister for US affairs, said earlier this month, using the country’s official name. “What is left to be done now is the U.S. option, and it is entirely up to the U.S. what Christmas gift it will select to get.”

In response, Trump has said that Kim could lose “everything” if he ended his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and missile testing, and recently revived his threats of tough military action. “If we have to, we will do it,” he said on December 3. And last week, Gen. Charles Brown, the top US Air Force commander in the Asia-Pacific region, predicted that Kim’s promised gift will most likely be “a long range ballistic missile.”

Many US analysts, such as Fox analyst Harry Kazianis, believe such a test is imminent, possibly as early as Christmas Day. They also see Kim’s latest missile and engine tests as sure signs that the North is not, in fact, getting rid of its nuclear weapons. “Reversible steps are being reversed, and North Korea is essentially ‘renuclearizing,’” Vipin Narang, an MIT security studies professor, tweeted after the latest Sohae test.

But, as Trump’s recent demands to expand US nuclear capabilities show, so is the USA. And to those who follow the region closely, the signs of a US “shadow war” are everywhere.

The most obvious is the acceleration of US surveillance of North Korea from bases in Okinawa and Guam, thus allowing the intelligence tracking “by the hour” alluded to by Sanger. In the latest such incident, on December 19, the Pentagon dispatched a Navy EP-3E surveillance plane over the peninsula; it was preceded four days earlier by an Air Force RC-135S Cobra Ball surveillance and reconnaissance plane.

A week earlier, on December 11, the US Air Force flew an RQ-4 Global Hawk over Korea, while the Pentagon ordered a strategic B-52H Stratofortress bomber capable of nuclear strikes to patrol the adjoining seas off Japan. The Stratofortress was accompanied by a KC-135 refueling aircraft, which can keep bombers in the air for days.

In recent weeks, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports, the United States has also deployed the Navy’s P-3C maritime surveillance plane and an RC-135U Combat Sent (which the USAF says “provides strategic electronic reconnaissance information to the president, secretary of defense [and] Department of Defense leaders”). Yonhap noted that “the B-52H, a long-range and large-payload multirole bomber, is one of the U.S. Air Force’s principal strategic assets.” In fact, the frightening sight of a B-52 over Korean skies has been a favorite US signal of its determination and destructive powers for decades.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has started testing a new series of ballistic missiles designed to counter Chinese and Iranian weapons but also perfectly capable of striking North Korea. The latest test of a land-based missile, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on December 12, was the second test of a weapon banned under the INF treaty. The first involved a Tomahawk cruise missile deployed on US warships and submarines.

“Top Pentagon officials have wanted to deploy the previously banned INF missiles to the Western Pacific to counter China’s military expansion and provocations in the South China Sea,” Fox News reported. “The missiles could be deployed to Guam, and within range of mainland China.” That’s also where the B-52s that regularly fly over and close to Korea are based.

These moves reflect a general escalation of US capabilities around the world under Trump. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who signed the INF treaty with President Reagan, told Japan’s Asahi Shimbun that the recent US missile tests illustrate that the Americans are “striving to free themselves of any obligations with respect to weapons and obtain absolute military supremacy.”

For North Korea, however, the deployment of new strategic missiles in Northeast Asia could be a game changer. “Even though this missile will be conventional, it stands to upend North Korea’s strategy in ways that could be immensely destabilizing,” Ankit Panda, an arms control analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, wrote last month. What made the banned missiles so dangerous, he noted, “was their promptness.”

Before the INF treaty, said Panda, “in a matter of minutes, a U.S. Pershing II ballistic missile could have decapitated the Soviet leadership.” Gorbachev and Reagan, he added, “understood that these missiles would push both sides to undertake exceedingly dangerous postures that would, in a crisis, make nuclear weapons use and escalation to a full-scale nuclear war more likely.”

Kim is clearly concerned, Panda concluded, pointing to a statement this past August from the North Korean foreign ministry that cited “U.S. testing of nuclear and strategic missile defense systems, including an ICBM, a submarine-launched ballistic missile, and the homeland missile defense system in 2019.”

But the North is also acutely aware of the South’s massive capabilities, which will soon expand. In recent months, according to South Korean press accounts, the ROK military has announced that it will acquire 20 more advanced F-35s and a fleet of Seahawk helicopters from Lockheed Martin that are designed for anti-submarine warfare. The South is also building a new assault ship, described as a “light aircraft carrier,” that will be capable of carrying F-35B fighter jets.

When the first US F-35s were introduced last summer, North Korea’s KCNA denounced Seoul for escalating tensions by “enhancing the Air Force’s operational capabilities to enable surprise attack against us.” The state media site said, “The South Korean government has the duty and responsibility to stop all activities that could become a source of tension on the Korean Peninsula, such as bringing in war equipment.”

As a result, President Moon’s government has been careful not to publicize recent acquisitions. Earlier this month, when the Korean Air Force took possession of its latest stealth F-35s, it held a “low-key” ceremony behind closed doors, the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo reported. And as the date drew near to take delivery of the new Global Hawk drones pictured in the ROK Air Force film, the government kept the entire process under wraps. “There will be none of the usual brass bands and ceremonial marking the purchase and handover, and the government will not announce the date of the drones’ arrival,” Chosun noted (as it predicted, the drones were delivered Monday with virtually no public notice).

There is no such hesitancy in Japan, which has also been expanding its military capabilities under the leadership of conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

According to Navy Times, Japanese military spending “is expected to set a new record next year as the country deepens its military alliance with the U.S. and spends more on expensive American stealth fighters and other equipment amid threats from China and North Korea.”

Under its latest, $50 billion military budget, the publication said, Japan is buying new F-35B stealth fighter jets, along with “105 F-35As, for a total F-35 fleet of 147—the largest number of any country outside the U.S., and, critics say, more than is needed for a country committed to self-defense.” In addition, Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Forces is deploying two US-built Aegis surveillance ships in the Sea of Japan and East China Sea and is reconfiguring one of its destroyers to serve as an aircraft carrier to be used in part by US Marine F-35B fighter jets. The “higher levels of integration between the two militaries could increase the risk of Japan becoming embroiled in a U.S.-led conflict,” Navy Times concluded.

At the moment, the most likely foe in such a conflict is Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, which sees itself as surrounded by the massive military forces of the United States, South Korea, and Japan.

Despite the recent tensions between Tokyo and Seoul and the Moon government’s cancellation of a bilateral intelligence-sharing agreement, the US allies remain a formidable deterrent to the North. That’s one of the reasons Kim chose to engage with the United States over its nuclear weapons last year, and why it seeks security guarantees that would prevent the powerful military alliance from attacking and destroying his regime (it’s also why the DPRK has grown increasingly critical of South Korea as Pyongyang’s negotiations with Trump have floundered).

These are all factors to consider as Kim’s New Year’s deadline approaches. Over the past few days, Stephen Biegun, the chief US negotiator with North Korea, was in Seoul and Beijing to discuss next steps and head off a year-end crisis. On Monday, President Moon will also be in China holding a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping before a trilateral meeting with China and Japan. South Korean progressives are urging him to take a more active role in the peace process.

“If North Korea and the US’ brinkmanship leads to a complete rupture, tensions on the Korean Peninsula will escalate to unprecedented levels, with South Korea ultimately suffering the greatest harm,” the newspaper Hankyoreh warned in a recent editorial.

To avoid a Christmas surprise, even Democrats who have been quite hawkish on North Korea are urging a turn away from military preparations. “It would be a severe miscalculation to believe that a resumption of ‘fire and fury’ threats and other attempts at nuclear coercion against North Korea, which can increase the risk of a catastrophic war, can lead to better results than the negotiating table,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and seven other senators wrote in a letter to Trump released last week.

Even while lauding “our alliances with the Republic of Korea and Japan,” the letter calls for a “sequenced” and “phased process” of denuclearization that has been embraced by both Koreas in their own bilateral talks. The senators said such an approach could lead to an interim deal that would be “an important effort to create the sort of real and durable diplomatic process that is necessary to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea.”

On the same day, however, the Senate also passed a bipartisan measure that would expand US sanctions on North Korea and impose a secondary boycott on banks that do business with the North. “Kim Jong-un is a ruthless thug whose nuclear & missile programs threaten us & our Asian allies,” Senator Pat Toomey tweeted in introducing the measure. “The best way [to] make him reverse course is through crippling sanctions.” The new language is part of the National Defense Authorization Act.

That is unlikely to work, however. Kim and his government have made clear in countless statements that they can survive and even thrive under US sanctions. And on Monday, CNN’s Will Ripley, one of the best-sourced reporters covering North Korea, predicted from conversations he’s had that Kim’s “gift” will not be an ICBM but the abandonment of his negotiations with Trump and “consolidating Pyongyang’s status as a nuclear weapons state.” According to his sources, “Pyongyang will also no longer pursue sanctions relief as a means of achieving economic development either in the short-term or long-term, but will instead increase its commitment to the state’s ideology of self-reliance, known as Juche.” How Trump might react to an ICBM test or Kim’s rejection is a major unknown. But Kazianis, the analyst certain of a North Korean missile test, said he has been told by White House officials that the president would see it as a personal insult. “Personal relationships to Trump are everything,” Kazianis reported on Monday. “Going back on a promise would make the president rethink the relationship.”

For Korea peace advocates, the key to ending the military buildup in Northeast Asia is a comprehensive agreement that would end the state of war on the peninsula (that was made clear to me by a recent South Korea delegation to New York and Washington). It was also a dominant theme in the latest policy statement on Korea from the newly formed Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which opened its doors this month and hopes to change the terms of debate in Washington about national security.

“To chart a new path toward peace, President Trump should state that the United States is no longer engaged in a war with North Korea and that it is willing to take steps to formalize a peaceful bilateral relationship,” wrote analyst Jessica Lee. “Ending the war would address Pyongyang’s perennial insecurities against external threats that has driven it to embrace weapons of mass destruction in the first place.”

To press that message, Korea Peace Now, a coalition of groups that includes Women Cross DMZ, is organizing a national action in March 2020 to call for a formal end to the war, a peace treaty that would require the involvement of China, and “tangible de-militarization including denuclearization, removal of landmines, and reduction of bases/troops.” With the peninsula headed into another potential crisis, that may be the only way to end America’s longest war.

It’s not just the North Koreans who are fed up with the glacial pace of their bilateral negotiations with President Trump over nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Many South Koreans are too. And they are starting to make their voices known.

On November 5, 71 members of South Korea’s National Assembly signed on to legislation calling on the two Koreas and the United States and China to declare a formal end to the Korean War and sign a peace treaty. To many Koreans on both sides of the DMZ, that’s a necessary step to kick-start the denuclearization talks and, in the words of the bill’s sponsor, “help to usher in peace on the Korean Peninsula.”

The timing was significant. The week before, on October 31, Kim Jong-un had set off alarm bells in Washington when his military conducted another “test fire” of a short-range missile. His intent was to add pressure on Trump “to meet an end-of-year deadline for a new proposal on exchanging the regime’s nuclear weapons program for economic and political concessions,” South Korea’s Yonhap reported.

The missile test received the usual blanket coverage in the mainstream US press. It has been contemptuous of Trump’s negotiations with Kim since they began in Singapore last year, and has adopted a story line pushed by the foreign policy establishment—that North Korea is rearming while Kim’s talks with Trump flounder.

“North Korea launched two more short range missiles and nobody seems to care anymore,” Josh Rogin, a hawkish commentator for The Washington Post, said in a tweet about the test. But they certainly care in South Korea, where people have lived with the threat of war for 70 years and are anxious to find a way toward a permanent peace.

In the week preceding the missile test, a group of progressive activists from South Korea was in New York and Washington pleading for a change in US policy to break the deadlock so the two Koreas can move forward on their own plans for reconciliation.

Tired of the impasse in the US–North Korean talks and impatient with what they see as President Moon Jae-in’s acquiescence to US demands on maintaining sanctions, the 22 delegates, representing South Korean churches, labor unions, academia, and agriculture, spent five days on the East Coast to warn that, without US concessions on sanctions, the peace process in their country could be doomed.

“We are on the cusp of a dangerous time in which a standstill between these countries that extends into 2020 could escalate to the extremes of military action and even war between North Korea and the United States,” Pil-young Shin, the chair of the June 15 Committee for the Reunification of Korea, said in his opening remarks to an October 26 conference at the United Nations in New York (I was invited to address the conference as an independent journalist).

Unlike the US skeptics, who dominate discussion of Korea in the media and cable news, the South Korean progressives view American policy itself as the prime obstacle to progress in the Korea peace process.

“We have emphasized repeatedly that the basic problem threatening peace in the Korean Peninsula lies in the US’s long-lasting hostile policies towards [the] DPRK,” Chongbok Lee, a veteran organizer and the chair of the peace delegation, said at the UN conference, using North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That term—“hostile policy”—is also at the core of North Korea’s demands of the United States.

Lee continued: “The US must come back to the spirit of June 2018 Singapore summit and should release blockade and oppressive measures against [North] Korea, making efforts to normalize relations. As the result of such processes, we ensure that the stable peace regime as well as denuclearization can be achieved.” He pointed out that the June 12, 2018, declaration in Singapore by Kim and Trump “asserted a commitment to end the long hostile relations between the DPRK and the US,” adding that “the US government must devote effort into uprooting the war mechanism deeply embedded into the Korean Peninsula.”

It was Trump’s hard line on maintaining sanctions until full denuclearization, he and other South Koreans argued, that led North Korea to walk out of its last meeting with US negotiators in Sweden on October 5. Ten days later, Kim Jong-un was pictured in state media riding a white stallion in the snow to Mount Paekdu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula and a symbol of North Korean nationalism, power, and invincibility. “Kim Jong-un sends message of self-reliance and perseverance to N. Korean people,” the progressive Hankyoreh declared in its headline about the event.

But most US observers interpreted the visual, which was widely ridiculed on social media, as a sign that he’s about to take dramatic action—perhaps “bigger and badder” missile tests, suggested analyst Harry Kazianis—unless the United States meets the deadline set earlier this year. Coming from the right, The Daily Beast’s Donald Kirk predicted that Kim’s ride on Mount Paekdu was “all about projecting the image of a hero in a campaign of intimidation aimed at both the U.S. and South Korea in a climactic drive to get [Trump and Moon] to yield at last to his demands.”

That’s certainly not how the visiting Koreans see it.

In their meetings with UN diplomats, US lawmakers, and peace groups in the last week of October, the delegation stressed that Trump’s refusal to lift sanctions as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign to force Kim’s immediate denuclearization has driven the North to display its conventional military might with its recent missile tests (24 launches this year, according to one observer).

Worse, they said, the sanctions have made it impossible for the two Koreas to move forward on the economic projects Kim and Moon agreed to at their own historic summit in Pyongyang in September 2018. One of the most important of those projects was the reopening of the Mount Kumgang tourism site in the North that was the focus of bitter recriminations by Chairman Kim in late October. When South Korea offered to discuss the project in face-to-face talks, the DPRK rejected the offer.

The South Korean delegation blamed US sanctions for the impasse. “We beseech our US friends: the US keeps imposing restrictions that stop the Mount Kumgang project,” Shin told a group of US Korea watchers at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. “We wish to work with you to overcome this obstacle.” Without a warming in inter-Korean ties, he warned, the prospects for a US and South Korean agreement with North Korea on nuclear weapons grow dimmer by the day.

The sanctions have also made it difficult for badly needed humanitarian aid to flow. In a meeting with the staff of Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey, the delegation said, they discussed the possibility of exemptions on sanctions for such items as medicine and water filters.

The serious impact of sanctions on ordinary North Koreans was underscored by a report from an international panel of independent experts that was released on October 30 by Korea Peace Now!, a coalition led by Women Cross DMZ. The report was covered widely, including by The Wall Street Journal, and includes some sobering statistics.

“There is already evidence of irreparable damage,” the report states. “It is possible to estimate with reasonable certainty that there may have been more than 3,968 deaths in 2018 (with 3,193 of those being children under age 5, and 72 of them pregnant women) as a result of sanctions-related delays and funding shortfalls impacting specific UN humanitarian programmes.” (A full copy of the report can be downloaded here.)

he June 15 Committee that visited the United States was formed in 2000 to support the spirit of the first-ever summit between North and South, where the Mount Kumgang project began (it was shut down in 2009 during a period of high tensions between the two sides). The committee was a key part of the broad coalition that organized the massive candlelight rallies in 2016 and 2017 that led directly to the impeachment of Park Geun-hye and the subsequent election of President Moon in May 2017.

Since then, the South Korean progressive forces have been the backbone of popular support for President Moon. As I witnessed from Gwangju in 2017, he campaigned for the presidency pledging to restore the “Sunshine Policy” of political and economic engagement initiated in the late 1990s by his predecessors, Kim Dae-jung—who made that first trek north in 2000—and Roh Moo-hyun. Since Moon took office, those in favor of his peace initiative are a majority; while he has slipped in popularity in recent months, most polls show that 60 percent support him on his outreach to North Korea.

But the hard-line US stance on the North has greatly troubled the Korean left and even the Moon government. They have watched with growing apprehension as the US-run United Nations Command in South Korea has blocked South Korean officials from participating in a survey of North Korea’s rail system and continued strict controls on people from the South crossing the border for discussions with their Northern counterparts. (Some of the controls are petty: One group that convened at Mount Kumgang last February was prohibited from bringing laptops or cameras with them, members of the June 15 delegation said.)

While publicly supportive of the UN Command, the Moon government has expressed reservations about its policies. On October 21, Moon’s Unification Minister, Kim Yeon-chul, said at a National Assembly hearing that the UNC was using “inadequate legal grounds” for denying certain permits to cross the border, and said that “institutional remedies” are needed so people can cross the DMZ for nonmilitary purposes (in a rare rebuke, the UNC responded with a press statement calling such reports “inaccurate”).

South Korean progressives have also been shocked by US criticism of the Moon government’s response to its trade dispute with Japan over a Supreme Court decision that Tokyo should pay compensation to Korean victims of Japanese forced labor during World War II. Even as the June 15 delegation was in New York and Washington, a senior US official, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell, was in Seoul asking the Moon government to rejoin an intelligence-sharing arrangement with Japan it had canceled in retaliation for Japanese export sanctions.

The distance between Seoul and Washington on this issue was very clear at a conference organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a military think tank that receives major funding from Japan and US arms exporters. “The country doing the most damage to itself” in the dispute “is the Republic of Korea,” said Michael Green, a CSIS senior vice president who worked on Korea issues for the George W. Bush administration. “I don’t know what the Moon government is doing with Japan. Japan is winning this tactically.”

The hostility from official Washington is so intense that Lee Su-hyeok, Moon’s new ambassador to the United States, told reporters a few days ago that South Korea’s policies toward the North are inviting criticisms that they are “pro-Pyongyang.” And Trump, whose outreach to Kim has been applauded by the South Korean left, has raised the stakes himself by demanding a five-fold increase in Seoul’s financial support for US forces in Korea.

According to a recent book by an aide to former secretary of defense James Mattis, Trump called South Korea a “major abuser” of the United States and characterized the alliance as a “losing deal.” He allegedly added that if Seoul “paid us $60 billion a year to keep our troops overseas, then it’s an okay deal.” The statements have sparked some protests in South Korea. On October 18, a group of progressive university students used ladders to enter the grounds of the residence of US ambassador Harry Harris and denounced the 500 percent increase in costs for the bases (“Leave this soil, Harris,” their banner read).

On the issue of US forces in the country, South Korea’s progressive forces seem to reflect mainstream thinking. While recent polls have shown that most South Koreans support a military alliance with the United States, there is considerable ambiguity about the future of US bases in the South and sharp disagreement with the US demands that Seoul increase its payments. Last January, for example, the Korean firm Realmeter found that nearly 60 percent of Koreans opposed paying a greater share of the costs for US bases, as Trump has demanded, while 52 percent were against the idea “even if” it means the United States scales down its forces or withdraws from the peninsula.

Trump’s recent statements, too, sparked anger from many South Koreans. “I hope against hope that Americans will get over with the Trumpian diversion and put things back to where they were,” Oh Young-jin, an editor with the centrist Korea Times, wrote in a commentary titled “Why Trump hates Koreans.”

The Trump administration also came under criticism after a Pentagon official suggested—during talks about returning wartime operational control of US-Korean forces to Seoul—that the South Korean military should become an auxiliary force for the United States in such places as the Middle East. “Reports that we may have to send our troops to overseas areas of conflict determined to be a threat by the United States after the Opcon transfer are not true,” a spokesperson for the defense ministry told reporters.

Back in Washington, members of the June 15 group explained that the differences over sanctions underscore the need to redefine the meaning of the US–South Korean alliance, which was formalized in 1954.

“We need to move from a hierarchical to a more equal relationship,” Lee, the chairman of the delegation, said. “Until the alliance is transformed, inter-Korean movement will be limited.” Moreover, “so long as the United States maintains a hierarchical alliance over South Korea, North Korea will not change its relationship” with the US government, he pointed out.

Their solution, he continued, is to “achieve South Korea’s sovereign voice within the US–South Korean alliance so South Korea can advocate for itself on the Korean peninsula.”

That’s a tall order for Trump, who is mired in an impeachment investigation and totally unpredictable in foreign affairs. But it also presents some rethinking by the Democrats, whose senior leadership (including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) has disparaged Moon’s negotiations with the “tyrant” (Joe Biden’s words) Kim Jong-un and, like CSIS, openly sided with Japan in the dispute over World War II compensation.

o what might happen over the next year before the US elections? Trump, ever optimistic and desperately seeking a foreign policy win to offset his blunders, continues to predict success on the denuclearization front with Kim Jong-un; but he adds that he’s in “no rush” to get a deal completed.

The DPRK leadership seems to see it that way, too. Even after fierce criticism of the US position by lower-level officials, Kim seems to believe Trump will pull it off. Trump and Kim still have a “special” relationship, but “Washington political circles and DPRK policy makers of the U.S. administration are hostile to the DPRK for no reason, preoccupied with the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice,” Kim Kye-gwan, a top adviser to Chairman Kim, wrote in a commentary carried by the state wire service KCNA. “There is a will, there is a way. We want to see how wisely the U.S. will pass the end of the year.”

Since then, Trump has appointed Stephen Biegun, his nuclear envoy to the DPRK, to the number-two position in the State Department, deputy secretary, where he will “keep his North Korea portfolio,” CNN reported on October 31. He has been busy with a schedule that has included, surprisingly, reaching out to humanitarian and peace groups focused on North Korea. Last week, for example, he met with Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, along with members of the campaign Korea Peace Now, for the second time. (Reached in Geneva, Ahn confirmed the meeting with Biegun and said “he was in good spirits.”) And in a sign that US and Korean pleas for a peace agreement are being heard, Alex Wong, the deputy special representative for North Korea, told a Washington audience on Tuesday that the state of war on the Korean Peninsula “should not and cannot be permanent.”

Meanwhile, the Moon government has been sending its own signals that it wants North Korea back in the talks with the United States. In contrast to the American concern about the DPRK’s October 31 missile test, Chung Eui-yong, President Moon’s national security director, downplayed the danger to South Korea last week. “I don’t think the missile capabilities the North is developing now are a grave threat to our national security,” he told the National Assembly, noting that the South’s military budget is much larger than that of North Korea and that the South Korean military also tests short-range missiles (the government’s stance drew sharp criticism from conservatives). On November 4, Moon’s intelligence director, Suh Hoon, sounded another note of optimism, telling lawmakers that US and North Korean negotiators are expected to hold another round of bilateral talks “no later than early December.”

In a sign of pre-negotiation flexibility, the US and South Korean militaries have agreed to skip an upcoming combined air exercise called “Vigilant Ace” that in 2017 mobilized around 270 US and Korean aircraft, including advanced F-22s and F-35s, to demonstrate their joint capabilities against the DPRK. Instead, they will hold separate drills, as they did in 2018. The decision reflects a bilateral effort “to support ongoing diplomacy for the denuclearization of North Korea,” Yonhap reported.  

Suspension of these exercises—as well as a peace treaty to end the Korean War—were also key demands of the South Korean peace delegation that came here. As one of the delegates said after his meetings on Capitol Hill on sanctions, “small steps at a time.”

A bitter dispute between South Korea and Japan over compensation for Korean victims of Japan’s war crimes escalated last week when Seoul announced that it would terminate a 2016 bilateral agreement with Tokyo to share classified military intelligence. The unprecedented move drew howls of outrage from US officials and analysts that were reflected in a Washington Post headline stating that the decision “was a blow to US security interests.”

The announcement from President Moon Jae-in’s Blue House came on August 22 after months of wrangling over a 2018 Supreme Court decision in Seoul that upheld claims that Japanese corporations must pay reparations to Koreans forced to work in their mines and factories during World War II. In response, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had removed South Korea from a “white list” of preferential trading partners and slapped unprecedented trade restrictions on South Korean exports.

“The government deemed that Japan caused grave change in the bilateral security cooperation environment” by imposing the sanctions, President Moon’s spokesperson said. “Under such circumstances, the government decided that it does not coincide with our national interest to maintain the agreement that was signed to exchange sensitive military information.”

From President Trump on down, the US government and Washington’s hawkish foreign policy experts had been pleading with South Korea not to take this step and to negotiate instead. “South Korea and Japan are fighting all the time,” President Trump complained recently to White House reporters. “They’ve got to get along because it puts us in a very bad position.” Afterward, a senior official in the administration said Seoul’s decision “is laying bare fundamental questions about the Moon administration’s commitment to our collective security.”

In the days leading up to the announcement, US policy hard-liners had urged Trump to intervene, saying the tit-for-tat trade retaliation by Tokyo and Seoul and a Korean boycott of Japanese goods threaten their collective stance against North Korea and China, and endanger both regional missile defense as well as the 2016 intelligence pact known as the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSMIA).

“This dispute is a clear and present danger to US national security interests,” Patrick Cronin, a former Pentagon official at the Hudson Institute, said at an August 7 seminar on the trade dispute at the Heritage Foundation, a line parroted by the Post and many other US commentators.

In a typical response, Mintaro Oba, a former State Department official specializing in Korea, tweeted that “Seoul will pay a very grave price for this in Washington. It is not in keeping with a constructive approach to the U.S.-Korea alliance.” Hard-liner Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies also lashed out at the US ally. “While this action is vindictively directed at Japan, it weakens the U.S.-ROK alliance as it weakens trilateral cooperation among the three countries,” he wrote in a CSIS commentary.

But Seoul’s foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, sharply disagreed with these assessments, saying the surprise decision “is a separate issue from the South Korea-U.S. alliance.” Taro Kono, her equivalent in Tokyo, called the decision “extremely regrettable” and lectured that Seoul “completely misread the regional security environment.”

Central to the dispute is a 1965 Normalization Treaty signed by South Korea and Japan during the height of the Cold War. That treaty, which was passed after years of intense US pressure, became the cornerstone of the “1965 system,” which helped make South Korea an industrial power and is the basis for the trilateral security alliance among Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul that still underpins US policy in Asia 54 years later.

An investigation by The Nation of US documents in the National Archives and Records Administration and newly declassified documents from the Central Intelligence Agency shows that the treaty—which brought Japan back to the Korean Peninsula for the first time since its surrender in 1945—was largely the work of the United States. They show that US pressure on Seoul to reopen ties with Tokyo began in the years after the Korean War, when US military planners and aid officials concluded that Korea would remain divided and that the South’s only chance for survival lay with its former colonizer.

One of the most remarkable documents in the archives was written in 1961 by Hugh Farley, a senior US aid official in Seoul and President Kennedy’s top adviser on Korea. In a report for the National Security Council from a “Presidential Task Force on Korea,” on file in the JFK presidential library, Farley urged the administration to move forcefully to persuade South Korea and Japan to normalize ties. But Washington, he insisted, should make it appear that the idea originated in Seoul.

“While the initiative should clearly be recognized as American, the action should be handled so as to appear Korean,” Farley wrote in a report that was cleared by the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. “There can be no question of waiting for or seeking some Korean readiness to act. We must galvanize the action.”

Abe first imposed trade restrictions in July after South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled that the 1965 treaty did not override the compensation rights of Koreans forced to be slave laborers for Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal and other companies during Japan’s occupation of Korea.

Earlier this month, Abe accused Seoul of breaching the treaty, which compensated Korea as a nation but not individuals. Moon endorsed the court’s decision and vowed not to back down in enforcing it. “We will never again lose to Japan,” he told his cabinet and broadcast in a tweet on August 2.

The US expert class on Korea has clearly sided with Abe on the treaty. During the conference at Heritage, speakers were unanimous in their concern that President Moon’s stance on the compensation issue could undermine the 1965 agreement and, by extension, the close security ties among the United States, Japan, and South Korea. President Moon “has a special responsibility to uphold international agreements, including the normalization treaty,” Scott Snyder, director of the program on US-Korea policy for the Council on Foreign Relations, warned at the Heritage event where Cronin spoke.

“Don’t reopen the treaty,” advised Bruce Klingner, a retired CIA officer who runs the Heritage program on Korea. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has apparently taken such sentiments to heart: Recently, he privately expressed to the Abe government his support for Japan’s position that the South Korean demands for compensation violate the 1965 treaty. After the news broke, Pompeo said he was “disappointed” in South Korea. His spokesperson, Morgan Ortagus, added that Moon’s decision “will make defending #Korea more complicated and increase risk to U.S. forces.”

A treaty Under Martial Law

But the treaty was hardly a model of democratic rule. It was signed under martial-law conditions on June 22, 1965, by the foreign minister for Park Chung-hee, a dictator who seized power in a military coup in 1961. In Tokyo, the signatory was Eisaku Sato, one of the first of a string of Liberal Democratic Party leaders who ruled Japan after the 1950s and were the secret recipients of millions of dollars from the CIA. (Sato was also the great uncle of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s current leader, and the brother of Nobusuke Kishi, an accused war criminal who was prime minister from 1957 to 1960.)

In addition to restoring diplomatic relations for the first time since Japan’s surrender, the treaty brought an immediate infusion into South Korea of $800 million in compensation—in the form of Japanese aid and credits—that was deployed to build the Korean steel, electronics, and shipbuilding industries. By 1973, according to a CIA “National Intelligence Survey,” the United States and Japan accounted for about 70 percent of South Korea’s exports, 67 percent of its imports, 90 percent of foreign private investment, and “the bulk of official economic aid.”

The treaty also set the stage for the close security ties among the United States, Japan, and South Korea that intensified in the 1980s and ’90s and expanded in recent years with the rise of North Korea as a nuclear state.

There’s a reason US officials and policy analysts don’t want the treaty reopened and scrutinized: Any focus on its origins would reveal the hidden hand of the United States in the pact. The documents in the US archives reveal that the pressure began as early as 1947 and continued unabated until the US government capitalized on Park’s military takeover to force South Korea back into Japan’s arms. It culminated in 1965, just as the Johnson administration was beginning its massive escalation in Vietnam by sending thousands of US troops to fight the communist-led National Liberation Front and North Vietnam. As a price for its US support, South Korea sent a huge contingent of soldiers to support South Vietnam as well.

Five years after the treaty was signed, the CIA was ecstatic with the results. “One of [South Korea’s] most difficult problems was resolved on at least a formal level with the 1965 treaty normalizing relations with Japan,” the agency said in a 1970 report on “The Changing Scene in South Korea.” Since the treaty, it said, “Japanese capital has played a vital role in South Korea’s economic growth. Suspicion and outright dislike of Korea’s sometime conqueror persist; but there nevertheless is a growing recognition within the leadership in both countries of common regional interests.”

The CIA added, “An encouraging feature of the relationship has been quiet cooperation in the exchange of intelligence.” That startling passage is strong evidence that the 1965 treaty was the catalyst for the intelligence-sharing pact that South Korea has now canceled. And it points to one of the more sinister motives behind US policies at the time: to make Japan a junior partner with the United States in running its new empire in East Asia after World War II.

A shared division of labor

The LDP’s eagerness to reopen ties with South Korea was part of a strategy by the United States to incorporate Japan into its anti-communist containment policies, according to Muto Ichiyo, one of the leaders of the Japanese New Left in the 1960s. As the Cold War heated up in the late 1940s, he said in an interview I first cited in The Nation in 2015, the Japanese elite decided that their best bet lay in forging a strategic alliance with the United States.

“The part of Japanese imperialism which was made powerless after the defeat in the war wanted, of course, to revive itself,” Muto said. “But they knew perfectly well that the situation had changed.… So they adopted a very clear-cut strategy: Japan will concentrate on the buildup of the economic base structure of imperialism, while America will practically rule Asia through its military forces.”

The treaty with South Korea and the enormous investments that followed, he said, reflected a “clear-cut strategy” by Japan’s rulers to be part of a “shared division of labor” with the United States in backing US military allies in Asia. That partnership was sealed in 1969, when President Nixon and Prime Minister Sato signed a joint communiqué saying that the security of South Korea was “essential to Japan’s own security.” That meant, Muto said, “that Japan almost ceased to regard Korea as another country.”

If that sounds like Marxist conspiracy talk, consider this tantalizing section of the secret 1970 report, which was submitted by the director of Central Intelligence. “Relations with Japan are likely to grow especially close, if not warm and friendly,” as a result of the treaty, the agency wrote in its National Intelligence Estimate on December 2, 1970. “A whole network of political, intelligence, economic, and military exchanges is developing between the two at various levels of government and commercial life which may lead to a sort of big-and-little brother relationship over the years.”

That colonial relationship was also reflected in the treaty’s ratification. To get the 1965 treaty through the Diet, Sato’s LDP mobilized its own “Korea Lobby,” a pressure group representing Japan’s top capitalists, many of whom had interests in Korea during the colonial period. The lobby group was led by the infamous Kishi, Abe’s grandfather, according to Kwan Bong Kim, a Korean academic who wrote a book on the treaty’s politics. Like Kishi, the members of the Korea Lobby were “quite frank in their admiration for the aims and achievements of Japanese imperialism,” the highly respected Far Eastern Economic Review reported in 1966.

One of the earliest signs of the US campaign to bring Japan back to the Korean Peninsula is dated nine years before the treaty. In 1956, President Eisenhower dispatched Robert Macy, a prominent US government economist, to Seoul. As chief of the international division of the Bureau of the Budget, the precursor to today’s powerful OMB, Macy’s task was to wean the shattered country away from its status as the world’s largest recipient of US economic aid. By the end of the 1950s, the US government provided more than half of South Korea’s budget and 90 percent of its foreign exchange.

Macy suggested that South Korea’s future depended on reintegration with Japan. “The biggest obstacle to ROK industrial development is the lack of skilled management,” he wrote in a secret report to the White House that I found in the diplomatic section of the National Archives. “By far the most important single step to overcome this bottleneck is the restoration of full commercial relationships with highly industrialized Japan.” Macy’s recommendations carried weight in part because he had been the special assistant to W. Averell Harriman, the director of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe.

In his report, Macy urged the administration to intensify the pressure on Seoul. But somewhat ominously, he added: “the situation appears to be ripe for a show down” with Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s autocratic president. “Unless President Rhee’s hand is forced soon on this whole situation, it is difficult to see how we can justify economic assistance” if South Korea “is not closely linked to a large industrial power.”

Rhee, who had resisted US pressure to link up with Tokyo, was overthrown in a popular and bloody revolt in April 1960 that the US government—in contrast to its intervention in a similar uprising 20 years later—did nothing to prevent. After his military refused orders to put down the demonstrations, Rhee was flown out of the country in a CIA plane. Over the next year, South Koreans took advantage of the democratic opening to press for more radical change; among the most popular ideas was reunification with the North and a neutral Korea free of both US and Soviet influence.

But in May 1961, Park, a general who had been trained in the Japanese Imperial Army and dutifully served in its colony in Manchuria, seized power in a military coup and put a stop to such talk. He was immediately recognized as South Korea’s legitimate leader by the incoming Kennedy administration, which looked to him to implement the US agenda. “After the Rhee period, it was generally recognized that reunification would not occur in the foreseeable future and that investment decisions should not be influenced by its possibility,” two former US advisers in Korea wrote in a 1971 book about the US aid program.

That decision was the impetus for the report to Kennedy’s NSC by Farley, the US aid official. After laying out South Korea’s dire economic situation, he recommended that President Kennedy discuss “the US planning for Korea” with the Japanese Prime Minister,” Hayato Ikeda, during a forthcoming visit to Washington. Remarkably, that meant the United States was initiating an enormous change for Korea not with its leaders, but with the Japanese.

In another report, on June 5, 1961, the NSC spelled out what Korea’s future should be under Park, its new military strongman. “The United States, Japan and the United Nations are of dominant importance in Korea’s foreign affairs,” the NSC stated. “The United States stands first because of Korea’s immediate dependence upon support for its defense and economic existence.” But “second only to the United States, Japan is of critical importance in terms of long-term Korean international relations.”

Why? Because “there has existed in the past a trade and productive relationship which created for Japan both an opportunity and obligation, in its own political and strategic interests, to take a leading role supporting and developing Korea.” That bland description of Japan’s colonial rule was essentially an endorsement by the United States that South Korea was to be a permanent appendage to Japan, and was an insult to the many Koreans who had fought so hard against Japan—and suffered under its occupation—since the advent of the Korean independence movement in 1919.

Still, the administration pressed on, and in the spring of 1961 made it clear to Park’s military government and the ruling LDP in Japan that they should take steps to reopen diplomatic relations. The pressure paid off: Within four years of his coup, Park showed his worth to the United States by signing the Normalization Treaty. But it was passed only after Park placed tanks and troops around the National Assembly to keep the opposition party out. “Seoul police used tear gas and clubs to break up demonstrations by 7,000 students,” who called the treaty “the product of ‘humiliating concessions,’” The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

The Japanese companies behind the treaty in Tokyo also provided millions of dollars to Park’s political party in the years leading up to the treaty, according to a secret CIA report on “the future of Korean Japanese relations” written in March 1966. It said that Japanese firms “reportedly provided two thirds of the party’s 1961-65 budget, six firms having paid the $66-million total, with individual contributions ranging from $1 million to $20 million.” “Politically sophisticated Koreans,” the CIA concluded, “fear that their own venal politicians may become subservient to Japanese business interests.” After South Korea’s democratization in 1987, that is exactly what Korean reporters discovered.

The end of the 1965 regime?

Based on that history, it’s understandable why many Koreans view the 1965 treaty as an affront to their national dignity and believe it should no longer stand as the basis for South Korea’s relationship with Japan.

“The history of the end of the ‘1965 regime’ is now in full swing,” Nam Ki-jeong, a Japan specialist at Seoul National University wrote in the progressive Hankyoreh on August 18. “The trigger pulled by Japan with its trade warfare is set to go down in history as its opening salvo.” He added: “Moving beyond the 1965 regime is an essential stage in the Korean Peninsula peace process.”

But that’s the last thing the US foreign policy establishment wants. Besides keeping the treaty intact, US officials have been adamant that Seoul cannot allow the dispute to threaten the intelligence-sharing pact, which was signed in 2016 with strong US backing. “We are all stronger—and Northeast Asia is safer—when the United States, Japan, and Korea work together in solidarity and friendship,” said Pentagon spokesperson Lieut. Col. Dave Eastburn after the agreement was nullified. “Intel sharing is key to developing our common defense policy and strategy.”

American officials and experts in think tanks are also deeply concerned that continued friction between Moon and Abe could endanger South Korea’s participation in a regional missile defense system that involves the militaries of all three countries. Both the GSMIA and the missile defense cooperation would have been impossible without the 1965 treaty, which established the shaky alliance between Seoul and Tokyo.

But unfortunately, the US response and media coverage of the dispute has been extremely favorable to Japan—so much so that when an American professor, Gregg Brazinsky of George Washington University, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post criticizing Japan for failing “to reckon with past atrocities,” he was profiled in the Dong-a Ilbo, a major Korean daily. “Many are accusing me of being anti-Japan,” Brazinsky tweeted. “Criticizing specific policies doesn’t mean you hate a whole country.”

That incident, and the history exposed in declassified US documents, underscores that the dispute over the “1965 system” is a problem of our own making. And it begs the question: Should the United States cling to an outmoded system put in place by a South Korean dictator in league with Japan’s right-wing LDP for the sake of national security and America’s massive forward base structure in Asia? And, more to the point, doesn’t South Korea have the sovereign right to make decisions about its own future, even when its allies in Washington disagree?

Those are questions that American citizens should pose to both the Trump administration and the leaders of the Democratic Party, which are united in their support for the trilateral military alliances with South Korea and Japan. But it suggests an answer: If Japan should own up to its sordid past, so should the United States.

Led by former vice president Joe Biden, the leading Democratic candidates for president in 2020 have focused on President Trump’s friendly (though presently shaky) relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as a prime example of a foreign policy that’s gone off the establishment tracks and left traditional US allies in the dust. With their next televised debate set for next week, Biden and most of his competitors hope to convince voters—especially those who voted Republican in 2016—that Trump’s personalized style of US power projection presents an existential danger not only to the United States but als0 to its friends around the world.

“We need allies,” Biden told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on July 5, five days after Trump revived his once-stalled negotiations with Kim in a historic meeting on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone arranged with the support of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Yet Trump “is absolutely dissing them,” the Democratic front-runner continued, and is instead “embracing thugs. He’s embracing Kim Jong-un, who is a thug.”

Even as Trump and Kim announced at the DMZ that their new negotiating teams would soon begin a new round of talks, Biden continued his line of attack, declaring on Twitter and in the CNN interview that the conversation at the border was merely a “photo op” that “gave Kim everything that he wanted: legitimacy.” Since then, of course, those talks have been delayed by continued disputes between Washington and Pyongyang, most lately about an upcoming series of US–South Korean military exercises and the North’s latest test, on Wednesday, of two short-range missiles.

Yet, given all that’s happened in Korea over the past 18 months, it’s hard to see how Biden’s tough line toward Kim—or a return to the confrontational days of 2017, when all-out war seemed a distinct possibility—could win over the swing voters the Democrats need to defeat Trump. On most issues, particularly immigration, the president’s racist stands and outrageous tweets give the party plenty of ammunition, no manner who the nominee is. But on Korea and Kim, not so much.

Since the first Trump-Kim summit, in June 2018, North Korea has refrained from testing any long-range strategic weapons, and the United States and South Korea has stopped the massive military exercises that so angered the North in years past (the ones coming up in August will be much smaller). And despite an onslaught of media stories about North Korea’s still-formidable military capabilities, the two Koreas have taken advantage of the first major diplomatic opening since the early 2000s to make enormous strides in scaling down tensions on the border, including destroying dozens of front-line guard posts and getting rid of mines.

“If Biden tries to make North Korea a campaign issue and tries to say that Trump is appeasing the Kim regime, he is wasting his time,” said Harry Kazianis, a prominent conservative and senior director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, a think tank founded by former president Richard Nixon. “The 2020 election will come down to economics, not nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula,” he told The Nation in an interview.

Still, Biden’s competitors have kept up the political offensive. At the first Democratic debate, on June 27, Senator Kamala Harris called North Korea “a real threat in terms of its nuclear arsenal” and said Trump “embraces” Kim, “a dictator, for the sake of a photo op.” Senator Elizabeth Warren continued the attack in a tweet a few days later, saying that instead of “squandering American influence on photo ops,” the United States “should be dealing with North Korea through principled diplomacy that promotes US security, defends our allies, and upholds human rights.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, in contrast, has been more nuanced. “I have no problem with [Trump’s] sitting down with Kim Jong-un,” he told ABC’s This Week. But in his view, he said, Trump has badly damaged the State Department and its ability to manage foreign affairs. “We need to move forward diplomatically, not just do photo opportunities,” he added.

It’s a close race for the Democratic nomination: In a poll released July 19 by NBC News, Biden led the pack with 25 percent, with Sanders and Warren holding steady at 16 percent and Harris just behind at 14 percent. This week, a CBS poll had it even closer, with Biden still at 25 percent, but with Warren at 20, Harris at 16 and Sanders at 15. The next three—Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, and Julián Castro—came in at 6, 4, and 2 percent, respectively. A total of 20 candidates will square off next Tuesday and Wednesday on CNN.

When it comes to foreign policy, Biden has been by far the most outspoken. He outlined his philosophy in a major speech on July 11, in which he castigated Trump as an “extreme” threat to US national security and again criticized his “cozy” relationship with Kim. (Writing in The Washington Post, neocon columnist Josh Rogin said that Biden views the 2020 election “as the last chance to save what’s left of the United States’ moral and international credibility and respect.”)

But the former vice president’s alternative policy on Korea, spelled out in his earlier interview with Cuomo on CNN, was a throwback to his days in the Obama administration, which (contrary to a ludicrous claim by Trump at the DMZ) rejected the idea of direct talks with North Korea unless Pyongyang gave up its nuclear weapons first.

Trump, Biden told CNN, “ended our relationship, as a practical matter, with South Korea and Japan as a united front and let China off the hook.” He accused Kim of doing nothing in return. “And what have we done? We’ve suspended exercises.” Asked what he’d do differently, Biden offered a taste of the militarism that Trump tried in 2017. “I make it clear that we’re going to move our defenses up, as we did before, and we’re going to make sure we have the capacity to deal with it near term. I’m going to let South Korea and Japan know we’re there for them. We are their nuclear umbrella. We’re there for them. And China understands, if you don’t want us in your throat here, if you don’t want us in your face, do something.”

Biden’s approach reflects a basic misunderstanding of the peace process in Korea. His overwhelming focus on Trump’s relationship with Kim—shared by the other candidates—obscures Korea’s agency in the peace process and the real issues at stake for Washington, Seoul, and Pyongyang. “This is a rare moment in history where US and Korean interests are aligned,”said Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ and the Korea Peace Treaty Campaign, in a talk in Washington on July 16.

In a discussion at the Center for International Policy, Lee identified the “greater motivating factors” behind the US talks with North and South Korea as Trump’s need to show a win before the 2020 election; Kim’s need to lift sanctions as part of his drive to improve North Korea’s beleaguered economy; and Moon’s need to make progress in inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation before his own term is up in 2022. The organizations she works with, Lee added, are working in Washington and in Congress “to create a political space in DC to prepare for peace in Korea.”

Any discussion of the peace process, in fact, must begin in South Korea. The talks between Trump and Kim only came about because of the encouragement of President Moon, who began the current wave of diplomacy in January 2018 when he invited Kim to send emissaries to the Winter Olympics in the South. Even Shinzo Abe, Japan’s right-wing prime minister and Trump’s closest ally in Asia, has jumped on the bandwagon, offering his own direct talks with Kim (he’s also now embroiled in a bitter economic and diplomatic dispute with Moon over Japan’s World War II–era conscription of Korean laborers).

Biden’s emphasis on the nuclear umbrella—under which the United States has pledged to defend non-nuclear South Korea and Japan with its own weapons—also shows an appalling lack of understanding about the North and its motives. Those weapons, which are carried on US ships and planes in the Pacific region, are part of the arsenal that Kim Jong-un would like to see directed elsewhere, and they explain why he has insisted on the wording “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” in any joint statements with Trump. It’s also a key issue for South Korean peace activists.

“There’s been a lack of discussion about what South Korea and the US should give up to help North Korea give up its nuclear weapons,” Tae-ho Lee, an activist with People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, one of the largest and most influential NGOs in South Korea, said during a recent visit to Washington. “Security assurances to North Korea are impossible without removal of the nuclear umbrella.” He also said the combination of the US and South Korean militaries, linked in an alliance since 1954, are an “overwhelming power.” For the past 30 years, he pointed out, South Korea’s military spending alone has been higher than North Korea’s entire GDP.

Sanders, alone among the Democratic candidates, has been paying attention to and meeting with peace activists and has incorporated into his platform some of their ideas for engagement. He recently used a campaign video that featured an interview with Christine Ahn, executive director of Women Cross DMZ, to argue that Trump’s insistence on tough sanctions until an agreement is reached is threatening progress. “Peace is the best path for American security,” he says. Sanders’s stance is winning support from other progressives within Democratic ranks, such as Representative Ro Khanna of California, a Sanders backer who was the primary author of a bill that passed the full House on July 11 calling for a “binding peace agreement” to bring a formal end to the Korean War. Khanna’s bill, an amendment to a National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020, marked the first time that Congress had taken a stand on ending the 70-year-old war.

The vote was the result of intense lobbying by an array of peace groups, including Ploughshares, Win Without War, and Peace Action. In a statement, Ahn called the vote on the Khanna amendment a “game-changer.” She added: “It’s a clear sign that the American people want an end to the oldest U.S. conflict, and that ending decades of hostilities with a peace agreement is the only way to resolve the nuclear crisis.” In a sign that civil society groups may be having an impact on the Trump administration, Ahn and Hyun Lee recently met with Stephen Biegun, Trump’s chief negotiator, to discuss the prospects for peace.

In the weeks after Trump’s meeting with Kim at the DMZ, close analysts of the Korea situation, and the South Korean officials who have been in discussion with the White House, predicted that the next step in US–North Korean talks will involve North Korea’s giving up a major chunk of its nuclear program in return for a partial lifting of US and UN sanctions that are crippling the most vulnerable parts of the North’s economy. That would move both sides past the disastrous summit in Hanoi in late February, when Trump walked out after unsuccessfully pressing Kim to accept a deal that would have involved the North giving up its entire weapons program before obtaining any sanctions relief whatsoever. This was seen in Pyongyang as a demand for surrender or capitulation—something they have said they will never do.

Biegun expressed the new US flexibility a day before Trump’s meeting at the DMZ, when he informed his South Korea counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, that the US government was prepared to move the US–North Korean negotiations forward “simultaneously and in a parallel” manner. Biegun, whose role was eclipsed in Hanoi by John Bolton, Trump’s hardline national security adviser, added in a speech to the conservative Atlantic Council on June 19 that “the door is wide open” for negotiations, and said he and his North Korean partner were committed to “regain our momentum” by returning to the basic areas of agreement—including establishing new US–North Korean political relations and building a “lasting and stable peace regime”—that came out of the first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Bolton, as many observers noted, was nowhere to be seen at Trump’s meeting at the DMZ.

Despite Biegun’s signaling and Trump’s insistence that he’s in “no hurry” to get an agreement, North Korea recently complained about new, albeit small, US military exercises with South Korea, and said they make it hard to trust the United States. In statements carried on its official news agency, KCNA, the North Korean foreign ministry said the upcoming “19-2 Dong Maeng (Alliance)” drills scheduled for August are “clearly a breach of the main spirit” of the June 12 statement in Singapore, where Trump canceled large-scale military drills and—to the shock of many—called them “provocative.” Underscoring its concerns, on Monday KCNA broadcast photographs of Kim examining a new submarine that experts cited by The Wall Street Journal “believe could carry multiple missiles, including those with nuclear capabilities.” And then came this week’s launch of what South Korea called a “new kind of short-range ballistic missile,” one that is similar to two projectiles fired last May. North Korea, in a KCNA dispatch, said the test was a message to South Korean “warmongers who are running high fever in their moves to introduce the ultramodern offensive weapons into South Korea and hold military exercise in defiance of the repeated warnings from” the North. Recently, the South began deploying the first of 40 F-35A advanced fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin.

The North Korean statements and actions alarmed Kazianis, of the Center for the National Interest. “If the situation remains unaddressed” and US and North Korean diplomats can’t return to “dialogue and compromise…we could very well go back to the days of North Korean nuclear testing, ICBM launches, and President Trump calling out ‘little rocket man,’” he warned Monday in The American Conservative. Yet even after Pyongyang’s angry statements, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has assured reporters that a new round of talks will start soon. On Tuesday, he said the United States is prepared to “provide a set of security arrangements” that would guarantee to North Koreans that “if they disband their nuclear program,” the United States “won’t attack them.” The next round of negotiations, he added, “will begin in a couple of weeks.” Later, he downplayed the latest test, telling reporters that “lots of countries posture before they come to the table.”

Still, if personalities matter, Biden is unlikely to shake his disdain for Kim and the North Koreans. Last May, responding to Biden’s initial criticisms of Trump’s relationship with Kim, KCNA called him “reckless and senseless, seized by ambition for power.” In an echo of its denunciation of Trump in 2017 as a “dotard,” KCNA said that what Biden uttered “is just sophism of an imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being, let alone a politician.”

If the Democrats are smart, they will realize that words like that, like North Korea’s latest missile salvos, are often a prelude—even an invitation—to dialogue.

On Monday night, the Department of Justice issued a wanted poster for the leader of Free Joseon, a shadowy group of Korean exiles suspected of leading a violent assault on the North Korean embassy in Madrid on February 22. A suspect, Adrian Hong Chang, “is considered to be armed and dangerous,” says the poster, which includes a color photo of the fugitive and instructs arresting police officers or anyone who knows his whereabouts to contact the US Marshals Service.1

The public notification from the DOJ underscores the seriousness of the US government’s efforts to track down two Koreans sought for possible extradition to Spain under a criminal warrant issued in March by Judge José de la Mata of Spain’s high court. The very unusual move has stirred a backlash from US foreign-policy hard-liners on North Korea who say the Trump administration’s manhunt for the suspects amounts to support for that country’s 34-year-old dictator.2

That response is being led by Lee Wolosky, a New York lawyer and partner at Boies Schiller Flexner with extensive national-security experience. He entered the picture as the attorney and spokesperson for Free Joseon on March 26, the same day de la Mata identified Hong (Chang’s original surname), and has added a layer of mystery—and obfuscation—to an already strange story.3

In his public statements, Wolosky has defended Free Joseon’s actions in Madrid, denied the judge’s accusations, and chastised the US government for publicly disclosing the names of the suspects. Wolosky did not respond to requests from The Nation for an interview. On Tuesday, a Boies Schiller Flexner spokesperson called to ask “what this story is all about” but did not respond to questions about who was paying for Wolosky’s representation and how he got involved in the case.4

Hong is a Korean citizen of Mexico long known in Washington for his strident opposition to the government of Kim Jong-un. Hong and Christopher Ahn, a former US Marine who once served in Iraq, stand accused of breaking into and entering the North Korean embassy in Madrid, taking North Korean diplomats hostage, and stealing computers, hard drives, cellphones, and encryption devices that they later handed over to the FBI. Ahn was arrested in Los Angeles by US Marshals on April 18.5

In the first court action in the case, on April 23, Ahn appeared in federal court in Los Angeles. He remains in jail and was denied bond under an extradition warrant from Spain, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, with another hearing scheduled for July. In a series of events that has yet to be explained, Hong met with the FBI in New York and Los Angeles in late March to discuss the embassy attack, according to the DOJ court filings. Yet he somehow managed to evade the government’s raid in April on his apartment in LA and is now in hiding, his attorney claims. 6

Hong, who is a permanent US resident, came to fame in 2004 after founding Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), a California-based organization which claims to operate an “underground railroad” that helps North Korean defectors and refugees settle in South Korea and the United States and uses the media and the Internet to promote their stories. He left LiNK in 2008 but remained active in his staunch opposition to the Kim government in Pyongyang. In 2015, Hong reemerged in public to organize the Joseon Institute—a precursor to his new organization—and announced that he would be preparing for “increasingly imminent, dramatic change” in North Korea.7

A recent posting on the Free Joseon website hints at that change. In it, an embedded YouTube video titled “In Our Homeland” claims to show someone in North Korea shattering framed pictures of Kim Jong-un and his father. “Down with Kim family rule!” the video reads. “For our people we rise up! Long live Free Joseon!” No North Koreans, however, were involved in the Madrid attack, according to Spanish police. Nevertheless, the perpetrators showed a remarkable sense of timing.8

The incident occurred a few days before the failed summit between President Donald Trump and Kim in Hanoi, where one of Kim’s top negotiators was Kim Hyok Chol, a former ambassador to Spain. The DOJ’s quick response to the warrant and its respectful treatment of North Korea in its “Memorandum of Points and Authorities” filed on April 19 is clearly linked to the Trump administration’s desire to keep the denuclearization talks with Kim going after months of stalemate. But it also could be a way for the US government to distance itself from the raid.9

Spanish intelligence initially blamed two individuals connected to the CIA for the attack, according to the Madrid daily El País. The State Department responded that the US government “had nothing to do with” it. And within days of that report, The Washington Post jumped in with a story tamping down the CIA talk. Quoting “people familiar with the planning and execution of the mission,” the Post countered that the raid was actually the work of Cheollima Civil Defense, a mysterious “dissident” organization that first came to public attention in 2017. On March 26, Cheollima confirmed the story on its website.10

Under its new name of Free Joseon (Joseon is the ancient name for Korea), Cheollima justified the raid as a stand against an illegal regime: “The charade of pretending that the [Kim] regime is a normal government must stop—the regime is simply a giant criminal enterprise.” Cheollima claimed it had been “invited into the embassy” and insisted that “no one was gagged or beaten.” At the same time, it complained that the names of Hong and others were leaked by the US government in a “profound betrayal of trust.” That left the impression that one of two things had happened: The attack was never approved by Cheollima’s US-government allies, or it was sanctioned but went drastically wrong. 11

Strangely, before the DOJ notification, few in Washington’s community of North Korea antagonists seemed to be aware of Free Joseon or its recent activities. “Honestly, I don’t know anything about them,” said Greg Scarlatoiu, the executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), who last saw Hong in 2015 and considered him a “dedicated human-rights activist.” Scarlatoiu, whose organization was founded in 2001 to expose the cruelties of the North’s police state and prison system, was excited by the emergence of another opposition group. “This is the first time we see organized, apparently militant resistance outside of North Korea,” he told The Nation. But he was quick to add that, as of now, there is “no clear, irrefutable evidence of resistance inside North Korea.”12

Jenny Town, a senior analyst and editor with the 38 North website and research group who last saw Hong around 2006, said Free Joseon’s claims that its actions were peaceful don’t seem credible in light of video and other evidence gathered by Spanish police. “I would trust the video rather than the political statements,” she said in an interview. Moreover, Hong’s “politics were never secret. He’s always been pro–regime change and trying to rescue North Korean defectors.” Several Korean Americans who knew Hong said his obsession with fomenting a revolt led by defectors has been well known in DC and the large Korean communities in Los Angeles and New York for years. “He was very, very demagogic,” said Christine Hong (no relation), a professor and historian at UC Santa Cruz who met Hong in the early 2000s at a conference on North Korea. 13

A Rashomon  Story

The conflicting tales and explanations about Hong and his group have a Rashomon, dueling-perspective feel to them that makes it difficult to come to definitive conclusions about the Madrid attack. “I think everybody’s telling the truth, at least in part,” John Kiriakou told The Nation. A CIA counterintelligence officer from 1990 to 2004, he was a whistle-blower prosecuted for divulging details to the media about the CIA’s torture program and, after a plea agreement, jailed in 2013 on the absurd charge of confirming the name of a known CIA officer.14

Kiriakou’s first take, he said, was that “the CIA would never, ever sanction an operation like what we saw in Madrid. It was so amateurish and so criminal in its nature that no one at headquarters would ever approve.” If the agency launched an embassy break-in, “it would be done in the middle of the night, with one insider and several specialists sent from Washington—not a bunch of exiles. Never, absolutely never.” But that said, he asked, “Do I think the CIA has had contact with these people? Absolutely. That’s what they do. The CIA has contact with opposition people, real and fake, all over the world.”15

The confusion about Free Joseon’s US-government ties is apparently what Wolosky is trying to clear up. In his press statements, he has tried to portray his clients as heroic dissidents “who are working in opposition to a brutal regime that routinely and summarily executes its enemies.” He turned up the heat when the DOJ arrested Ahn. “We are dismayed that the US Department of Justice has decided to execute warrants against US persons that derive from criminal complaints filed by the North Korean regime,” Wolosky declared on April 19 in a statement posted on the Free Joseon website.16

A few days later, he went on CNN and made the audacious claim to reporter Brian Todd that Hong is in hiding because “North Korean hit squads have been dispatched” to kill him. (Wolosky chose his media outlet carefully: Todd is responsible for some of CNN’s most sensationalized reporting on North Korea over the past two years.) After the arrest, Wolosky sought to link the dissidents to Otto Warmbier, the Virginia student who was imprisoned in North Korea for a year and a half before being returned to the United States in a coma and dying in 2017. 17

“The last US citizen who fell into the custody of the Kim regime returned home maimed from torture and did not survive,” Wolosky said. “We have received no assurances from the US government about the safety and security of the US nationals it is now targeting.” On April 22, he tweeted, “Never thought I’d see the day when DOJ is executing warrants against U.S. nationals being targeted by North Korea, based on criminal complaints from the Kim regime.” Last Friday, he charged that the DOJ and Spain based their accounts on “the highly unreliable accounts of North Korean government witnesses.”18

Those claims are preposterous and are based on fallacies about the investigation, said a European analyst who is in contact with Spanish officials involved in the investigation. North Korea, which called the embassy intrusion a “grave terrorist attack” and an “act of extortion” in its state-run media, did not file charges against the attackers or request their extradition. In fact, “they haven’t cooperated at all,” the analyst said. The Spanish just “wouldn’t issue direct warrants without proof,” he said. “The people in the embassy were beaten pretty badly and were hospitalized. The Spanish authorities view this as a serious case.”19

So who are these guys, and what are they really up to? Are they working for the CIA? Why has a lawyer who has represented clients in important national-security cases suddenly emerged as their spokesperson? The Nation has gathered enough strands of information to provide some preliminary answers.20

First, there is strong evidence that Hong has connections to US intelligence agencies. According to the European analyst with ties to Spanish law enforcement, Spanish police and intelligence officials have “solid proof” that Hong met with known CIA officials in Spain—including photographs and communication records. In April, the right-wing Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s largest newspaper, which is known for its contacts with South Korean intelligence, reported that Hong signed a US-government contract about eight years ago and that his “consulting work often involved the CIA.”21

And in 2018, according to a prominent North Korean defector interviewed by The Washington Post, Hong was in Washington for a meeting at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. When I asked the ODNI if it could confirm or deny that report, a US official said the ODNI “declines to comment.” But she warned that reporters should “really check” and “be careful” of their sources on this story, adding, “I’ve said enough.”22

Second, several North Korea analysts believe that the CIA was involved in past actions by Free Joseon. In 2017, Cheollima Civil Defense was involved in a covert action that whisked Kim Han-sol, a nephew of Kim Jong-un, from Macau to a safe house in an unknown country after his father, Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean leader’s half-brother, was murdered in Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. At the time, Cheollima thanked the US government, as well as the governments of China, the Netherlands, and another nation it did not identify for their assistance and later posted a video of the younger Kim speaking about his family. (His poise and solid command of English can also be seen in a remarkable interview he did a few years earlier with a Finnish journalist at his school in Bosnia.)23

Last week, Wolosky told CNN that Ahn was involved in the extraction of Kim Han-sol and called him “an American hero.” Ahn would have been prepared for a covert mission: As a Marine in Iraq, he was the deputy chief of intelligence for a battalion that ran US detention facilities after the scandal at Abu Ghraib, according to a 2008 article in The Washington Times. After his time in Iraq, he worked in Washington as the director of operations for Vets for Freedom, a group that stood out for its adamant support for the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and advocated for victory in Iraq, according to a profile on NPR. (See him lament the “loss” of patriotism at the University of Virginia in this video from the 10th anniversary of 9/11.)24

Third, Wolosky’s background in national security could explain why he represents Free Joseon. During his years as director for transnational threats at the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he was responsible for several important investigations, including that of the US blacklisting of a bank in Macau that was linked to North Korea. From 2015 to 2017, Wolosky was President Barack Obama’s special envoy on closing the US detention facility in Guantánamo, Cuba, and has extensive connections to many top Democrats involved in counterterrorism.25

Most significantly, Wolosky is the attorney for United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a neocon organization that focuses much of its energy on Iran’s links with North Korea. It is chaired by former senator Joseph Lieberman and was co-founded by (and retains close ties to) John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national-security adviser. Wolosky’s representation of UANI was confirmed on Tuesday by Edward Evans, a spokesperson for Boies Schiller Flexner. “UANI is a long-standing client, but there are no active litigation matters,” he said.26

That organization, according to journalist Eli Clifton, receives much of its funding from “GOP megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.” It claims Iran’s weapons and missile programs are illicitly backed by North Korea and wants the US government to increase sanctions against both countries. UANI would have good reason to support regime change in North Korea, which the group sees as part of a triumvirate of countries threatening US interests. “I am hopeful that Trump will use his recent momentum from Venezuela to demonstrate strength and resolve to North Korea and Iran’s regimes,” Mark Kirk, a former Illinois senator and a senior UANI adviser, wrote in a February 2019 op-ed timed for Trump’s ill-fated summit with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi.27

Adrian Hong and the Axis of Evil

Adrian Hong is from an evangelical family and discovered North Korea issues while a student at Yale. He founded LiNK shortly after George W. Bush famously declared in 2002 that North Korea was part of an “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and Iran. With the US government now clearly on the side of regime change, activist groups and evangelical Christians who opposed North Korea on anti-communist grounds were given a renewed lease on life. “The axis of evil allowed all these cold warriors to renovate along human-rights lines,” said UC Santa Cruz’s Christine Hong, who has written extensively about the role of defectors in US foreign policy.28

By all accounts, Adrian Hong was driven by a messianic regime-change ideology that was on vivid display in his last public appearance, before the Canadian Parliament in 2016. In 2006, he was instrumental in a State Department operation that smuggled six defectors into the United States in the first US-sponsored effort to give asylum to North Koreans. His fame grew when he was briefly arrested and detained in China for helping refugees. He spoke often, as at this conference at the Hudson Institute in 2012 that was broadcast on C-SPAN.29

In the ensuing years, LiNK and other groups established a formidable network that included Scarlatoiu’s HRNK, the Defense Forum Foundation, and the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy, which has poured millions of dollars into programs for North Korean defectors and sponsors visits of high-level defectors to Washington. In contrast to the American Friends Service Committee and other humanitarian organizations that work in North Korea, these more hard-line groups argue against engagement with Pyongyang, even by the South Korean government, and often talk openly about the need for regime change.30

Under Hong, LiNK adopted a peculiar America-first approach to North Korea that largely excluded the South as a player in reunification discussions. During his time there in 2006, Hong led several delegations of college kids, most of them Korean American, to South Korea to voice “frustration about how little South Koreans seem to care about human rights.” Their activities, according to an account in the South China Morning Post, “included ambushing local politicians, distributing fliers and staging public demonstrations.” South Koreans basically told him to bug off, a response that stung Hong. “The worst reaction has been student protesters saying ‘go back to your country, mind your own business, this is our issue, we will take care of it,’” he complained to the newspaper.31

Hong also promoted an economic vision for a liberated North Korea that sounds much like Trump’s predictions of US-led development for the North today. “In serial calls for regime change in North Korea, [Hong] has glibly pitched the vast growth potential of a post-collapse North Korea brightened by capitalism and annexed to U.S. financial interests,” Christine Hong wrote in a recent essay.32

In 2008, Hong quit LiNK and his high-profile job and left Washington. “He went dark on most of his contacts,” said Town of 38 North. A few years later, he founded a financial consulting firm, Pegasus Strategies, and began focusing more of his energies on overt support for regime change. One of his motivations was the example of Libya, where in 2011 the government of Moammar El-Gadhafi was overthrown by a US- and NATO-led intervention assisted by the CIA. “I consider the Arab Spring a dress rehearsal for North Korea,” Hong told The National, a daily published in the United Arab Emirates, shortly after Gadhafi was captured and murdered. North Korea “has seen what happened” to deposed rulers in Tunisia and Egypt “and especially Gaddafi this year.”33

Shortly after Gadhafi’s fall, Hong went to Libya to test his model. By this time, he was established as a TED fellow, with the credentials to organize autonomous gatherings for the Silicon Valley PR organization under the rubric TEDx. As a conference in Tripoli was getting underway in 2012, Africa Intelligence, a specialty newsletter, said the event “allowed international investors and business people to mingle with Libya’s new rulers,” including Libya’s Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur (who became an adviser to the Joseon Institute, the London Sunday Telegraph reported last week).34

The idea behind meetings like this, Hong later wrote in an op-ed for The Christian Science Monitor, was to help create “a class of Korean technocrats [who] must be capable of stabilizing and rebuilding on a national scale.” It was around this time that he signed his contract that “involved” the CIA, according to Chosun Ilbo. A few years later, Hong began to work with Ahn, and Cheollima Civil Defense took shape. Little is known of Ahn since his days with Vets for Freedom, but Hong was likely attracted to his commitment to the exercise of US power. “Who is the leader of the world pushing for goodness and harmony and democracy and trying to facilitate that?”Ahn asked in his 2008 interview with The Washington Times. “It’s the Americans, and not the government, but the people through their sacrifices.”35

Hong had a similar vision. In his trips to Asia, he frequently sought to persuade high-level North Korean defectors to join his cause—including Kim’s half-brother while he was exiled in Macau. “He asked Kim Jong Nam multiple times to serve as the insurgent leader, only to be met with rejection,” a former South Korean intelligence official told The Washington Post. Just before the attack in Madrid, Hong went to Tokyo in an attempt to raise funds and meet Japanese officials “who could help provide protection for Kim Han Sol,” according to an account in NK News. But a Japanese intelligence official told the reporter that he didn’t understand Hong’s request because Kim’s nephew “now resides in either the U.S. or Israel under full government protection.”36

Now Hong and Ahn stand charged with violent crimes that the DOJ said could put them in prison for over 10 years. DOJ documents claim that Hong, after first visiting the embassy posing as a financial consultant, returned on February 22 and asked to see the chargé d’affaires, identified as Y.S.S. When an official went to look for him, Hong opened the door and let Ahn and six others “carrying knives, iron bars, machetes and imitation handguns” into the grounds. Once in control, they proceeded to restrain members of the embassy staff “using shackles and cables.”37

In a technique often used by terrorists and US Special Forces, Hong and his crew placed bags over their captives’ heads. Among them was Y.S.S. Hong and Ahn, according to the DOJ complaint, “took Y.S.S. to a bathroom where they tied his hands behind his back, placed a bag over his head, and threatened him with iron bars and imitation handguns.” This was apparently an attempt to persuade the commercial attaché, who had been an aide to Ambassador Kim Hyok Chol, to defect.38

Once done with their mission, the suspects then flew to the US East Coast, where Hong contacted the FBI and apparently turned in his colleague, according to DOJ documents related to the case. (In a meeting with the FBI in Los Angeles, the DOJ said, Hong “stated that Ahn was one of the members of the group who participated in the attack” and “lived in Chino, California.”) Hong did not respond to queries sent to his verified Twitter account or an e-mail address provided by a former classmate.39

So who’s paying Wolosky, the lawyer? “That’s a great question,” said former CIA operative Kiriakou. If Wolosky has a security clearance, “it’s conceivable that he could be paid by the government, including the ODNI, the CIA, or even the NSC.” In fact, the chances that he has retained his clearance since leaving government are high: A defamation lawsuit against UANI that Wolosky handled was dismissed by a federal judge in 2015 after the government argued that it could reveal state secrets. Evans, the spokesperson for Boies Schiller Flexner, ignored questions about Wolosky’s security clearances. On Tuesday, however, Wolosky released a statement to The Nation taking issue with the DOJ’s claims. “As we have maintained from the beginning, Free Joseon was invited to enter the Embassy, and there was no ‘attack’ or forced entry,” he said. “This is now made clear by the CCTV images released by the DOJ itself. In due time, we expect to be able to present additional evidence that contradicts the account of the North Korean government, which correctly recognizes the threat posed to it by those championing the cause of freedom.” 40

It now looks as if Wolosky’s audacious defense of Free Joseon could mark the beginning of a campaign by regime-change advocates to support Hong and Ahn as freedom fighters who deserve US support. The opening salvo was fired on April 25 by Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor of Korean studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University who is frequently called to testify before Congress because of his hard-line views and ardent support for military and economic pressure on North Korea. “For the U.S. to accept what is essentially a North Korean version of the events is to effectively defend the Kim regime,” he wrote in The Los Angeles Times.41

Fox News picked up the story, with interviews with Wolosky and Lee, and that segment has been tweeted by such neocon stalwarts as Iraq War promoter Max Boot. Last Friday, the campaign against North Korea was boosted by a well-timed story in The Washington Post that said the Kim government issued a $2 million bill for Warmbier’s hospice care before he was released. Trump denied it, saying “We don’t pay money for hostages.” But by Monday, despite former US envoy Joseph Yun’s explanation that the US government was obligated to make the payment, hundreds of people from left and right tweeted the Warmbier story and used it to hammer Trump and Kim.42

What’s next? In a mysterious posting on its website on Saturday after the Post story broke, Free Joseon wrote just one word: “Orange.” An intelligence source quoted by one Korean newspaper said the color may indicate “a deciphering algorithm.” But could it be a sign that Free Joseon’s next target for its campaign against extradition is Trump, well known for his orange countenance? For Adrian Hong, who used the alias Oswaldo Trump while hailing an Uber during his getaway in Madrid, that’s entirely possible. As Town concluded, the tale of the attack and Hong’s role in it “is all very murky to everyone.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that while Joseon is the ancient name for Korea, it was not generally adopted in 1919 by Korean opponents of Japanese colonial rule, as the article originally stated.

The collapse of the US–North Korean denuclearization negotiations in Hanoi earlier this month and the prospect of a return to President Trump’s hard-line rhetoric of 2017 have intensified public interest in what life is really like inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a country known as one of the most repressive on earth. So it’s no surprise that dozens of Washingtonians have come to see John Feffer’s new play, Next Stop: North Korea. It’s the latest in a series of one-person dramas the author, novelist, and sometime Nation contributor has written and performed in over the past eight years.

As entertainment that deftly mixes history, satire, pathos, comedy, and personal recollection, Next Stop is an unqualified success. In the two performances I saw at the DC Arts Center in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, the audience seemed spellbound as Feffer led them on a virtual tour into this now-forbidden land where few Americans outside the government have ever ventured. Both shows included solid performances from Feffer, who made three weeklong trips to the DPRK between 1998 and 2001 and wrote a book about North and South Korea in 2003. He explains the country through his own experiences in Pyongyang as a dual representative, with his wife Karin Lee, of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and in the projected voices of several finely etched Korean characters.

They include “Mr. Kim,” his ubiquitous minder, who “looks like an ambitious stockbroker” and loves pastrami sandwiches and sappy American tunes (“You Are My Sunshine” and Joni Mitchell’s “Clouds”) from his time serving as a diplomat in North Korea’s UN Mission in New York. There’s also the tour guide at the Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang, who deeply admires—and hilariously imitates­—Kate Winslet’s assertive voice in Titanic, which she’s seen 500 times; a group of South Korean devotees of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who inexplicably are building Pyongyang’s largest church and apparently own the hotel where Feffer and Lee are staying; a German entrepreneur trying to sell investors on North Korea because in the DPRK they can have “the best Korean workers without the strikes” that regularly occur in South Korea; and a US-based North Korean defector wearing a baseball cap who escaped from his country in 1999 as a child at the peak of the terrible famine that killed nearly a million people.

As the house lights dim, Feffer’s faux Scottish “guide” gruffly explains (in full brogue) the strict rules to his flock at the airport in Beijing before they fly off on their imaginary visit to North Korea. “This is not a trip to Disneyland,” he instructs. “Rule Number One: Follow orders. Rule Number Two: Follow orders. And Rule Number Three: Follow the bloody orders.” He adds: “Do not take anything, especially propaganda posters.” When that draws nervous laughter, he snaps, “Otto Warmbier didn’t think that was funny”—a reference to the American student who was arrested by North Korean authorities for taking a propaganda poster and returned a year and a half later, in a coma from which he would never recover. Later, Feffer jokes about the strange friendship between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. (“They were having such a love affair I thought it might have been consummated,” he says, adding that the failed meeting in Hanoi was a “summit interruptus.”) But as Feffer gets deeper into his narrative from Pyongyang, the picture he presents from his own journey in the 1990s turns dark and even terrifying.

Before his assignment in the DPRK, Feffer’s experience with communist countries had been in the Soviet Union, where (he later tells me) he studied in Moscow for two months in 1985 and visited again in 1990, and in Poland, where he lived for seven months in 1989 and worked as an editor. He also visited Poland once with his parents in 1978 and studied in Hungary in 1984 for five weeks. A few years ago, he wrote and performed in a play about his experiences in Eastern Europe, where he got to know, and hung out with, many dissidents. But none of this, he explains in the play, prepared him for what he encountered from 1998 to 2001 in North Korea, which he calls “the caboose of communism.” In the DPRK, he says, he “came face to face with who I am.”

While in Pyongyang, Feffer is most struck by the corruption at the top and the vast political control the leadership exerts. To his consternation, North Korean bureaucrats stage huge banquets for foreign guests at a time of widespread hunger and starvation (that period is long past, but the country still experiences malnutrition). Society is strictly controlled: “Mr. Kim” explains that, decades after North Korea’s founding, its population is divided into three classes: “core” supporters of the regime (like him), who are allowed to travel overseas; citizens who are “wavering” in their loyalty to the Kim family and the North Korean state; and “hostiles,” who are ostracized because their families collaborated with the Japanese colonialists who ruled Korea from 1910 to 1945 or fought against the revolution after the Japanese were kicked out at the end of World War II.

Meanwhile, Feffer relates, the North’s dynastic government is so obsessed with the United States that it portrays, at one of its Korean War museums, a well-documented incineration of hundreds of women and children in an underground bunker in October 1950 as the work of sadistic Americans, when it was actually South Korean forces who did the deed (“It’s much easier to blame everything on you Americans,” the European diplomat who reveals this fact tells him during one of those interminable banquets). The reason, he later learns: After unification, North Koreans would not want to come face to face with South Koreans who did such despicable things.

Feffer also describes his own experience with North Korea’s elaborate police state. In one episode, he recalls how he and his wife sneaked out of their Pyongyang hotel one night and walked nearly a mile before they began to speak in furtive tones about their feelings about the place. As they whisper, his wife wonders how an erudite and worldly man like Mr. Kim can engage in such “mumbo jumbo.” The next morning, their minder picks them up for a meeting at the ministry of health, where they hope to pitch the government on an exchange of medical professionals; he coolly tells his AFSC guests to pay attention, because “we do not want to hear any mumbo jumbo.” Feffer and Lee freeze: They’ve never heard this term from Mr. Kim before. “He is telling us to never forget where and who you are,” Feffer explains with a shudder.

Feffer’s impatience is a constant from the beginning. In the play’s first scene in Pyongyang, he refuses to bow properly, as his minder desperately urges, before the massive statue to Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder. Instead, persuaded by his wife that he “has to bow” because he’s “representing the organization,” he screams silently to himself as he bends his neck ever so slightly and mutters, “you’re a murderous dictator.” That jarred me a bit because I had heard that exact phrase stated on television during the Hanoi summit from MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski as she sought to paint as negative a picture as possible of Trump’s meeting with Kim.

Feffer, however, is no hawk, and certainly not a proponent of regime change, like so many of the pundits on cable TV. He has written eloquently of the importance of the United States engaging with North Korea, and he pens a regular column for Hankyoreh, South Korea’s progressive daily newspaper. (Full disclosure: I’ve been friends with Feffer since his days with AFSC, write articles that he edits, and admire his tenacity as one of the most prolific writers in Washington.) He also makes clear during the play that America and the US Air Force were, in fact, guilty of terrible crimes during the Korean War, including carpet bombing of civilians, the massive use of napalm, and the planned destruction of dams to flood the countryside and deprive North Koreans of food. (At the Museum of American Atrocities, he acknowledges, “It’s propaganda, but truth as well.”)

Feffer also argues against the notion that the Kim government deliberately starves its people (a meme I also heard from Brzezinski during her shrill denunciation of the summit on MSNBC). Partly because of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea lost its cheap supply of oil. Since then, as a result, “their farm machinery lacks fuel, so the work must be done by hand,” Feffer says of the situation in 1998. That’s still one of the reasons that humanitarian workers who are experienced in North Korea say some of today’s UN sanctions on oil imports should end. (“Absent sanctions exemptions that would allow for necessary oil-based inputs into the 2019 agricultural production cycle, the logical corollary is an expanded food catastrophe, threatening lives and livelihoods of millions of North Koreans in 2020,” Hazel Smith, a British expert on the North Korean economy, wrote this month in a US policy journal).

Most important, Feffer is able to find the humanity in the people he encountered while trying, as a representative of an organization dedicated to peace, to “bring the US and North Korea closer together.” At an otherwise strained meeting with officials from the Institute of Architecture, he finds common ground with “Mr. Cho,” a high-ranking official who, like Feffer, speaks Russian from his student days in the Soviet Union. While the rest of the room looks on, they embark on a spirited discussion in their common language about sustainable, energy-efficient architecture (something Feffer is somewhat of an expert on).

“Mr. Cho really cares about building things to help people,” he finds. But then Mr. Cho switches back to Korean, and the moment of unity disappears as the idea for an architectural exchange is vetoed from above. Feffer also acts out the part of his laid-back driver, who, upon seeing glossy ads in a South Korean magazine while idling at a collective farm, dreams of owning a fancy automobile and taking it out whenever he pleases.

“It may sound simple and banal,” Feffer says, “but North Koreans are not simply automatons. They are people trying to survive the best they can under very difficult circumstances.” He recalls an ancient Christian fable he heard from his Moonie contact in Pyongyang about the difference between heaven and hell, where the only utensil available is a super-long spoon; in heaven, people feed each other, but in hell, nobody shares, and everyone starves. During parts of his trip, “I see how quickly hell can become heaven,” he says, ruefully. “I just have to turn one spoon of mine and feed someone other than myself.” It’s an argument against withholding food aid and other assistance to the DPRK.

Maybe that’s why, in an effort to further humanize North Korea, after every show Feffer brings on a guest knowledgeable about the country to provide a short commentary on the play and answer questions from the audience. They have included Jenny Town, a sharp North Korea expert at 38 North, a website devoted to North Korea run by the Stimson Center; Jean Lee, a former AP reporter in Pyongyang; and Daniel Jasper, AFSC’s public education and advocacy coordinator for Asia. The first night I went, Feffer’s guest was Immanuel Kim, an associate professor of Korean literature and culture studies at George Washington University and the author of Rewriting Revolution: Women, Sexuality, and Memory in North Korean Fiction.

Immanuel Kim argues against a common misconception: that all art in North Korea is dedicated to praising the Supreme Leader, as Kim Jong-un is known. Not so, he says, from his reading of hundreds of works of North Korean fiction. Much of its literature, and television drama as well, is about “family problems,” neighborhood dynamics, and the complications in relationships between men and women. At one Saturday matinee, the guest was Ryan Oh, a young North Korean defector from one of the country’s northern provinces now living in Washington on a short-term US visa. He speaks of his dangerous escape with his mother to China in 1999, during the famine, and how he was caught and returned to North Korean security forces in 2000. After being released (his captors understood that he left because he was hungry, he told me), Oh then managed to escape again in 2002, made his way to Canada and eventually South Korea, where he now lives with his mother and brother.

The entire experience of Next Stop: North Korea, from play to Q&A, is both enlightening and depressing, if not discouraging. My only criticism, as someone who’s written extensively about the Koreas, is that it lacks context in some places and, oddly, empathy in others. I especially felt that toward the end, in a scene that takes places in Gwangju, South Korea. That was the site of a horrific massacre in 1980 of hundreds of people by South Korean Special Forces and, subsequently, a citizens’ uprising that was suppressed with the support of the US government and the Pentagon. Feffer and his wife are there on a tour of Korean War sites where US and South Korean soldiers committed atrocities against civilians. He is troubled by his hosts’ decision not to include North Korean atrocities on the tour, and abruptly leaves it to visit Gwangju’s famous Biennale art exhibition to work out his frustration.

I found that off-putting; in that moment, Feffer seemed a little too focused on his own perspective as an outsider and an American. After leaving his group in Gwangju, he tells the audience, he “prefers to be with the ones who roams freely,” and adds, to laughter, “I’d rather be on a stage by myself.” I got that. But it might have helped the audience to explain—perhaps in a South Korean voice—that the activists focusing on US and South Korean war crimes may have been trying to overcome decades of anti-communist propaganda claiming that the DPRK was the only villain in Korea’s division and during the counterinsurgency wars that raged on the peninsula from the late 1940s through the Korean War. At the same time, Feffer missed an opportunity in this scene to remind audiences that South Korea, too, has experienced the terror of “murderous dictators.” In fact, their history in surviving authoritarian, repressive governments is something that leads many South Koreans to believe that their kin in the DPRK may someday overcome, just as they did in 1987, when mass resistance ushered in South Korea’s flowering of democracy.

I also felt that Feffer might have hinted in his concluding scenes at what motivated Kim Jong-un and the DPRK to engage and negotiate with the hated United States, and how some of his experiences and proposals during his visits 20 years ago worked out. In one Q&A session, for instance, Feffer said that North Korean bureaucrats eventually did take up his suggestion for an exchange with American medical professionals and architects. Why, I asked him later, didn’t he mention that, after spending an entire scene recalling his exchange with the Russian-speaking bureaucrat? “That was a way to step outside our roles in the actual drama,” he explained. “It struck me when I was there how theatrical North Korea is,” and how officials are always “playing their roles for foreigners.” And that’s probably why Trump has been successful in engaging Kim and taking the talks as far as he has, he suggested. “Trump stepped outside those roles. So, the rules of the theater have changed.”

Feffer has changed them, too. In the end, his play, and the shifting perspectives of his characters, is a marvelous vehicle to help Americans understand what makes North Korea tick and why making peace is going to take years, even decades—and yet is the right thing to do. If you go, walk in with an open mind, take it all in, and ask plenty of questions. More than most commentators, Feffer knows that the key to ending the decades of enmity between North Korea and America is true engagement—with Korea, with ourselves, and with our own history.

Next Stop: North Korea, written and performed by John Feffer and directed by Angela Kay Pirko, runs at the DC Arts Center until March 24.

After President Trump walked out of his talks with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi over North Korea’s demand for an end to “sanctions in their entirety,” Democratic leaders were ecstatic. “I’m glad,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters. “They wanted lifting sanctions without denuclearization.” In a giddy aside, Pelosi added that Trump had finally realized that Kim “is not on the level.”

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer chimed in, declaring on Twitter that Kim’s deal “would have only made North Korea stronger & the world less safe.” Their response was quite a shift for a party that questions Trump on practically every front, from immigration to health care to Russia. But this was about North Korea, and Democrats have been cynical about Trump’s talks with Kim and the inter-Korean peace process from the beginning.

Even before Trump went to Singapore last year for the first-ever meeting between a US president and a North Korean leader, Schumer and six other senators warned that they would reject “any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other” than the complete dismantling of its nuclear and missile programs. In February, Senator Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, sent another letter attacking South Korean President Moon Jae-in for seeking sanctions relief to aid his push for closer economic ties with the North. Joined by Republican Senator Ted Cruz, Menendez demanded that Trump must ensure “the integrity of the sanctions regime.”

As if this weren’t enough, a week before the Hanoi summit, Pelosi arrogantly lectured South Korean lawmakers seeking support for their engagement policy not to trust Kim. Worse, she urged them to end a nasty quarrel with Japan over its war crimes during World War II as part of a misguided attempt to create a united front against North Korea. That led the speaker of the National Assembly—Pelosi’s counterpart in South Korea—to accuse her of carrying water for Shinzo Abe, Japan’s right-wing leader. Abe, meanwhile, was just as chipper as the Dems at the collapse of the Hanoi summit.

But the Democrats were hoodwinked into buying Trump’s explanation for his failure. In fact, the president and John Bolton, his national-security adviser, were extremely misleading about the deal they rejected. This became clear within hours of Trump’s departure, when North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho publicly rebutted Trump’s claims. In return for shutting down its massive—albeit aging—Yongbyon nuclear complex, the North, it turned out, had asked Trump to remove the sanctions imposed on the country only after 2016, not the entire sanctions regime. Kim, said Ri, had focused on five UN sanctions that “impede the civilian economy and the livelihood of our people.” Moreover, Ri announced that North Korea had been ready to offer, in writing, a permanent halt to its nuclear and ICBM tests. Even the Associated Press, well-known for its evenness in foreign reporting, had to ask of the sanctions: “So who’s telling the truth? In this case, it seems that the North Koreans are.”

President Moon expressed his disappointment with the outcome. Should Yongbyon “be fully and completely dismantled,” he told his National Security Council, “North Korea’s denuclearization process could be said to have entered an irreversible stage.” His foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, said Seoul would seek three-way talks with Washington and Pyongyang to jump-start denuclearization talks. Kim Jong-un, meanwhile, issued a conciliatory statement through KCNA, the state-run news agency, expressing appreciation for Trump’s “active efforts towards” results and vowing to meet again.

Despite this gesture, Trump’s final act in Hanoi made the situation even worse. After State Department and Treasury officials convinced Trump that the relief sought by Kim would give North Korea billions of dollars that it could pump back into its nuclear and missile programs, Trump came back with one of his trademark grand gestures that he foolishly hoped Kim would accept. It was “the big deal that could make a difference for North Korea,” Bolton proudly told Fox News. Under Trump’s new formulation, as Bolton explained on CBS, “if North Korea commits to complete denuclearization—including its ballistic-missile program and its chemical- and biological-weapons programs, the prospect of economic progress is there.”

But this gambit—which vastly expanded the working US definition of “denuclearization”—was bound to fail. First, the demand on chemical and biological weapons (which Schumer and the Democrats had backed in their 2018 letter) was added at the last minute by Bolton. Second, Trump was now demanding a total surrender of Kim’s weapons arsenal as the condition for relaxation of any sanctions. That’s a deal that North Korea has constantly rejected, going back to the Bush and Obama years. Even when the North’s inconsistent negotiating record is considered, this was a colossal—and bipartisan—blunder.

Sadly, Trump’s cold response to the death of Otto Warmbier, the Virginia student who was returned from North Korean captivity in a coma and later died, has given Democrats more ammunition to go after the peace process. “I will take him at his word,” Trump said about Kim’s assurances that he was unaware of Warmbier’s condition until his release.

In response, Democratic Representative Tom Malinowski, a former Obama official who in 2017 called for regime change in North Korea, introduced a congressional resolution to hold Kim personally responsible for Warmbier’s death. He later withdrew it at the request of the Virginian’s family. Still, a full investigation of the facts—which should include questioning US diplomats and intelligence officers as well as Warmbier’s doctors—might be useful to the public’s full understanding of what really happened to him during his captivity and the efforts that led to his release.

Overall, Democrats taking a hard line on North Korea should consider that no death should be used as a political weapon. Congress must join with South Korea in keeping the peace talks alive, so that we can bring an end to America’s longest war and help the two Koreas reconcile after 70 years of division and conflict. There really is no other choice.

It was a bolt from the blue. Hours after President Trump and Kim Jong-un appeared to be on the cusp of a historic denuclearization agreement and the North Korean leader told a US journalist that he had “a feeling that good results will come,” the bilateral peace summit in Hanoi ended abruptly, with both leaders walking out before signing anything.

The surprise ending came after a day and a half of talks that focused on an emerging deal in which North Korea would have shut down its massive Yongbyon plutonium and uranium facility—the crown jewels of its nuclear program—in return for relief from the US and UN sanctions that have crippled its economy. There was also hopeful talk of a formal declaration to end the Korean War and the opening of liaison offices in Pyongyang and Washington.

But Trump apparently decided to walk away without even an interim agreement because, in his version of events, Kim demanded a total lifting of sanctions in return for his country’s concessions. “It was about the sanctions,” Trump explained to a startled media at a press conference called after the US and North Korean delegations canceled what would have been an elaborate luncheon and signing ceremony.

“Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” Trump added. “They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted, but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that.” But he noted that Kim had pledged not to resume testing of his weapons or missiles, a critical decision that prevents the North from developing a full nuclear-attack capability.

Standing beside Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added that it wasn’t all a wash. “We made real progress” during the 36 hours of talks, he told the press. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get all the way” to “something that ultimately made sense for the United States of America.” But he expressed optimism about the talks continuing, saying he was hopeful the US and North Korean negotiating teams will soon get back together “and continue to work out what’s a very complex problem.”

The decision to terminate the talks was a blow to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who had told Trump before the summit that his country was willing to act as an economic bridge with North Korea as a way to get to a final agreement. Moon has also urged that the US and the UN relax some sanctions so North and South can continue their plans, spelled out in their bilateral summits last year, to deepen economic cooperation by linking their roads and railroads, reopening the Gaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ, and other steps.

Those projects have reached a limit with the sanctions. The collapse of the US–North Korea talks is “terrible for Moon Jae-in, who cannot pursue more than ceremonial inter-Korean cooperation for the foreseeable future,” Chad O’Carroll, the CEO of the Korea Risk Group and an editor at its NK News, tweeted from Hanoi just after the talks ended.

Kim Eui-kyeom, Moon’s spokesperson at the Blue House, said in statement that Seoul “regrets” the fact the Trump and Kim couldn’t reach an agreement. He added that the discussions of sanctions relief in relationship to denuclearization shows that the two countries have brought their discussions “to another level.”

But in a sign that South Korea may become more involved in the US discussions with the North, Trump asked President Moon in a telephone call to “actively” mediate his dialogue with Kim. Many Koreans now expect Moon to hold another summit with Kim, as he did when the US talks with the North appeared on the verge of collapse in 2018.

Some analysts said it was too early to gauge what went down based on Trump’s version. “Exactly what happened is unclear and we will need to wait for the dust to settle,” Joel Wit and Jenny Town of the 38 North think tank wrote on Thursday morning. “It’s hard to believe that Kim Jong Un wanted all sanctions lifted in return for just dismantling Yongbyon. He must have known going in that was a non-starter.”

It didn’t take long for the North Korean story to emerge. In a midnight press conference in Hanoi, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, who was deeply involved in the talks, directly contradicted the US president and said the North only sought partial sanctions relief in exchange for closing Yongbyon.

When Washington demanded a further step beyond Yongbyon, he said, it became “crystal clear that the US was not ready to accept” the North Korean proposal. Choe Son Hui, the vice minister with years of experience dealing with the US government, added ominously, “I cannot guarantee that this opportunity will be offered to the US once more.”

There were also reports from South Korea that the presence at the talks of John Bolton, Trump’s aggressively hawkish national-security adviser, helped torpedo the talks.

In an interview with a Korean newspaper on Thursday, South Korea’s former unification minister, Chong Se-hyun, suggested that the summit was derailed by the “last minute” attendance of Bolton, who “added demands for North Korea to also report chemical and biological weapons” as well as their nuclear arsenal. In response, Chong said, the North Koreans “increased their demand for sanctions relief.”

Representative Ro Khanna, one of the most outspoken members of Congress on Korean issues, openly blamed Bolton in a series of tweets on Thursday morning. “I’m not shocked that Trump—with John Bolton at his side—has failed,” he wrote. He cited Bolton’s past statements in favor of a “Libya model” for North Korea in which the Gadhafi government was toppled after it denuclearized, and his more recent abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal and threats of military action against Venezuela.

“These inconsistent and hawkish actions are obstacles for needed confidence building” with North Korea, he said (Representative Khanna is the chief author of a congressional resolution, signed by 20 other House Democrats, calling for an end to the Korean War).

The dismal end to the Trump-Kim talks was a sharp contrast to the mood in Hanoi in the days leading up to the summit. As diplomats and the press gathered, Hanoi was suffocating under a thick blanket of smog. But it was also full of excitement: Street vendors advertised T-shirts bearing Kim and Trump’s faces, thousands of badge-wearing journalists from all over the world roamed the streets, and shiny new signs declared Hanoi “the city for peace.”

For Hanoi residents like Cao Thu Hà, 29, an art director at a marketing agency, the summit was an important moment for Vietnam. “It shows that Vietnam is a place where this thing could happen,” she said. “I take that as a good sign for Vietnam.”

Van Nguyen, 29, a freelance interpreter, had a slightly more cynical point of view. “I think Vietnam is chosen because they are a communist country, because North Korea is communist,” she said. “And they can’t go to China because they’re having a trade war with the US. So, this is a neutral zone.”

Although the summit activities interrupted daily life in Hanoi—blocking off streets, forcing some businesses to close, and slowing traffic to a standstill—it was striking just how much the prospect of peace seemed to excite everyone. That made it all the more disappointing when the summit activities were abruptly cut short and Trump ended up boarding Air Force One for Washington.

During his press conference, however, Trump acknowledged the harmful impact of sanctions on the North Korean people and the provocative nature of the US–South Korean war games, which have been a contentious issue for the North. In the eyes of many Koreans and activists, his willingness to engage with Kim Jong-un and take steps to build trust reflects a dramatic departure from past US approaches and is a hopeful sign for the future.

“This is a moment when the international community must put pressure” on countries that have sided with the United States in this conflict, Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, told Democracy Now! from Hanoi. “Korea wants peace and the international community has a responsibility to support it.”

South Koreans are learning the hard truths expressed in the protest music of Phil Ochs from the darkest days of the Cold War. “When it comes to times like Korea, there’s no one more red, white, and blue” than the American liberal, he sang in one of his most biting verses.

Decades later, with the two Koreas on the brink of ending a war that ripped their country apart and triggered the massive US military intervention of 1950, the liberals and Democrats who earned Ochs’s derision may be undermining the best chance for peace on the peninsula in a generation.

As US diplomats prepare for the second summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un next week in Hanoi, senior Democrats in the House and Senate, joined by a few Republicans, have been sounding alarm bells, warning that South Korean President Moon Jae-in is moving too fast in reconciling with North Korea by seeking a premature lifting of sanctions on the nuclear-armed state.

They are also expressing strong reservations about the US and South Korean negotiations with Kim and warning Trump not to budge on his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign until Kim has completely dismantled North Korea’s nuclear-weapons and missile program. Kim temporarily halted the program nearly 500 days ago by suspending all testing of his “nuclear force.”

The congressional actions have been fueled by a steady stream of pessimistic and often misleading studies from Washington think tanks, eagerly embraced by US media hostile to the peace process, alleging that Kim is “playing” Trump and that both Moon and Trump may stop short of demanding North Korea’s immediate denuclearization by embracing a more incremental approach.

In recent days, word has been circulating in Washington that Trump’s team in Hanoi, led by State Department special envoy Stephen Biegun, may loosen some US sanctions in return for North Korea’s closing down of its huge nuclear complex at Yongbyon, which South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper describes as “the center and symbol of North Korea’s nuclear development program.”

Other reports claim that the two countries may set up liaison offices in their respective capitals as the bilateral talks move forward. Those attempts at a compromise, in turn, have set up an internecine battle inside the Trump administration, with hard-liners like John Bolton, who is visiting South Korea this weekend, trying to head off Biegun’s diplomacy.

But Trump is sticking to his guns. “I’m in no particular rush” as long as the North’s test suspension remains in place, Trump told reporters at the White House on February 19. That same day, President Moon told Trump in a 35-minute phone call that South Korea was ready to use economic incentives, including connecting inter-Korean roads and railroads and other projects, to “reduce the burden” on the United States in forging an agreement with North Korea. “Seoul is ready to reboot inter-Korean exchanges with an early resumption of joint economic projects,” a presidential official at the Blue House told reporters.

Top Democrats, however, oppose such moves. Last week, Senator Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, joined Republican Ted Cruz in sending a strongly worded letter to Trump that directly attacked President Moon’s push for closer economic ties with North Korea. They urged the White House to rein in the US ally by committing “the full weight of the U.S. government to ensuring the integrity of the sanctions regime.”

Senator Menendez is also the author of a resolution, now under consideration in the Senate and House, promoting the trilateral military alliance between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, which is highly unpopular among Koreans. It comes as Tokyo and Seoul are locked in a bitter dispute over Japan’s use of “comfort women” as sex slaves during World War II and its refusal to provide restitution to thousands of Koreans forced to labor in Japanese mines and factories during that time. The resolution, which was introduced in the House by Democratic Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, is widely seen in Seoul as a way to pressure President Moon to back off and settle the dispute.

The most dramatic moment of congressional impatience with South Korea came last week, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with a high-level delegation of South Korean lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties.

The group, which was led by Representative Moon Hee-sang, the speaker of South Korea’s National Assembly, came to Washington to seek support for the inter-Korean peace process started by President Moon during the “Olympic Truce” of January 2018. According to Korean reporters who were briefed on the meeting, the session was uncomfortable from the start and had to be extended “as the talks grew intense.”

Pelosi, citing her own visit to Pyongyang in 1997, reportedly told her visitors not to trust the North and asserted (apparently with prodding from Representative Na Kyung-won, the floor leader of the right-wing opposition Liberty Korea Party) that North Korea’s “real goal isn’t its own denuclearization but South Korea’s demilitarization.” At one point, Pelosi insisted that last June’s summit in Singapore—the first-ever meeting between a US president and a North Korean leader—was “nothing but show.”

The implication was that the South Koreans, who have had extensive discussions on economic, political, and military issues with their Northern counterparts over the past year, are naive and don’t understand the threat to their own country. Representative Moon, in an interview with Fox 11 in Los Angeles, said he responded to Pelosi that the second summit in Hanoi “is of great importance to the Korean people and it will determine the fate of our country. That’s how important it is.”

The US congressional pressure on South Korea to end its dispute with Japan also contributed to the tension. The issue of Japan’s wartime crimes is particularly sensitive for Representative Moon, who recently suggested that the Japanese emperor apologize to his country for its war crimes against Koreans. Later, he called Japan a “brazen thief” for demanding that he retract his comments.

After hearing Pelosi express her concern about the dispute between South Korea and Japan, Speaker Moon told Korean reporters that the House speaker was essentially lobbying for Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party government in Tokyo. “I think Japan told her to have a word with [us] before the meeting, or in other words, scold us,” he said, according to the Joongang Daily. Pelosi’s press office did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment and clarification.

Still, Pelosi’s comments rattled many Koreans, who are hoping for a successful summit so they can proceed with their plans to eliminate tensions with the North. “Reconciliation and peace between North and South Korea is a gravely historic matter that should be for the Korean people to decide,” Simone Chun, a Korean scholar and activist who has spoken to congressional staffers about the peace process, told The Nation. “It cannot be allowed to be reduced to a bargaining chip in the struggle for one-upmanship between Republicans and Democrats.”

Chun was also critical of Representative Na of the Korean opposition party for raising fears during her visit to Washington about a North Korean nuclear attack and opposing an end-of-war declaration at the upcoming summit. “What Pelosi did was to legitimize the ultra-right-wing views expressed by Na,” she said.

Hwang Joon-bum, the Washington correspondent for Hankyoreh, South Korea’s largest progressive daily, wrote an op-ed about the House speaker’s remarks. “Pelosi is just one person who reflects the dominant viewpoint in the American political establishment, the mainstream media and think tanks,” he said. “There was never any chance” that the lawmakers’ tour “would reverse the deep-rooted distrust of North Korea and the antipathy to Trump both inside and outside of the US political establishment.”

The US critics, he added, “aren’t impressed by North Korea’s suspension of nuclear and missile testing since Nov. 2017, its willingness to demolish its Yongbyon nuclear facility and [Kim Jong-un’s] focus on an economic line.”

Daniel Jasper, the public-education-and-advocacy coordinator for Asia of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), said in an interview that he hoped Democrats would start seeing the Trump-Kim talks through Korean eyes.

“We are urging Democratic leadership to see the peace process for what it is—a Korean-led effort to end a 70-year-old war,” Jasper told The Nation. “Changing from the view that the current situation is a nuclear standoff to the view that this situation is the result of an un-ended war is essential to understanding what types of reciprocal actions are pragmatic and necessary, as well as why diplomacy is needed in the first place. We remain hopeful that the Democrats will rise above partisanship and political calculations to support the overall goal of peace.” AFSC, which established its first operations in North Korea in 1980, works with four cooperative farms in the country to raise productivity and implement sustainable agricultural practices, Jasper said.

But the Menendez letter showed little appreciation for South Korea’s efforts to help the North improve its economy. Menendez and Cruz listed a series of South Korean actions they consider troublesome, including moves by Korean banks to “pursue investments and operations” in the North and the participation of “multiple business executives” in President Moon’s summit in Pyongyang last September to discuss reopening the Kaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ and tours of Mount Kumgang, a tourist site beloved by South Koreans.

They also complained about President Moon’s recent calls to lift sanctions on the North “as soon as possible” and plans by both Koreas to break ground on a new cross-border rail project “within this year.” They added that North Korea’s “opacity” and its “well-documented efforts of evading sanctions” makes it impossible to ensure “that economic engagement with the North—regardless of intent to contribute to positive diplomatic progress on denuclearization—would not violate U.N. Security Council resolutions or be used for illicit activities prohibited by U.S. sanctions.”

Meanwhile, in another move that could constrain both South Korea and the United States in their negotiations with the North, Representative Tom Malinowski, a newly elected Democratic congressman from New Jersey, joined Republican Representative Mike Gallagher in introducing a bill that would restrict the US government and the Pentagon from reducing US troops in South Korea from their current level of about 28,000 to 22,000 or less unless the secretary of defense could assure Congress it would not have an “adverse” impact on US security.

The bill, H.R. 889, states that a “withdrawal or significant reduction” of US forces, which could happen eventually if a peace deal is reached, “may risk upsetting the military balance” in the Asia region. It also uses language similar to the Menendez letter concerning the US alliance with Japan, saying that the trilateral ties between the United States, Japan, and South Korea “form the bedrock of regional stability.”

Malinowski, a former director of Human Rights Watch, was the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor during the Obama administration. In 2017, he wrote an article for Politico titled “How to Take Down Kim Jong Un” that essentially called for a campaign that would “lead to the end” of the North Korean regime “and its reason to exist as a country.”

The Democratic Party’s current approach was established last June, one week before the Singapore summit, in a letter to Trump from Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and signed by Senators Menendez, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Sherrod Brown, Mark Warner, and Patrick Leahy. It laid out a series of demands, including North Korea’s “dismantlement and removal” of its chemical and biological weapons, which are not currently part of the talks, and urged the White House to “maintain a tough approach to China” throughout the peace process. The Schumer letter also rejected any incremental steps by the US government in its dealings with Kim.

“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” the Democratic senators declared.

Chun, the scholar-activist, said in a recent e-mail to peace activists that the Schumer letter “completely overlooked the recent progress toward peace evinced by the inter-Korean summit and the Panmunjom Declaration and discounted the overwhelming support for the peace process by Koreans. It also offers no alternative vision for peace on the Korean Peninsula and considers Korean interests only insofar as they serve the narrow political agenda of the Democratic Party.”

After the Schumer letter went out, according to activists who spend time on Capitol Hill, Representative Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders told their caucus “not to speak supportively” of the Singapore summit, which happened to coincide with a week of advocacy on Korea by peace groups. “Many of our folks lobbying on the Hill were stunned at how hostile many Dems were,” one activist told The Nation.

But now, with the Trump-Kim negotiations in full swing, a few Democrats are ready to take a new approach. A group of lawmakers from the Congressional Progressive Caucus plan to announce an action next week to express support for the Korea peace process and call on the United States to finally end the Korean War through a peace agreement. That would be most welcome, said Kevin Martin, president of Peace Action and national coordinator of the Korea Peace Network.

“Democrats should support diplomacy, and remember the most important president in this process is Moon Jae-in, not Donald Trump,” Martin said. “Moon’s persistent leadership toward reconciliation and diplomacy with North Korea represents the fervent desire of the Korean and Korean-American people for peace. Members of Congress from both parties should understand that and support it, skepticism about Trump and Kim notwithstanding.”

A two-hour White House meeting last Friday between President Trump and Kim Yong-chol, the chief negotiator for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, apparently cleared the decks for the next phase in the US attempt to convince Kim to give up his nuclear weapons in return for relief from economic sanctions and a new relationship with the United States.

The other US officials at the session were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Stephen Biegun, the former Ford executive who is now serving as Pompeo’s Special Representative for North Korean Policy. After the meeting, which Trump called “incredible,” the president announced that a site had been chosen for his next summit with Kim, to take place “probably at the end of February.” The next site is widely expected to be Vietnam, which also fought a long, bitter war with the United States and will soon host Kim for a state visit to Hanoi.

“This meeting shows that Trump and Kim have moved into the diplomatic phase of negotiations, which is a great thing for the people of Korea, North and South,” Christine Ahn. the Korean-American founder of Women Cross DMZ, told The Nation. “It’s an assurance that renewed conflict is off the table, and that the two sides are starting to define a roadmap that will lead to the end of the 70-year Korean War.”

In fact, despite the indifference of the US media and Democratic Party hostility to the talks, it appears that US and North Korean negotiators have made significant progress in moving the process forward in recent weeks. The divide has been primarily over US demands that North Korea show it is taking irrevocable steps to phase out its nuclear program before any economic sanctions are lifted, and the North’s long-stated desire for a formal declaration by the United States and the two Koreas ending the Korean War.

The most telling sign of that progress came in an official photograph of the White House meeting—complete with a new letter from Chairman Kim sitting on the desk—that was distributed by Trump’s communications team.

It showed Kim Yong-chol, who is best known as the former director of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s notorious intelligence service, sitting in front of Trump’s desk with Kim Hyok-chol, North Korea’s former ambassador to Spain. Also in the photo are Kim Song-hye, the head of strategy at the United Front Department of the Workers Party of Korea, and Pak Chol, the vice chairman of North Korea’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee. (A North Korean interpreter was also present.)

Chad O’Carroll, the editor and founder of NK News, the Seoul-based reporting service that identified the men, told The Nation that the presence of the “working-level officials” was significant because it “comes after almost a year during which talks have been stuck at the presidential and Secretary of State level.” In an article in NK News, he reported that “a key American condition” of Kim Yong-chol’s visit “was that working-level talks could commence as a direct result of it.”

That is already happening. On Saturday, Biegun flew to Sweden to begin the first official diplomatic talks since the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore last June. On Monday, he met with his counterpart in Pyongyang, Choe Son-hui, North Korea’s vice foreign minister and a well-known figure to US diplomats. Lee Do-hoon, a South Korean negotiator dispatched by President Moon Jae-in, also took part in the talks, which were described as “constructive” by Sweden’s foreign ministry.

“With the possibility for a few more rounds of working-level exchanges before the next summit, it is now much more likely that the two leaders [Kim and Trump] will be able to agree to a much more in-depth series of commitments in Vietnam,” O’Carroll said in an interview.

The presence of Pak Chol in the delegation to Washington was especially poignant to Women Cross DMZ’s Ahn. Pak was a senior counselor at the North Korean Permanent Mission to the UN for over five years and, according to Ahn, has extensive experience “engaging with international civil society working for peace and unification in Korea.”

In 1989, Ahn said, Pak was the lead interpreter for North Korea during a World Youth Festival in Pyongyang that became famous in South Korea when a university student, Im Su-kyong, crossed the DMZ to attend it (she met Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather) and was arrested upon her return to Seoul. Years later, Im was elected to the South Korean National Assembly. A political activist who helped Im make her secret trip, Im Jong-seok, was also arrested, but he went on to serve until a few weeks ago as the chief of staff to President Moon.

More recently, when Ahn was negotiating with the governments of North and South Korea and the UN Command in Korea for the first women’s crossing of the DMZ in 2015, she met frequently with Pak Chol in New York. “I credit him as the key North Korean diplomat who advocated for the peace walk,” she said. Pak’s presence in Washington with Kim Yong-chol, she added, shows “he has the ear” of Kim Jong-un.

“It heartens me to see that his experience and expertise is so highly regarded and that he can use all of that to help end the war and help transform North Korea,” she said.

During their brief stay in Washington, however, Pak and his delegation were apparently under strict orders not to make any public comments. Many South Korean reporters and a few US journalists staked out the Dupont Circle Hotel where Kim Yong-chol and his retinue stayed, and where he met briefly on Friday with Pompeo. But reporters were unable to get any quotes from him for their stories.

“It’s so hard to spot North Korean delegations at their hotel!” one frustrated Korean reporter posted on Facebook, along with several photographs. “They’ve been using (garbage) back door of the hotel to avoid media. GIVE UP NUKE & USE FRONT DOOR MAN!” Earlier, a few enterprising Korean reporters managed to capture the North Koreans’ arrival at Dulles Airport in Virginia and catch Kim riding on one of those uncomfortable and annoying buses that transport tired travelers to the main terminal.

For the US media, Kim Yong-chol’s visit—the first time since 1998 that a North Korean official had flown directly to Washington—was overshadowed by the frenzy over BuzzFeed’s story that Trump had advised lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress over a potential business deal in Moscow. As a result, there was little incentive to report in any depth on the US–North Korean talks. Instead, the networks performed their usual role by using the White House meeting as another opportunity to hammer Trump and disparage a Korea peace process they’ve never liked.

Within minutes of the White House talks, Victor Cha, the former Bush official at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), was on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC playing down the chances for success and suggesting “a little bit of desperation on the president’s part.” An hour later on the same network, Cha’s colleague at CSIS, former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, was saying much the same to host Katy Tur (the segment showed how little Tur, who covered the Singapore summit for NBC, has learned; when Terry told her that Kim Jong-un is seeking an end to the war, Tur foolishly asked “didn’t they already declare” that?).

The CSIS preening on MSNBC may have been preparation for a Monday story on NBC News that used another CSIS report co-authored by Cha to allegedly show that the North is still operating “as many as 20 undisclosed missile sites.” Cha was quoted by NBC, which has become the most hawkish network on North Korea, as saying that “the North Koreans are not going to negotiate over things they don’t disclose. It looks like they’re playing a game.”

The CSIS report aired on NBC Nightly News on Monday night, with the reporter Bill Neely (quoting Cha again) sounding almost hysterical as he stated that CSIS had discovered missile sites that “North Korea has never declared.” CNN fell for it on Tuesday. Naturally, none of them bothered to check to see if the information was new, which it wasn’t. As Seoul’s Hankyoreh reported on Wednesday, “Despite the report’s claims, the base has been mentioned in numerous reports in the South Korean press since the late 1990s.”

There was also another factor that wasn’t addressed: the universal practice of military secrecy. In response to the CSIS report, Gregg Brazinsky, a professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, pointed out on Twitter that “of course [North Korea] isn’t going to tell [the country] it’s technically at war with where its missiles are. It’s not deception. No country in the world has no military secrets.”

Unfortunately, the charge that Kim Jong-un is “gaming” Trump and the United States has also become a litany for many Democrats as they use their new powers in the House to go after Trump.

On CNN on Friday, for example, former Obama strategist David Axelrod joined a smug and clueless Brooke Baldwin in an inane conversation about whether Kim Jong-un is “totally playing this president.” Both displayed their utter contempt for the Korea reconciliation process by dismissing Friday’s White House meeting as mere “theater.” Like so many US commentators, they completely discounted the fact that South Korea’s Moon and his government are playing a critical role as a mediator between the United States and the North in hopes of finding a permanent peace.

Worse, in a vivid example of how little some Democrats care about South Korea’s deep interest in reconciliation, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut issued a scathing tweet on Friday about what he considers the folly of the Trump-Kim summit.

“Trump’s creepy bear hug of Kim legitimized Kim’s campaign of torture and starvation,” he said. “Kim made zero concessions on nuclear program[.] US screwed South Korea by giving up joint exercises, in exchange for nothing[.] Uhhh…of course Kim wants another summit.”

While anyone knowledgeable about Korea is aware of Kim’s sordid human-rights record, Murphy’s blast overlooked the fact that Moon, whose parents fled the North in 1950, has also embraced Kim as part of the inter-Korean peace process and last September signed a sweeping demilitarization agreement with the North that led to unprecedented changes on the Korean border. And Murphy completely ignored the North’s suspension of its nuclear and missile tests over a year ago.

A few Democrats are taking the high road. Hours after Senator Murphy’s outburst, Representative Ro Khanna of California tweeted his support for the peace process. “Glad to see new talks with North Korea,” he said. “Diplomacy is necessary to end this nearly 70-year conflict. An attack on nuclear-armed North Korea is simply not an option.” Many of his fellow lawmakers, however, are hostile to the talks and, according to a House aide who works on Korea issues, will be pushing Murphy’s more confrontational line as the 2020 election approaches.

There was one voice countering Washington’s armchair generals on MSNBC and CNN, however, and it came from an unlikely source: Vincent Brooks, a retired US Army four-star general who, until recently, commanded US and UN forces in South Korea. On Friday night, Brooks appeared on PBS NewsHour in his first interview since his retirement. He gave a ringing endorsement to the Korea peace talks and a second summit between Trump and Kim.

“Without conversation, we go right back where we were in 2016 and ’17, with the great potential of miscalculation one another’s actions,” he said, according to a transcript released by PBS. “So, I think it’s good. It’s important to recognize that any decision made in North Korea about the way forward is going to be made by Kim Jong-un himself. And so the fact that he sent his trusted representative, Kim Yong-chol, to Washington to carry the message that the door is still open, I believe, is a good thing.”

Asked about the criticism from Senator Murphy and others that the suspension of US–South Korean military exercises has “degraded” US military readiness, General Brooks was unequivocal. “The readiness does get degraded,” he told interviewer Nick Schifrin. “But let’s put that in context. So there has to be room for diplomatic maneuvering, diplomatic action to occur. And if creating leverage or traction comes from these adjustments to the exercises, then that’s a risk that has to be consciously taken.” The entire interview is worth watching as an antidote to the ill-informed Washington consensus on Korea.

Brooks’s comments, and his support for direct US–North Korean negotiations to end the conflict, also echo the views of many US military officers who have served in Korea, said Devin Stewart, a senior fellow specializing in East Asian politics at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. Stewart, who was once affiliated with CSIS, told The Nation that he regularly meets US military officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps in his work, “and they all support peace talks. And they don’t miss being deployed to the Korea drills.”

In his interview, Stewart said he’s noticed a “general divide” between, on the one hand, “the establishment elite” who don’t support the US-North talks and “experts with field experience who do support the talks, on the other.”

The establishment elite, he said, includes “media pundits, senior scholars, and anti-Trump reporters who accept the received wisdom or gospel of ‘thou shalt not talk with North Korea’ and other truisms.” But “people who live or have lived in Asia, military folks, Asian officials, and people who do a lot of field work in Asia, seem more willing to question the received wisdom and try something new,” he said.

But most of the US media are content with their establishment views and rarely seek out people holding contrary opinions on Korea. That, of course, is the job of reporters, but in this day and age, the media themselves—led by NBC and its cable twin, MSNBC—seem content to be official voices for war and confrontation.  

Correction: The text has been updated to reflect the fact that activist Im Jong-seok was not Im Su-kyong’s lawyer when she made her secret 1989 trip to North Korea.

December 14 is D-Day in Okinawa, the island at the most southern end of the Japanese archipelago where 70 percent of all US military bases in that country are concentrated.1

But this D-Day won’t stand for liberation. Instead, it will stand for destruction—of an environmentally sensitive bay to clear the way for a new US military base on the island, and the symbolic destruction of Okinawan democracy, which has voted repeatedly and overwhelmingly against the base’s construction.2

“I believe the situation is unfair and abnormal,” Denny Tamaki, Okinawa’s newly elected governor, told The Nation in an interview. “I think Japan is disrespecting the Okinawan peoples’ will. It’s as if democracy doesn’t exist on Okinawa.”3

On the 14th, after a last-minute plea by Gov. Tamaki to stop it, private contractors hired by the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) government of Shinzo Abe will begin the final phase of building a new offshore airport for the US Marines at Henoko, in northern Okinawa, by filling in nearby Oura Bay with earth, sand, cement, gravel, and large rocks. The reclamation phase of the project, which is being supervised by the Okinawa defense bureau of Japan’s  Ministry of Defense, is expected to take five years.

Once that work is completed and a series of runways built on the reclaimed land, the new base is supposed to replace US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a huge facility in the middle of the crowded city of Ginowan. It has been the target of local anger for decades because of rapes and other intolerable actions by US soldiers, environmental and noise contamination, and a history of serious accidents by US aircraft constantly in flight.5

But the US plan to relocate Futenma to Henoko instead of closing the base altogether is staunchly opposed by a majority of Okinawa’s 1.4 million residents, who twice in recent years have elected governors who want the Marine base moved out of the prefecture entirely.6

“Since 2014, if you look at the election results of Okinawa, we have been saying ‘no’ to the relocation plan,” Tamaki told me in an exclusive interview at the Okinawa prefectural office in downtown Washington. He noted that the Okinawa local assembly last year voted unanimously for a resolution calling for the removal of all US Marines from the island.7

In a dramatic show of resistance in August, 70,000 Okinawan residents held a rally against the Henoko base in the Okinawan capital city of Naha. And in recent days, the construction site at Henoko has been the scene of daily demonstrations and blockades that have been forcefully broken up by Japanese police.8

“The US government says this issue is a Japanese domestic issue,” Tamaki continued. “On the other hand, the Japanese government says it wants to proceed with the [Futenma] relocation for the US government.” He added this warning: “Without solving issues related to democracy in Okinawa, the US-Japan security alliance is going to be very, very vulnerable.”9

Governor Tamaki is correct to focus on the US and Japanese refusal to recognize the concerns expressed by Okinawa’s citizens, said Annmaria Shimabuku, an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at New York University and a second-generation Okinawan. “Henoko is a battle between the US and Japan about the meaning of the democratic will of the people of Okinawa,” she said.10

Shimabuku, the author of a new book on Okinawa, pointed to the latest study by the Okinawa Prefectural Government on Henoko indicating that the total cost of building the new base could exceed 2.5 trillion yen, or $22.5 billion. That’s “at least 10 times what the defense ministry initially estimated for the project,” she said. An editorial in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun last week argued that “the government’s case for forging ahead with the Henoko base plan is riddled with deceptive and inconsistent claims.”11

The higher estimate quoted by Shimabuku is largely due to the difficulties presented by building on top of Oura Bay’s limestone base and to the need to comply with the intense and time-consuming environmental-approval process that Okinawa will demand as the project continues.12

According to the Asahi, “more than 5,800 species of living things, including 262 endangered species, have been confirmed to inhabit Oura Bay off Henoko. It should not be forgotten that the dumping of earth and sand would cause immeasurable damage to this fertile sea.” Moreover, Okinawan officials have projected that it will take 13 years to complete the Henoko base—eight years longer than originally planned—“due in part to additional work to solidify the soft seabed,” the newspaper reported.13

“From a political, engineering, and fiscal perspective, the Henoko project is a disaster in the making,” said Shimabuku. “It shows how hell-bent and recklessly determined the Japanese government is in sticking Okinawa with yet another US military base.”14

The struggle over Henoko dates back more than a dozen years. In 1996, the United States and Japan agreed to replace Futenma with the new base after three US Marines were arrested for raping an Okinawan schoolgirl in 1995, causing a national uproar and a serious crisis in US-Japan relations.15

Since then, successive US administrations have backed the agreement, saying it is the only option available for US forces in Japan. Last year, Trump and Abe—one of the US president’s few friends among global leaders—reaffirmed the plan in one of their many meetings, calling the Henoko relocation plan “the only solution that avoids continued use” of Futenma.16

And in the early days of the Obama administration, senior US officials exerted enormous pressure on Japan to stick to the relocation plan when a government led by the progressive Yukio Hatoyama sought to alter it as part of a planned reform of US-Japan strategic agreements approved over the years by the right-wing LDP.17

Hatoyama was pushed out in 2010 after he acceded to the US demands for the new base at Henoko, and his Democratic Party of Japan was replaced by the LDP two years later—much to the satisfaction of the Pentagon and the US government. (Hatoyama spoke to The Nation about his experience last February. In November, he visited Governor Tamaki in Okinawa and urged him to “persevere in your intent to absolutely not allow the new base to be built.”)18

Why Abe and the LDP are so intent on pleasing the United States is rarely addressed in either the US or Japanese press. But the answer lies in the LDP’s role as possibly the most subservient, pro-American party and government the world has seen since World War II—a relationship that was recently described by the eminent Australian historian Gavan McCormack as “clientelism.”19

Writing in The Asia-Pacific Journal this month, McCormack said he used that term to describe “a state that spontaneously chooses servitude, insisting on the ‘alliance’ with the US as its charter (with de facto priority over the constitution), on the absolute privilege of the US military presence in Japan, especially in Okinawa.” Japan’s clientelism, he said, has been especially pronounced during the second term of Prime Minister Abe, who is now the longest-serving prime minister in modern Japanese history.20

After Trump became president in 2017, McCormack wrote, “Abe paid especial care to nurture the bilateral relationship. With no other world leader did Trump so relish rounds of golf or consult so often, whether directly or by telephone. As the personal relationship seemed to flower, Abe committed Japan to a new level of incorporation in the projection of US hegemony over global land, sea, space, and cyber-space.” And thus the standoff over Henoko.21

ere’s the stark truth about Okinawa, which was the scene of one of the most horrific battles of World War II. It takes up less than 1 percent of Japan’s land mass, yet it hosts nearly three-quarters of the US bases in Japan. About half of the 50,000 US soldiers in Japan work out of bases in Okinawa, including Kadena Air Force Base, a strategic US outpost where some of the Pentagon’s most sophisticated spy planes are based.22

That disparity is the driving force behind Okinawa’s opposition to the Henoko plan. “These US bases are concentrated close to or around the center of residential areas where 80 percent of Okinawans live,” said Tamaki.23

Tamaki, an energetic former lawmaker, has an unusual pedigree for a Japanese politician. His father, whom he has never met, was a US Marine serving in Okinawa, and he was raised by his Okinawan mother. That makes him Japan’s first mixed-race governor in its history. In another milestone, 10 years ago Tamaki became “the first Amerasian to be elected to Japan’s House of Representatives,” according to The New York Times.24

“Tamaki is a true man of the people who embodies not only Okinawa’s complex relationship with the US military but also with Japanese pressures on Okinawa to assimilate and their insistence on Japan’s status as a monoethnic state,” said NYU’s Shimabuku.25

Tamaki was elected in September after his predecessor, Takeshi Onaga, a fierce opponent of US bases, died of cancer. Tamaki handily defeated Atsushi Sakima, a local mayor backed by Abe’s LDP. “The strong feelings of Takeshi Onaga, risking his life to stop the construction of any more bases, helped bring this victory,” Tamaki told reporters after his election.26

During his visit to New York in November, Tamaki delivered a speech at NYU in which he strongly criticized both Tokyo and Washington for proceeding with the Henoko relocation project even though a majority of Okinawans oppose it.27

“The Japanese government is going to build the base, and the US government is going to use it,” he said. “They have responsibility as concerned parties, yet the base is being forced on Okinawa. Where should Okinawans deliver our voices? Where is democracy for Okinawa?”28

While in Washington, Tamaki asked US officials, including Marc Knapper, acting deputy assistant secretary of state, to open three-way talks with Okinawan and Japanese officials over the future of Futenma and Henoko, but he was rebuffed, the governor said. Instead, the State Department said that Knapper and other officials “thanked Okinawa for playing a central role in the U.S.-Japan alliance that is a cornerstone of peace in the Asia-Pacific region,” Kyodo News reported.29

That’s part of the problem, Governor Tamaki explained in his interview. He pointed to the Pentagon’s recent expansion of the Pacific Command (which includes US forces in Japan) into the United States Indo-Pacific Command. Its jurisdiction now stretches “from the waters off the west coast of the U.S. to the western border of India, and from Antarctica to the North Pole,” the command’s website states.30

“In my understanding, US forces are now aiming for a free and open Indian and Pacific ocean,” said Tamaki. “I’d like Americans to understand that Okinawa is part of the Pacific, too. And I’d like Americans to respect the Okinawan people’s democracy.”31

amaki also addressed one of the least-known aspects of US bases in Okinawa: their relationship to the US military presence on the Korean Peninsula.32

Since the Korean War, as I’ve reported, the US-run UN Command that organized the fighting against the North Korean and Chinese armies has had a major presence in Japan called UN Command-Rear. It’s based at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo and includes seven US installations, including three important US bases on Okinawa: Kadena (Air Force), Futenma (Marines) and White Beach (Navy).33

“As you know, there is a UN flag at Kadena, which is one of the most important airfields US forces have overseas,” said Tamaki. “There’s also a UN flag flying at Futenma and the US Navy port at White Beach.” But their strategic value to the United States could change as a result of the peace process in Korea initiated last January by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un.34

In a speech this past March to a Washington conference on Okinawa attended by then-Governor Onaga, former US secretary of defense William Perry argued that a settlement in Korea could dramatically change the structure of US bases on Okinawa by removing the justification for the Marine base at Futenma. That’s because Futenma’s sole mission, he said, is to be the first line of defense if North Korean forces invade South Korea.35

“The whole purpose of US military planning relative to North Korea is to get reinforcements in very, very quickly to stop North Korean forces before they get to Seoul,” Perry told the conference, which I covered. If the United States “is able to solve the North Korea threat and danger, that would go a long way to removing the rationale for even having military forces in Okinawa. I believe in time [this] would lead to a situation where the US forces in Okinawa could be removed altogether.”36

With that in mind, I asked Governor Tamaki if Okinawa should be part of a regional discussion about peace and demilitarization, if the US and South Korean negotiations with North Korea about ending its nuclear program and the Korean War are successful.37

He responded carefully, saying that Japan could “retain its deterrence” even if the US Marine base is relocated. He added that “we are just requesting withdrawal of Futenma air base, not all US Marines, from Okinawa, so I wonder why both the US and Japanese governments stick to this small issue [of the relocation to Henoko].”38

After reflecting for a moment, he spoke of Okinawa’s “unique history” of close ties with China, Taiwan, and South Korea. “I’d like to have Okinawa become a peaceful backwater region in Northeast Asia,” he said, adding that his “big dream” is to someday convert the island’s bases into UN facilities and “make Okinawa a center for humanitarian aid and disaster relief” in the Asia-Pacific region.39

Just before leaving for his US trip, the governor said the prefectural government would try again to express Okinawa’s will by holding a referendum on the Henoko relocation plan next February 24. In the last such referendum, in 1996, 89 percent of Okinawans voted to support a scaled-back US military presence and a review of the Henoko plan.40

“This issue has everything to do with Okinawan identity as the reality of a people who are rendered invisible in the geopolitical acrobatics of the US-Japan security alliance,” said Shimabuku. “For Americans exhausted with political echo chambers and polarizing ideological debates, Okinawa is the place to look to see how real people with complex lives can respond to the overwhelming pressures of powerful states.”41

The New York Times may still have a Judith Miller problem—only now it’s a David Sanger problem.

Miller, of course, is the former Times reporter who helped build the case for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq with a series of reports based on highly questionable sources bent on regime change. The newspaper eventually admitted its errors but didn’t specifically blame Miller, who left the paper soon after the mea culpa and is now a commentator on Fox News.

Now, Sanger, who over the years has been the recipient of dozens of leaks from US intelligence on North Korea’s weapons program and the US attempts to stop it, has come out with his own doozy of a story that raises serious questions about his style of deep-state journalism.

The article may not involve the employment of sleazy sources with an ax to grind, but it does stretch the findings of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank that is deeply integrated with the military-industrial complex and plays an instrumental role in US media coverage on Korea.

“Controversy is raging,” South Korea’s progressive Hankyoreh newspaper declared on Wednesday about the Times report, which it called “riddled with holes and errors.”

Sanger’s story, which appeared on Monday underneath the ominous headline “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception,” focused on a new study from CSIS’s “Beyond Parallel” project about the Sakkanmol Missile Operating Base, one of 13 North Korean missile sites, out of a total of 20, that it has identified and analyzed from overhead imagery provided by Digital Globe, a private satellite contractor.

None of the 20 sites has been officially acknowledged by Pyongyang, but the network is “long known to American intelligence agencies,” wrote Sanger.

Sakkanmol, according to CSIS, “is an undeclared operational missile base for short-range ballistic missiles” a little over 50 miles (85 kilometers) north of the border and therefore “one of the closest to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and Seoul.” Pyongyang’s highly publicized decommissioning last summer of the Sohae satellite launch facility “obscures the military threat to U.S. forces and South Korea from this and other undeclared ballistic missile bases.”

Its authors added a huge caveat at the end: “Some of the information used in the preparation of this study may eventually prove to be incomplete or incorrect.”

But the Times ignored the warning and took the report several steps further. According to Sanger, that analysis of the missile base shows that North Korea is “moving ahead with its ballistic missile program” despite pledges made by Kim Jong-Un to President Trump at their Singapore summit on June 12 to eliminate his nuclear and missile programs if the United States ends its “hostile policy” and agrees to forge a new relationship with North Korea.

The “new commercial satellite images” of the undeclared missile sites, Sanger concluded darkly, suggest that North Korea “has been engaged in a great deception.”

While North Korea has offered to dismantle a major launching site, he asserted, it continues “to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.” That finding “contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination” of the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles, Sanger concluded.

The implication was that North Korea, by continuing to build missiles after the Singapore summit, is lying to the United States and is therefore untrustworthy as a negotiating partner—and that Trump, by proclaiming that he has neutralized Kim’s threats, has been deceived. The Times-CSIS report was immediately picked up by major media outlets and repeated almost verbatim on NBC Nightly News and NPR, with little additional reporting.

A leading Democrat, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, seized on the report to argue that President Trump is “getting played” by North Korea. “We cannot have another summit with North Korea—not with President Trump, not with the Secretary of State—unless and until the Kim regime takes concrete, tangible actions to halt and roll back its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs,” he said in the statement.

But even a cursory analysis of the imagery should have raised questions. On Monday night, a Korean news outlet pointed out that all the photos analyzed in the CSIS report are dated March 29, 2018—almost two and a half months before Trump and Kim met in Singapore on June 12.

The dates make Sanger’s claim that North Korea is “moving ahead” on missile production after its pledges to Trump laughable; indeed, they make his story look like a serious attempt to deceive the American public about the real progress that has been made in ending the standoff.

In fact, as discussion swirled on Twitter, it became clear that Sanger was exaggerating the report. Arms-control experts immediately questioned his assertions, arguing that he had ignored the fact that North Korea and the United States have yet to sign any agreement under which the North would give up its nuclear weapons and missiles. And in the absence of an agreement, it’s status quo for both North Korea and the United States.

North Korea’s missile program “is NOT deception,” Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, posted soon after the story was published. Narang, who writes occasionally for the Times editorial page on North Korea, pointed out that Kim Jong-un has never offered to stop producing ballistic missiles and in fact had ordered more to be produced in January 2018.

“Unless and until there is a deal” with Trump, he wrote, “Kim would be a fool to eliminate and stop improving [them].… So the characterization of ‘deception’ is highly misleading. There’s no deal to violate.” (Like other US analysts, Narang did not question the CSIS report itself, calling it “excellent.”)

The CSIS report was denounced by the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in as “nothing new,” and Kim Eui-kyeom, its chief spokesperson, took particular exception to the Times’ use of the term “deception.” To his credit, Sanger acknowledged the criticism and quoted the statement in full.

“North Korea has never promised to dismantle its missile bases, nor has it ever joined any treaty that obligates it to dismantle them,” said Kim. “So calling this a ‘deception’ is not appropriate. If anything, the existence of these missile bases highlights the need for negotiation and dialogue, including those between the North and the United States, to eliminate the North Korean threat.”

Hankyoreh, in its analysis, objected to Sanger’s claim that Sakkanmol and other missile bases are “hidden.” It reported that South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had identified the base as the source for a short-range missile launched by North Korea on March 10, 2016. “South Korean and overseas news outlets at the time dedicated significant coverage to the launch, noting the presence of an underground Scud missile base in the Sakkanmol area.”

Leon Sigal, the author of a book about North Korea and a former member of the New York Times editorial board, sharply disagreed with Sanger’s assertion that North Korea is now “moving ahead with its ballistic missile program.” Writing Tuesday in 38 North, Sigal said the CSIS report notes that “only minor infrastructure changes were observed” at the missile site since Kim came to power in December 2011. That’s hardly progress.

Sigal also noted the absence of a US–North Korea agreement inhibiting the “deployment of missiles by Pyongyang, never mind requiring their dismantlement. Nor has Washington yet offered the necessary reciprocal steps that might make such a deal possible.”

In a biting comment on his former employer, he added that “substituting tendentious hyperbole for sound reporting may convince editors to feature a story on page one, but it is a disservice to readers.”

Taking note of the response from the Moon government and arms-control experts, Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ and a strong advocate for engagement with the North, called on the newspaper to correct the story. “The @nytimes should write a retraction,” she said. “They just made real Trump’s allegations of #fakenews.”

On Tuesday, as she predicted, Trump used the story to launch another attack on the media. “The story in the New York Times concerning North Korea developing missile bases is inaccurate,” he tweeted. “We fully know about the sites being discussed, nothing new—and nothing happening out of the normal. Just more Fake News. I will be the first to let you know if things go bad!”

Less than two hours later, the Times communications office put a short statement out on Twitter defending Sanger’s reporting. “The New York Times stands by our story, which is based on satellite imagery analyzed by experts,” it stated in a post that linked to Trump’s earlier blast.

Sanger, who is interviewed frequently for national security conferences and documentaries on North Korea, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment on his story.

ike many of his North Korea stories over the years, Sanger’s account of what he basically described as a betrayal by Kim Jong-un seemed perfectly timed to interject public skepticism of the North at a crucial moment for the US negotiations with both Koreas to resolve the nuclear standoff and pave the way for a final peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula.

Over the past month, while the two Koreas have made spectacular leaps in reducing military tensions along their border, the US dialogue with North Korea has stalled. The primary issues dividing them are Trump’s insistence on keeping his pressure campaign of economic sanctions in place until the North denuclearizes, and the North’s demand that Trump join the two Koreas in publicly declaring an end to the Korean War.

South Korea has also pushed for such a declaration, saying that it would assure the North that it can eventually disarm without fear of attack or invasion from the United States (its position on the end-of-war declaration has been harshly criticized in Washington, including by CSIS analysts).

The differences came into stark relief last week, when North Korea abruptly canceled a planned meeting in New York between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Korean Workers’ Party Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol. In a bid to get them back on track, President Moon this week sent his unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, to Washington, where he is meeting with Pompeo, congressional leaders, and, according to Yonhap News, top officials at CSIS.

South Korean officials are confident the US–North Korea talks will resume, and point to the steps Pyongyang has taken since the Singapore summit. They include North Korea’s decommissioning of a major satellite launch facility; its destruction of the tunnels where its nuclear weapons were tested; its return of American dead from the Korean War; and its unprecedented cooperation with South Korea and the US-controlled UN Command to remove guard posts and firearms in the DMZ.

On Tuesday, John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national-security adviser, told reporters in Asia that Trump “is prepared to have a second summit” with Kim in early 2019. And on Thursday, in a brief meeting in Singapore with President Moon, Vice President Mike Pence asked that South Korea “communicate and talk more closely with North Korea” to help bring this about, Moon’s spokesman told reporters.

he most glaring problem with the Times story was Sanger’s characterization of CSIS as a neutral organization (“a major think tank”) and his failure to disclose that it receives enormous funding from the US government as well major military contractors. Nor did he mention that CSIS and its key analysts provide a kind of anchor to the Times’ coverage of Korea; they often appear near the lead of a story to explain its political significance. That is particularly true of Victor Cha, one of the authors of the report.

Cha, the director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council in the George W. Bush White House, was briefly considered last year by President Trump for US ambassador to Seoul (apparently his hawkish views weren’t enough to get him the job).

In his interview with Sanger for the Times article, Cha seemed to be pushing for a more aggressive stance against North Korea. “It’s not like these bases have been frozen,” he said. “Work is continuing. What everybody is worried about is that Trump is going to accept a bad deal—they give us a single test site and dismantle a few other things, and in return they get a peace agreement” that formally ends the Korean War.

Cha continued to defend the report as the criticism intensified, and took special umbrage at South Korea’s response. “How can [South Korea] defend NK’s undisclosed operational missile bases?” he asked in a heated exchange on Twitter that caught the attention of Charles Knight, an analyst with the Project on Defense Alternatives. “Seriously, how contorted can these rationalizations for NK weapons possession get??”

Knight, in an e-mail, said he had concluded that Cha has been “enabled” by Sanger and the editors of the Times to “be the agent of the opening salvo of an offensive by the most reactionary elements of the US national security and foreign policy establishment against the Korean diplomacy of both the Trump administration and South Korea.”

Here’s where the contractor money that pours into CSIS comes in: Providing the justification for a tougher policy of sanctions and military threats would be very much in tune with the defense and intelligence companies that support the think tank.

According to the CSIS page for “corporation and trade association donors,” they include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3, Rockwell, General Atomics, and Booz Allen Hamilton. CSIS is also funded by several Asian defense giants, including Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Korea Aerospace Industries.

All of these companies have a stake in US military options focused on North Korea, including monitoring its military activities, building missile-defense systems and providing weapons, ships, drones, and aircraft for offensive military operations when they become necessary.

As I reported in 2017 for Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism, “As the South Korean and US militaries have become more integrated in the face of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, CSIS has become an important forum where military collaboration—especially on the industrial side—is thrashed out and decided.”

In 2016, for example, CSIS sponsored a conference on “U.S.-Korea Defense Acquisition Policy and the International Security Environment” that drew high-ranking officials from the South Korean government and its military industry. In opening the conference, CSIS’s CEO John Hamre, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, declared, “We’ve been military partners for 70 years but we are now going to be business partners in a very new way.”

Digital Globe, the satellite company that supplied the imagery for the CSIS report, is not a donor to the think tank. But it has a special relationship with US intelligence as an important contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, one of the primary collection agencies for the US government. According to CSIS report, Joseph Bermudez Jr., its primary author, is a former “senior all-source analyst for DigitalGlobe’s Analysis Center.”

The Moon government, while a donor to CSIS, did not seem impressed with the Digital Globe imagery. In his critique of the Times story, Moon’s spokesperson Kim Eui-kyeom pointed out that the source for the CSIS analysis is a “commercial satellite” vendor. “The intelligence authorities of South Korea and the U.S. have far more detailed information from military satellites and are closely monitoring [it],” he said.

In the end, the Sanger story was widely derided in the circle of people who closely follow North Korea. Once these doubts were voiced, both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post avoided the Times’ claim of deception and played down its dire conclusions that North Korea is cheating on the agreement it reached with Trump last June.

That’s a good development, indicating that Sanger’s questionable scoop probably won’t mushroom out of control and add fuel to a conflict, as Judith Miller’s phony reporting did at the advent of the Iraq War. And Sanger’s role as a leading expert on North Korea and US intelligence may take a hit.

“In an age of baseless allegations of fake news devaluing the work of journalists worldwide, it’s extremely lamentable that the New York Times—which is meant to be a nuanced and quality outlet—spun the CSIS story in the egregious way it did,” Chad O’Carroll, the CEO of Korea Risk Group, a Seoul-based organization that analyzes North Korea, tweeted on Tuesday.

Correction: The passage discussing a Twitter exchange involving Victor Cha and Charles Knight was garbled in the editing process; it has now been corrected.

As the two Koreas continue to move their peace process forward in the wake of their highly successful September summit in Pyongyang, the Trump administration, along with military-industrial think tanks and journalists who influence US policy, have shifted their collective indignation away from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and toward South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

A year after threatening Kim with a “bloody nose” strike unless he stopped his nuclear buildup, the Trump administration and its allies are now going after Moon’s economic engagement with North Korea as a chief impediment to Pyongyang’s pledge to denuclearize. Moon, in their view, has weakened Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and military threats by moving too quickly on inter-Korean reconciliation and ignoring US demands that sanctions be lifted only after the North’s nuclear disarmament.

In contrast, the United States has stood firm. “I haven’t eased the sanctions,” President Trump told Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes this past Sunday in comments that were overshadowed by his defense of his professed “love” for Kim Jong-un. “I haven’t done anything.” A few days earlier, Trump sent shock waves through South Korea when he was asked about reports that Moon’s government was considering the idea of terminating the sanctions and trade embargo that South Korea itself had imposed on the North in 2010.

Trump said South Korea wouldn’t lift sanctions on Pyongyang without American approval, and then repeated himself: “They do nothing without our approval.” His arrogant assumptions were too much for the JoongAng Daily, a conservative paper that generally supports US policy. “[Trump’s] choice of the word—approval—could sound very offensive as it suggests the United States denies us our sovereignty,” its editorialist wrote. The center-right Korea Times added that Trump’s statement “is seen as infringing on the national sovereignty of South Korea.”

In fact, the Moon government has been generally supportive of US and UN sanctions and has consulted with the Trump administration about lifting them in specific instances. At the same time, President Moon is seeking support for sanctions relief as US and South Korean negotiations with Pyongyang move forward. “I believe the international community needs to provide assurances that North Korea has made the right choice to denuclearize and encourage North Korea to speed up the process,” he said this week in Paris during a visit with French President Emmanuel Macron. Moon is on a nine-day tour of European capitals that was followed up on Thursday when he met with the pope at the Vatican and extended to him an invitation from Kim Jong-un to visit Pyongyang.

The US ambassador to South Korea, Harry Harris, underscored US impatience when he warned in Seoul that the US and South Korean governments must speak with one voice. “We are, of course, cognizant of the priority that President Moon Jae-in and his administration have placed on improving South-North relations,” he told a conference on Tuesday co-sponsored by the US-government-run Wilson Center. “I believe this inter-Korean dialogue must remain linked to denuclearization, and South Korea synchronized with the United States.”

In what seemed like a tit-for-tat response, South Korea’s ambassador to Washington, Cho Yoon-je, responded on Wednesday to the US concerns that Seoul is “moving too fast” on implementing its agreements with the North.

“When inter-Korean relations are moving a little faster than North Korea–US dialogue, that gives South Korea the leverage to act as a facilitator and enables it to break through deadlocks between North Korea and the US,” Cho said in a speech to South Korea’s Sejong Institute and the US Council on Foreign Relations. While agreeing that sanctions “must be implemented faithfully,” he argued that the “momentum on one side can drive the process on the other and create a virtuous cycle.” Cho pointed to the three summits between Moon and Kim as evidence, saying that they “breathed new life into North Korea–US dialogue.”

he turning point for the Trump administration’s relations with Seoul may have come on September 14, when the two Koreas opened a liaison office just north of the DMZ. They did this against the public recommendation of the State Department, which had initially warned that South Korea’s supply of electricity, water, and other supplies to the Gaesong Industrial Complex would violate US and UN sanctions. Since the virtual embassies opened, representatives from the two Koreas have had more than 60 face-to-face meetings, and the office has become a clearinghouse for over a dozen bilateral projects launched during the summit.

The Korean snub of the State Department may have triggered another flare-up in early October, when the two Koreas began removing landmines along the DMZ as part of the bilateral military agreement signed during the Pyongyang summit to prevent an accident from spiraling into another war. Their announcement of the pact greatly displeased Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. According to Korean press reports, he “furiously harangued” Moon’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, in a blistering phone call that shocked many Koreans when its contents were made public in a parliamentary hearing.

Pompeo’s impatience was reignited this past Monday, following a weekend agreement by the two Koreas to hold a groundbreaking ceremony in late November or December for a massive binational project to link roads and railroads severed during the Korean War. Asked to comment, a State Department official tartly observed that sanctions must be enforced until the North denuclearizes. “We expect all member states to fully implement U.N. sanctions [and] take their responsibilities seriously to help end the [North’s] illegal nuclear and missile programs,” the diplomat told Yonhap News.

The transportation deal also stoked the ire of the think tanks. “As North-South rails get linked, US-ROK alliance faces a new disconnect,” Patrick Cronin, the director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party–aligned think tank, tweeted. The influential Center for Strategic and International Studies chimed in, pointing out that “Seoul’s latest move is expected to increase friction with its traditional ally Washington over the pace of inter-Korean engagement.”

Criticism of Moon is also coming from liberals, including former advisers to President Obama. They have zeroed in on South Korea’s interest in a declaration to end the Korean War, which the North has said should be a precursor to any nuclear agreement. “A peace declaration is not merely ineffective in establishing peace, it advances the North Korean push to unwind the U.S.-ROK alliance,” Daniel Russel, Obama’s top diplomat on Asia, told The Wall Street Journal on October 7. “This is not an argument we should be having right now.”

The mainstream media, too, have been highly skeptical of South Korea’s engagement with the North. “South Korea wants to lift sanctions on North Korea,” Vox.com blared in a highly slanted story on October 10. “That could kill Trump’s nuclear plan.”

And in an October 15 story from Tokyo, The Washington Post asserted that recent North-South agreements come “amid some concerns in Washington about the enthusiasm with which [Moon] has embraced North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, despite the fact that North Korea has so far taken no concrete steps to disarm.” This “fact,” of course, is disputed by the North as well as by the Moon government and many analysts familiar with Pyongyang’s behavior.

Meanwhile, as if to underscore its contempt for the people of North Korea, the Trump administration—in a decision made by Pompeo himself—has blocked several predominantly Christian US aid groups from traveling to North Korea to deliver humanitarian aid. “It has become clear that the Trump Administration regards the provision of humanitarian assistance to the North Korean people as a legitimate target for its maximum pressure campaign,” said Keith Luse, executive director of the nonprofit National Committee on North Korea.

“It’s a disturbing new trend in American maximum pressure to use humanitarian work” as a lever of pressure, added Jennifer Deibart, North Korea Program coordinator at the Mennonite Central Committee, one of the groups barred from traveling, in an interview with NK News. A few days later, Moon’s health minister, Park Neung-hoo, told the National Assembly in Seoul that the United States was blocking South Korea’s own efforts to provide medical aid to the North.

he Trump administration’s criticism of the Moon government has been amplified by a hard-line cadre of commentators who have no qualms about trashing and even redbaiting the South Korean president. One of the most outrageous has been Gordon Chang, a prominent writer for The Daily Beast who has allied himself with South Korea’s fringe right wing and parrots their propaganda in his many appearances on media, from MSNBC to Fox.

On October 13, Chang tweeted, “Is Moon Jae-in a traitor? He speaks so passionately about #NorthKorea while not doing the same about the society he was elected to represent.” Two days later, he added, “I hope Prez Trump publicly demands #SouthKorea stop violating UN sanctions. If Prez #MoonJaein does not relent, we need to impose costs on the South.” Chang’s latest piece in The Daily Beast is entitled “Bad Moon Rising: Why Is Trump Letting Moon Jae-in Hand South Korea to Kim Jong Un?”

Chang’s strident attacks on Moon noticeably increased in tempo and vitriol after he was slated to appear as the guest of honor at a dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington on October 2 hosted by the extreme-right Korean Patriot Party. It was founded in 2017 to oppose the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye, who is now in a Seoul jail cell after being removed from power for corruption. The party regularly holds anti-Moon rallies in downtown Seoul, where its fervent supporters wave US, South Korean, and Israeli flags.

In remarks at the National Press Club, Patriot Party leader Wonjin Cho—its only member in the Korean parliament—explained that he was in the United States to warn the Trump administration that President Moon is a “pro-North Korean leftist” with “socialist aims” who is intent on “serving the interests” of Kim Jong-un. “The Moon government wants to fight America,” he asserted. “The only way for South Korea to survive is to get rid of his leftist policies.” 

One reason for the Trump administration’s criticism of Moon is the notable shift away from sanctions by China and Russia, who both hold veto power over the UN Security Council. In a meeting last week in Moscow, the deputy foreign ministers of China, Russia, and North Korea called on the UN to “adjust” the sanctions and instead “establish a peace mechanism on the [Korean] peninsula through bilateral and multilateral cooperation.”

For its part, North Korea has signaled that it sees lifting the sanctions as equally important as an end-of-war declaration, according to the liberal Hankyoreh newspaper in South Korea. It quoted from a recent commentary posted on KCNA, the North Korean news service.

“Considering how much time has passed since we stopped our nuclear tests and suspended our ICBM launches, it is only right for the sanctions to disappear accordingly, considering that they were concocted on the pretext of those actions,” the North Korean column said. “It’s customary to give back as much as you take, but the US keeps taking without giving anything in return.”

Meanwhile, recent polls in South Korea show that Moon’s popularity has risen to 65 percent since his last summit with Kim. In contrast, the conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party has 11 percent support. Gordon Chang’s allies in the Patriot Party don’t even show up in the numbers, underscoring its irrelevance and obscurity.

Still, Chang was hard at work on Wednesday, accusing Moon of “trying to exercise the powers of a communist leader.… If he likes totalitarianism that much, he should just move to #NorthKorea.” His attack is ironic, considering that Moon’s parents were refugees from the North who fled the country in a US Navy vessel after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.

But Washington hard-liners may now have another target. In a major development Friday, the Pentagon announced that it was suspending the next round of US–South Korean military exercises to improve the atmosphere for the US and South Korean negotiations with Pyongyang. “Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis and Minister of National Defense Jeong Kyeong-doo decided to suspend Exercise Vigilant Ace to give the diplomatic process every opportunity to continue,” Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said in a statement reported by CNN. This was a strategic move: Last year’s Vigilant Ace drills involved 230 aircraft and were denounced by the North as an “all-out provocation,” a term Trump himself used when he first canceled US-Korean drills in June.

The gesture can only be good news for the peace process and might be seen in Pyongyang as the US response to its demand for “corresponding measures” in return for its own steps toward denuclearization. And it could show that that President Moon’s persistence in pressing for continued engagement is paying off, big time.

Correction: An earlier version of this article reported that Gordon Chang appeared at an October 2 dinner at the Trump International Hotel hosted by the Korean Patriot Party; the party itself had announced that Chang would be present. After the article appeared, Chang told The Nation that he was not at the dinner. We accept Chang’s denial and regret the error.

Seoul

ver three days of diplomacy and pageantry in Pyongyang this week, the leaders of North and South Korea put on a stunning display of national unity and purpose that sent an unmistakable message that the two Koreas have moved into a new phase of reconciliation and are ready to overcome the barriers that have kept them divided since 1945.

“We have lived together for 5,000 years and been separated for 70 years,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in told some 150,000 people who had gathered in Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium to celebrate the summit in a climactic moment on Wednesday night. “We must live together as one people.”

The summit, the third between Moon and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un, was designed to tell the world—and skeptics in Washington—that North and South are determined to end, once and for all, the danger of war and nuclear conflict on their divided peninsula and resolve years of tension over North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

Minutes after returning from Pyongyang on Thursday night, Moon summarized his conversations with the North Korean leader to hundreds of Korean and foreign reporters covering the summit at the Seoul Press Center. “Chairman Kim expressed his wish to finish complete denuclearization at an early date and focus on economic development,” he said.

If the North makes good on its promises, “the US side, as well as our side too, need to take steps that would eradicate our hostile relations with the North,” he added. On Wednesday, following their first day of meetings, the two leaders laid out their goals.

“Today we adopted a military agreement to make a nuclear-free Korean peninsula,” Kim declared. Moon, standing next to him, added: “A Korean Peninsula free of war has begun to take shape. The South and North agreed today to eliminate all risks that could lead to war from all parts of the Korean Peninsula.” It was the first visit to Pyongyang by a South Korean leader since 2007.

The summit was “peacemaking at its finest,” said Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, an international coalition of women seeking to transform the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War into a permanent peace treaty. “This is history being made; there’s no turning back.”

On the nuclear front, North Korea offered to “permanently dismantle” two key facilities of its ICBM program that is so threatening to the United States, including a missile-engine test facility and a missile launchpad, and to allow outside experts into the country to observe the process. It also said it would permanently shut its nuclear facility at Yongbyon if certain conditions were met.

In addition to these gestures, President Moon said Thursday, Kim said he wants Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “North Korea visit and a second summit with President Trump to happen at the earliest convenience in order to speed up the denuclearization process.”

Moon Chung-in, a special adviser to President Moon who accompanied him to Pyongyang, said in a press briefing Wednesday that the situation has fundamentally changed.

North and South Korea now “share a common starting point: prevent random conflicts on the Korean Peninsula, which, in turn, could lead to preventing nuclear conflicts,” he said. “Through this process, the two Koreas should be able to achieve complete denuclearization on the peninsula.”

Highlights of the summit included a detailed agreement to defuse military tensions along the military demarcation line dividing the two countries, a decision by Kim to make an unprecedented visit to Seoul later this year, and a joint proposal to host the Olympic Games in 2032. Moon was accompanied on his trip by dozens of corporate executives, sports stars, artists, and leaders of civic organizations.

In Pyongyang, the two leaders issued a sweeping joint declaration they hope will knit their countries together economically and socially. It includes agreements to quickly link their road and rail connections, promote binational cooperation on environmental protections and public health, and open a permanent facility so divided families can visit each other on a regular basis. Most of the agreements completed proposals first made at their initial summit in Panmunjom last April.

Moon and Kim also agreed to reopen the Gaesong Industrial Complex just north of the DMZ, one of the most enduring symbols of previous eras of détente,, which was closed in 2016 during a period of severe tension. But the joint projects, which will also include tourism projects and a west-coast special economic zone, can only happen “as conditions rip[en],” Moon and Kim said. This was a reference to the US and UN economic sanctions on the North.

“There’s good potential for economic cooperation, but to really obtain these benefits, they have to get out of the sanctions,” Daniel Pinkston, a professor at Troy University in Seoul and an expert on North Korean politics, told The Nation in an interview outside the press center. Pinkston has been highly skeptical that the North will ever give up its weapons, but said the military agreements hold serious promise.

“The two sides agreed to refrain from any action to infiltrate, attack or occupy each other’s area of jurisdiction by any means or method,” the agreement states.

Among other steps, according to an analysis by the Associated Press, the two Koreas agreed to establish “buffer zones” on land and at sea and a “no-fly zone” in the air over the border to prevent the possibility of accidental confrontations.

“There appears to be real movement in confidence-building measures,” said Pinkston. “But can the agreement address issues of weapons of mass destruction? A lot of work remains there.” He noted that Yongbyon—a reactor complex where North Korea extracts plutonium from spent fuel and produces highly enriched uranium for weapons—“is only a piece of the nuclear program. Just closing it is not abandoning that program. Are they willing to trade it off in pieces? I’m not convinced.”

Moon Chung-in, the presidential adviser, seemed to address that concern in his press briefing during the summit. This was “the first time, ever, for Pyongyang to announce its willingness to permanently give up its plutonium- and highly-enriched uranium-producing facilities, which are the foundation of its nuclear weapons,” he said.

The US and UN sanctions, which increased in 2017 as the North tested one nuclear weapon and over a dozen ICBMs, have prevented the two countries from moving forward on new transportation and economic proposals. They also sparked a dispute between Seoul and Washington last month over the two Koreas’ opening of a permanent liaison office in Gaesong.

Seoul and Pyongyang opened it anyway. That was the right move and should not be seen as problematic by the US government, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, told The Nation while traveling from Washington to Seoul on a Korean Air flight last Sunday. “The two Koreas have every right to move ahead like they are, even if people here [in Washington] don’t like it,” he said.

The proposals by the North to close the two missile facilities were designed to get movement on the sanctions, which the United States has insisted must remain in place until the North completely and permanently eliminates its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs.

So was the offer on Yongbyon, which Kim, in the joint declaration, said he would permanently dismantle if “the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.”

That term—“corresponding measures”—was a reference to promises made by President Trump to Kim in Singapore last June to create a new US–North Korean relationship and “build a lasting and stable peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has insisted that Trump follow up on his pledge before it takes further steps on disarmament.

Even though the Koreans left the ball in the US court, the proposals from Moon and Kim were met with immediate approval from President Trump, who tweeted his thanks moments after their joint news conference in Pyongyang. He will meet with Moon on September 25 in New York to discuss the developments and the possibility of a future summit with Kim. In his press conference Thursday, Moon said he would discuss with Trump the idea of declaring an end to the Korean War by the year’s end.

But even as the usual gang of Washington hard-liners, missile-technology experts, and skeptics of the Korean peace process were criticizing the Moon-Kim promises as too little, too late, Pompeo, who has been the North’s chief interlocutor in this year’s negotiations, welcomed the gestures. “On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations,” Pompeo said in a statement issued by the State Department (the DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s formal name).

Pompeo said he had invited his counterpart in the North, Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, to meet in New York at next week’s UN General Assembly, and added that he had invited the North to meet the new US special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna.

“This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” Pompeo said.

The use of the term “transform” was clearly designed to respond to the North Korean concerns that Pompeo and Trump had not fulfilled their pledge in Singapore. “It was not having the peace declaration to offer that led Pompeo to tell Trump to call off the last visit,” Leon Sigal, the author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, reminded The Nation in an e-mail.

On the summit’s final day, Moon and Kim climbed Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula and a symbol to both Koreas of the mythical founding of their 5,000-year-old nation.

This fulfilled a lifetime dream for President Moon, an avid hiker whose family fled North Korea in the early days of the Korean War in 1950. But to many Koreans, the climb up Mount Paektu—a live volcano where Korean guerrillas fighting Japanese colonialism during the 1930s and ’40s often hid out—was also a reminder of their historical struggle for independence from foreign powers.

In a dramatic attempt to restart the Korea peace process, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will meet for the third time in Pyongyang September 18–20.

The summit, announced as North Korea was preparing for massive celebrations Sunday marking its founding in 1948, couldn’t come at a better time. Over the summer, the negotiations Moon and Kim initiated last spring with the Trump administration to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula reached an impasse that is proving difficult to overcome.

The dividing line is Washington’s rejection of a demand from North Korea to bring a formal end to the Korean War, and US insistence that international economic sanctions on the North remain in place until it shows concrete signs of getting rid of its nuclear arsenal.

“We’re not going to give anything until North Korea does what it says” about denuclearizing, Andrea Thompson, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, told reporters on Friday.

But the dispute is not just between the United States and North Korea. A chasm has also opened up between Washington and Seoul that threatens to undercut the bilateral military alliance created in 1953 to fend off another Korean War.

At issue is whether South Korea has the sovereign right to follow through on its plans—codified in the April 27 Panmunjom Declaration signed by Moon and Kim—to make peace within the borders of its own country. This came to a head in August, when the Trump administration, citing US and UN sanctions, expressed opposition to North and South Korean plans to open a liaison office in the Gaesong Industrial Complex just north of the DMZ.

Last week, the Pentagon, acting through the UN Command in Korea that it controls, blocked plans by both Koreas to inspect rail lines in the North that are crucial to their plans for closer economic ties. Gen. Vincent Brooks, the US Commander in Korea, has also expressed reservations over South Korean plans to remove some guard posts from the border with the North as a way to reduce military tensions.

“We have a big problem coming with South Korea,” a US official deeply involved in the Trump administration’s Korea policies told journalist Daniel Sneider in an August 27 article widely quoted in Washington. “It has reached the point where the South Koreans are determined to press ahead. They no longer feel the need to act in parallel with us.” Sneider, a lecturer at Stanford, reported that some officials “even fear the alliance itself may be in jeopardy.”

Meanwhile, inside the think tanks that guide American policy, the pressure is on for South Korea to follow US dictates. “The United States and South Korea must harmonize their approaches to the North Korea problem, to counter coordinated efforts by Kim Jong-un to drive them apart,” Patrick Cronin of the hawkish Center for a New American Security wrote last week.

Comments like these underscore the stark choice facing the two Koreas at this juncture.

Do they move forward together to reconcile and end the Korean War that has divided them for so long, with the United States playing a useful role by supporting a peace process and ending seven decades of hostility toward Pyongyang? Or will South Korea be forced to stick to its American ally, keep the military and economic pressure on North Korea, and possibly spark a deeper military clash in the region?

The Koreas are clearly hoping for the former. On Sunday, in the huge parade marking its 70th anniversary, North Korea didn’t display its ICBMs that are capable of hitting the United States, and instead emphasized Kim’s new focus on economic development. As one analysis in the South Korean media put it, the missiles “appear to have been omitted out of respect for North Korea’s continuing dialogue with the US to break through their deadlock over denuclearization measures and the end-of-war declaration.”

CNN reporter Will Ripley, one of dozens of foreign reporters in Pyongyang to witness the event, noted that the “Mass Games” held after the parade included a “historic nod” to President Moon. “Video footage from Moon and Kim’s inter-Korean summit in April was shown and received rousing applause from the primarily North Korean audience in Pyongyang’s May Day stadium,” he reported.

Meanwhile, during the emergency discussions in Pyongyang last week between Kim and Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security adviser, the North Korean leader expressed his will to “completely remove the danger of armed conflict and horror of war from the Korean peninsula.” He added that, while US-North Korean talks have “suffered recent setbacks,” the North “will continue to trust Trump at this critical juncture.” He also said that he wanted the denuclearization process to be completed by the end of Trump’s first term.

In a surprise development Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that, after making these conciliatory remarks, Kim had sent a “very warm, very positive” letter to Trump asking for another summit meeting. The president, she said, is open to the idea and his staff is “already in the process of coordinating” one. The developments clearly pleased Trump, who is facing perhaps his most severe domestic crisis yet, with high-ranking officials in his own White House turning against him. “Thank you to Chairman Kim,” he tweeted after Kim’s remarks in Pyongyang were published. “We will get it done together!”  

To do that, however, both Trump and Kim will have to make compromises to bridge their differences over the pace and timing of North Korea’s denuclearization.

“It’s a sequencing problem with North Korea right now,” explained Sue Mi Terry to MSNBC. Terry, a former CIA officer at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, consistently supports a hard-line policy. North Korea “wants normalization and a peace regime first before they take active steps towards denuclearization, and we’re saying they need to denuclearize first.”

Former US officials assert that Pyongyang’s basic stance hasn’t changed. “North Korea has returned to the tired demand that what it needs before moving toward denuclearization is some kind of proof that the United States has abandoned its ‘hostile policy,’” Christopher Hill, who led US negotiations with North Korea from 2005 to 2009, declares in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

But as much as Hill wants to ridicule this linkage, North Korea views the US reluctance to embrace a peace agreement as a betrayal of the promises Trump made in Singapore during their June summit. After all, the first two points of the joint declaration in Singapore were to “establish new US-DPRK relations” and “build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.” (The DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is the formal name for North Korea.)

Discerning readers of North Korean state media also point out that a joint declaration ending the war was the clear understanding of North Korea after Singapore. The US government “supported the issue of terminating war and this has already been agreed upon at the DPRK-U.S. summit talks,” North Korea’s KCNA declared in a July 24 dispatch captured by the media site NK News.

So it came as somewhat of a shock to US pundits to learn that Trump had, in fact, promised Kim that he would sign an agreement ending the war. That was confirmed on August 29 by Alex Ward, an enterprising reporter at Vox with good sources inside the White House. “It makes sense why the North Koreans are angry,” one US official told him. “Having Trump promise a peace declaration and then moving the goalposts and making it conditional would be seen as the US reneging on its commitments.”

The US demand to Pyongyang that it dismantle most of its arsenal before the United States signs off on an end to the war “is likely what has led to the current stalemate in negotiations between the two countries—and the increasingly hostile rhetoric from North Korea,” Vox concluded.

Last week, the Moon government reiterated that it disagrees with the US stance. “The position of the South Korean government is that an end-of-war declaration is a political declaration and the first step toward building trust between related countries. North Korea feels the same way,” Chung, Moon’s envoy, said during his September 6 briefing on the upcoming summit.

How the Process Broke Down

The initial indications of a major breakdown in the US–North Korea talks came on August 24, when President Trump abruptly canceled an upcoming trip by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang, saying “we are not making sufficient progress” on denuclearization. A few days later, Trump blamed China and its disagreements with him over trade for the problems with the North, and kept the door open for further negotiations with Kim.

But, in an ominous sign of his own impatience with the process, Trump also suggested that the United States and South Korea might join Japan in military exercises that both he and Kim have called provocative, adding that they might be “far bigger than ever before.” Almost immediately, senior US officials let it be known that Pompeo’s trip was vetoed after he received a “belligerent” letter from Kim’s government that allegedly threatened to restart nuclear and missile tests if the talks broke down.

That was largely a cover story fed to Josh Rogin, a conservative columnist at The Washington Post who is consistently sought out by hard-liners to promote their views of the North as unyielding and untrustworthy. A different story began to emerge when CNN got hold of the letter, which warned that denuclearization talks were “again at stake and may fall apart.” That sounded more like a restating of positions than a “belligerent” threat to go back to a military standoff.

Suh Hoon, Moon’s intelligence chief and South Korea’s primary contact with the Kim government, provided what may be the most accurate summary of what happened. In testimony to the Korean National Assembly, he said the cancellation of Pompeo’s visit “was because the North asked for the adoption of a declaration ending the war as a prerequisite while the U.S. asked for a list of nuclear weapon[s] first.”

But beneath the surface, there was far more going on.

As many South Koreans are beginning to realize, the United States is not all that interested in ending the Korean War or giving the two Koreas room to work things out on their own. President Moon himself spelled out the stakes on August 15, a national holiday in both North and South Korea celebrating Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945.

In a nationally televised speech, Moon made a ringing declaration of his engagement policies with the North and said they were integral to the peace process. “Developments in inter-Korean relations are not the by-effects of progress in the relationship between the North and the United States,” he declared in an unmistakable rebuke to US hard-liners on his plans to open the liaison office in Gaesong. “Rather, advancement in inter-Korean relations is the driving force behind denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

The US response was swift. On August 20, four days before Trump’s White House cited North Korean intransigence in canceling Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang, US news reports cited an unidentified senior US official as saying that the establishment of a liaison office could be a violation of not only UN Security Council sanctions, but also the separate sanctions that Washington unilaterally imposed on Pyongyang.

The official, most likely hard-line National Security Adviser John Bolton or one of his deputies, was quickly contradicted by the Korean government. “Establishing a liaison office is a basic project aimed at easing military tensions and bringing permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Moon spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom told reporters.

But the audacious decision by the US-controlled UN Command to block the North-South rail project brought the divisions into sharp focus. Specifically, the command refused permission for a South Korean train to travel from Seoul and cross the border into the North so technicians from both countries could conduct “a joint inspection on the North Korean stretch of the line between Kaesong and Sinuiju,” which they hope will soon link their countries.

The problem this presented to South Korea was spelled out by Hankyoreh, the progressive daily. “The South Korean government’s position is that the project in question does not represent an area subject to UN or US sanctions against North Korea,” it reported. “Critics have been vocal in proclaiming that Washington’s interference in inter-Korean cooperation efforts to implement the terms of the Apr. 27 Panmunjeom Declaration have reached the point of infringing on sovereignty.”

Kim, knowing Moon’s precarious position with Washington, has come to South Korea’s defense on these issues. Rodong Sinmun, the Workers’ Party newspaper, issued a stinging editorial on September 6, saying the United States is pulling both Koreas’ “hind legs to prevent every (inter-Korean) project, including the opening of the North-South joint liaison office, North-South railway projects, North-South road modernization projects, the reactivation of Kaesong Industrial Complex and resumption of Mount Kumgang tourism.”

Liaison Office Will Open Anyway

The Moon government has returned the favor. A day after Kim met in Pyongyang with Moon’s delegation, South Korea’s foreign ministry directly contradicted US government officials and pundits by welcoming North Korea’s closure of its key nuclear and long-range missile-engine test sites as meaningful steps toward denuclearization.

Kim Jong-un, according to Moon’s envoy, had complained that his steps toward denuclearization, including the recent destruction of a missile testing site, were not being recognized by the United States or the international community. “Given that the steps were voluntary, [the ministry] views them as meaningful ones toward the realization of complete denuclearization,” a South Korean government spokesman told reporters.

A day later, South Korea announced that the North-South liaison office will likely open this week in Gaesong despite the US opposition.

“South and North Korea are now holding discussions on the opening date of the liaison office and other details,” the Unification Ministry said. And on September 7, in an interview with Indonesian reporters, President Moon said that he intends to establish a permanent peace by the end of the year.

“The most basic goal of our policy is that there must never be another war on the Korean Peninsula,” he said. South Korea, he added, “will take all necessary measures not only for the development of the South-North Korean relationship but also for the development of the North Korea-U.S. relationship and acceleration of the denuclearization process.”

The question now is whether the hard-liners in the White House and Washington’s think tanks can be convinced to go along.

Seoul

uly 27 marks the 65th anniversary of the 1953 armistice agreement that ended the ferocious fighting that marked the Korean War. Signed by generals from the United States—representing the UN Command—as well as North Korea and China, it ushered in an uncertain peace that millions of people on both sides of the conflict now hope to extend with a formal treaty ending the war once and for all.
“Nearly 70 years ago…an extremely bloody conflict ravaged the Korean Peninsula,” President Trump declared after his unprecedented summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12. “Countless people died in the conflict, including tens of thousands of brave Americans. Yet, while the armistice was agreed to, the war never ended.… But now we can all have hope that it will soon end. And it will.”

Over a month later, as Trump continues his quest to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear weapons with promises of a peace process, a lifting of sanctions, and economic assistance, five prominent analysts with extensive experience dealing with Pyongyang are looking to that armistice as a vehicle to provide the North with the security guarantees it needs to eliminate its only deterrent against the US military forces arrayed against it in the Asia-Pacific region.

In an article published by the Berkeley-based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability earlier this month, the analysts—four Americans and one Australian—make an audacious proposal for the United States and North Korea to shift from their present status as enemies to virtual allies.

Under their proposal, the two warring countries would become “security partners” in which the North “would be neither an enemy nor an ally, but somewhere in-between, albeit on the cooperative end of the spectrum.” The situation, they say, could be analogous to the US relationship with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Washington and Pyongyang could accomplish this, the analysts argue, by transforming the current armistice agreement into a partnership involving the US and South Korean militaries with Kim Jong-un’s Korean People’s Army.

Such an arrangement would “amend” the mission of the present UN Command—which has been led by the United States since its formation in 1950—changing it into a “post-Armistice role” that would “change how extended deterrence is maintained on the Korean Peninsula, such as where US troops are positioned or how and where [military] exercises are conducted.”

The five analysts also outline ways the “amended” UN Command could engage with the militaries of South and North Korea on joint operations, such as search-and-rescue operations in Korean waters, military training and counterterrorism, management of mine clearance in the demilitarized zone known as the DMZ, and even “participation by a joint South-North force in UN peacekeeping.”

“In short, treating the DPRK as a ‘security partner’ may serve American, allied, and regional security interests better than either ally or enemy,” the paper, published on July 6, concludes (the DPRK, or the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, is North Korea’s formal name).

The paper was written by Morton Halperin, a former Pentagon official in the Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson administrations and a senior adviser to the Open Society Foundations; Peter Hayes, the Australian co-founder and executive director of Nautilus; Thomas Pickering, a former ambassador and US under secretary of state for political affairs; Leon Sigal, a former State Department official who wrote a book about North Korean diplomacy; and Philip Yun, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund, who was a senior adviser on North Korea to former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman.

Hayes, whom (in the interest of full disclosure) I have worked with in the past on investigative projects involving nuclear power and weapons, explained the gist of the Nautilus proposals when we met in late June during a conference on peace and security on Jeju Island in South Korea. He said the idea of using the armistice as a vehicle for a new US–North Korean relationship had been around for a long time, and that he had once discussed a similar proposal in a meeting in Pyongyang with Kim Yong-chol, Kim Jong-un’s top negotiator and the former director of North Korea’s powerful intelligence service.

The opening for Nautilus’s joint proposal may have been the comments made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a week after his meetings in Singapore. Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club in Michigan on June 18, Pompeo offered the intriguing observation that President Trump is “committed to making sure that we alter the armistice agreement [to] provide the security assurances that Chairman Kim needs.”

I asked the State Department to clarify Pompeo’s comments, but only received a statement of principles that clearly reserved any substantial change to the armistice until Kim fulfills his pledge in Singapore to dismantle his nuclear weapons. “The U.S. and its allies are committed to the same goal—the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea, as agreed to by Chairman Kim Jong-un,” the statement for The Nation read. “We committed to the building of a peace mechanism with the goal of replacing the Armistice agreement when North Korea has denuclearized.”

North Korea, too, is anxious to replace the armistice and has been stepping up pressure on Washington to do so. “Ending the current abnormal situation of an armistice and establishing a solid system of peace is a historical task we cannot put off,” Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of Kim’s Workers’ Party, stated Wednesday. The party added that “the adoption of a declaration ending the war will be the first step toward easing tension and establishing a solid system of peace on the Korean Peninsula and is an essential requirement to establish trust between North Korea and the U.S.”

In Seoul, officials with US Forces Korea and the UN Command would not comment. Instead, they referred me to an expert on the armistice, a retired US military officer with more than 30 years of experience in South Korea. He agreed to meet but would only speak on background. Over coffee and tea at a Starbucks in the Korea Press Center downtown, he explained that the armistice was not a complicated document. “It was a cease-fire agreement between warring commanders, and could be abrogated,” he said. “If they sign a peace treaty, then the armistice is off.”

The primary use of the armistice today, he told me, is to recognize the Military Demarcation Line, which marks the boundaries between North and South Korea over land and sea. “You can’t really alter it because there’s nothing to alter,” said the former officer. He wouldn’t comment on the Nautilus proposal. But he said that the DPRK’s current intentions are hard to assess because “they bring something to the table we haven’t seen before.” As for the peace process, he said “it’s a thousand-step process, and we’re at step five.”

Still, the proposal made by the five analysts reflects the views of many diplomats and analysts who believe that North Korea is seeking a completely new relationship with the United States that would end their mutual status as enemy combatants and allow both countries to fully normalize their political and economic relationships. These analysts claim that this has long been the DPRK’s goal in its dealings with past US administrations, going back to the 1994 Agreed Framework with the Clinton administration.

“We have to shift out of our intellectual ruts—the North Koreans are thinking very big steps,” Robert Carlin, a former North Korea analyst for the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told the conference in Jeju where I met Hayes. Carlin, who was part of the US team that negotiated the 1994 agreement during the Clinton administration, argued for a US strategy that aims at creating a long-term relationship of trust (he also said the Clinton agreement was later “murdered” by the Bush administration).

“From the American side, we have to stop focusing like a laser on the concept of denuclearization,” said Carlin. “If we continue to do that, we will trip ourselves up. I get the feeling that this administration realizes that. This is a much broader process; it has a lot more depth and a lot more promise. Denuclearization is not the only thing that needs to move.”

Speaking on the same panel, Glyn Ford, a member of Britain’s Labour Party who has been to the DPRK more than 50 times, said Kim is “looking for a deal that buys him out and keeps him safe. There’s a lot of talk about CVID [complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization], but he’s looking for complete, verifiable, irreversible security guarantees. Not ones that are temporary.”

But the Nautilus proposal goes completely against the grain of most thinking in Washington. Over the past few weeks, North Korea watchers in media and the think-tank world have decided that Trump’s peace initiative with Kim is withering on the vine and ready to be replaced with tougher policies, including military force.

A common theme is that denuclearization must occur before a peace agreement is signed. “Peace and denuclearization can overlap, but shouldn’t until enough [denuclearization] happens first,” Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based fellow with the Center for a New American Security, told me in a Twitter exchange after making those arguments on CNN this week.

The criticism of the Singapore process intensified after Pompeo’s third visit to Pyongyang on July 6-7, when he met again with Kim Yong-chol. The meeting was largely seen as a failure because the North Koreans rejected US demands that it move rapidly to dismantle its nuclear arsenal before receiving any benefits, such as the lifting of sanctions or the security guarantees promised by Pompeo in Singapore.

Although Pompeo declared afterward that he had “made progress on almost all central matters” during his talks, North Korea’s foreign ministry issued a sharp attack on his negotiating position. The US side, Pyongyang said (according to a translation from journalist KJ Noh), had failed to discuss the “wide-ranging, simultaneous, mutual, proactive steps” proposed by Kim during the Singapore summit, including a “public declaration” of the end of the Korean War that would “build a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”

The sharp differences convinced many US analysts that the process is dead. “The United States needs to start working on a Plan B now, or be left with a binary choice between accepting a nuclear North Korea or going to war,” Josh Rogin, an influential Washington Post analyst who is often a conduit for North Korea hard-liners, wrote on July 19.

Rogin’s opinion piece was followed in the Post a few days later with a triple-bylined story arguing that Trump himself “has fumed” over the lack of progress with Kim. “U.S. negotiators have faced stiff resistance from a North Korean team practiced in the art of delay and obfuscation,” the Post team reported. Although the claim of apparent failure was immediately challenged by Trump on Twitter and in interviews, it became the instant meme for experts who have been skeptical about Trump’s outreach from the start.

In particular, the critics cited the DPRK’s alleged failure to follow through on commitments made in Singapore to destroy a missile-engine facility and return the remains of US soldiers killed in northern Korea during the war. Kim “will just give enough to keep this [process] going,” predicted Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a Washington forum on July 23. “[Kim will] make these more cosmetic concessions that the Trump administration can take and call a success.”

That same day, the independent research group 38 North released commercial imagery showing that Kim’s government has, in fact, started dismantling the missile-engine test site.

“Since these facilities are believed to have played an important role in the development of technologies for the North’s intercontinental ballistic missile program, these efforts represent a significant confidence-building measure on the part of North Korea,” the analyst, Joseph Bermudez Jr., concluded. Pompeo agreed with that assessment at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. The administration, he said, is “tracking Kim’s commitments on the missile-engine site. They’re beginning to dismantle that. It’s a step forward.”

The day before, on July 24, CNN reported that Defense Department officials would soon fly to the North to retrieve US remains and take them to a US military base in South Korea for examination and identification. That, too, was verified by Pompeo. “They reaffirmed their commitment to return remains they have in their possession,” he said (sure enough, on Friday a US military plane transported the remains of 55 American soldiers from the North Korean port city of Wonsan to Osan Air Base in South Korea). “It’s not fair to characterize [the North Koreans] as walking back commitments,” Pompeo said in the hearing. But “there’s an awful long way to go and a great deal of work to that will be highly contested,” he admitted.

In response to the pessimism expressed in the Post stories, Leon Sigal, one of the authors of the Nautilus report, pointed to recent comments by the US Commander in Korea, Gen. Vincent Brooks, challenging critics who say no progress has been made with North Korea. Brooks “noted that the peninsula had ‘gone now 235 days without a provocation,’ and that he had seen a slowdown in the operating tempo of North Korean armed forces,” Sigal reported in a commentary for 38 North. Brooks, he added, “emphasized that building trust was not a job for the North Koreans alone.”

“That’s called diplomatic give-and-take,” Sigal concluded, “and whatever the impatience in some parts of Washington, it will take time.”

Seoul

ust as I arrived in South Korea’s capital to report on the Korea peace process after Singapore on the last day of June, my Twitter feed exploded with outraged comments about a new US intelligence study of North Korea that was leaked to NBC News.

North Korea, according to three NBC reporters and “more than a dozen” unnamed US officials familiar with the new assessment, has reportedly increased production of fuel for its nuclear weapons “at multiple secret sites” and “may try to hide those facilities” in its upcoming talks with the Trump administration. NBC’s exclusive was quickly updated by The Washington Post, first under the provocative headline “North Korea plotting to deceive U.S. on nuclear program” on its opening page.

Basing its report on four anonymous officials, the Post said the classified report was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the weeks after the June 12 Singapore summit. The DIA is the prime intelligence-collection agency for the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and oversees the analysis of data provided by military satellites and the US Air Force on North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities.

“Specifically, the DIA has concluded that North Korean officials are exploring ways to deceive Washington about the number of nuclear warheads and missiles, and the types and numbers of facilities they have, believing that the United States is not aware of the full range of their activities,” the Post reported. Pointedly, neither the Pentagon nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all US spying, would comment for its story.

Critics of President Trump’s approach to North Korea and various “experts” immediately seized on the reports as examples of Kim Jong-un’s perfidy and Trump’s poor negotiating skills.

“Now we learn there is ‘absolutely unequivocal evidence’ Kim Jong Un is deceiving us,” Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, tweeted. “The observed activity appears inconsistent with a North Korean intent to abandon its nuclear weapons programs,” Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, told NBC.

But it’s hard to see how analysts could leap to such conclusions without actually reading the DIA report and digesting its underlying intelligence.

Leon Sigal, the director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project in New York and the author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, said the new assessment may have been stating the obvious about the negotiations that were launched in Singapore by Trump and Kim but have yet to begin in earnest. North Korea, he told The Nation by e-mail, “is continuing to make fissible material” used in nuclear bombs, a fact that he said should not be a surprise.

“As some of us have been saying, the most urgent step is to negotiate reciprocal steps to halt that production and then to induce them to disclose the location of all such sites,” Sigal said. “How much they have made is the main difference among US agencies. So we start by getting them to declare how much Pu [plutonium] and HEU [highly enriched uranium] they’ve made and how many nukes they have. Then comes the long, hard work to verify that.”

Even John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national-security adviser, seemed to agree with that analysis. In an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, he downplayed its conclusion that North Korea might be concealing parts of its weapons program, and characterized the internal debate within the administration as an inevitable aspect of the highly unusual talks Trump has launched with North Korea.

“A series of reports [that] things are going better [or] things are not going well, they are concealing this, they’re not concealing that…doesn’t serve the purpose of advancing the negotiations,” he said. Kim Jong-un, he added, “was very emphatic several times in Singapore he was different from prior regimes. Now we’ll let their actions speak for themselves.” He told CBS that the Trump administration would push North Korea to dismantle its nuclear and missile programs within a year. Few analysts believe that time frame is realistic, however.

On Sunday, in a dispatch from Seoul, The Wall Street Journal added to the barrage of negative stories. It cited two new reports from private US research organizations claiming that Pyongyang was “completing a major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant” and therefore “pushing ahead with weapons programs even as the U.S. pressures it to abandon them.”

Again, that conclusion appeared difficult to justify. The new research was based exclusively on overhead imagery of the exterior of the plant that could not possibly identify what was going on inside the missile facility—a point left out of the narratives that immediately spread on social media. A US official who serves as a point-person in Seoul for US policy on North Korea was not available for comment. “We regret that Embassy Seoul is unable to conduct an interview at this time,” a US public affairs officer told The Nation.

The dueling accounts were reminiscent of the role played by the US media in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when anonymous intelligence experts quoted by The New York Times and elsewhere helped build the case for a US invasion. And for NBC, the story was a continuation of the extremely alarmist style of reporting about Kim Jong-un it has adopted since the latest North Korea crisis began in the spring of 2017.

Moreover, given the widespread acceptance of the leaked intelligence report, the DIA’s sinister conclusions indicated that the stories were a clear attempt by anonymous officials in Washington to derail a negotiating process they fundamentally disagree with. Another motivation may have been to persuade the public that Kim has already broken the terms of the broad and somewhat vague agreement he signed with President Trump in Singapore on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

If that’s the case, both the intelligence leakers and their media enablers could be deliberately deceiving the public about the actual status of the US–North Korea talks. They are set to begin shortly after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visits Pyongyang for the third time on July 5.

“There are no solid agreements to breach at this point,” a diplomatic troubleshooter in Seoul who meets regularly with US and Korean officials told The Nation. “We haven’t even gotten to the stage of North Korea making a declaration” of its weapons or its plutonium and uranium facilities. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his position.

The troubleshooter, whose contacts in Korea go back many years, said that the US and North Korean intelligence officials who have been handling bilateral talks since they began in March will soon be replaced by diplomats, including Pompeo and North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho. They will seek to carry out the joint pledge by both sides in Singapore to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” To Kim Jong-un, he said, that means a verification scheme that also includes South Korea and the many US bases there.

“There are no obligations until there’s an agreement in place covering nuclear material on both sides of the DMZ,” he told me over lunch at a Seoul hotel. “Why should they agree until it covers both halves of the Korean Peninsula?” He pointed out that, while then–President George H.W. Bush withdrew US-controlled tactical nuclear weapons from the South in 1991, “North Korea never verified it.”

The North might also push for any agreement to include the US nuclear umbrella over the South, including US nuclear-armed ships and warplanes in the Northeast Asia region. “Let’s have the agenda, and then decide who’s violating it or not,” he said.

But meanwhile, the status quo for both the North (with its small nuclear arsenal and powerful ICBMs) and the United States (with its 30,000 troops in South Korea and a massive, nuclear-armed military force in the Asia region) remains in play until both sides reach an agreement on a peace and disarmament process. As an example of the continuation of US policies, last Friday US and South Korean military officials formally opened America’s largest overseas military base, at Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, about 80 miles from Seoul.

With this new base, US Forces Korea “will remain the living proof of the American commitment to the [US–South Korean] alliance,” USFK commander Gen. Vincent Brooks declared. In a similar vein, in late June the White House said it would extend a standing executive order declaring a national emergency over North Korea’s nuclear threat to the United States.

Given the fact that both Kim and Trump have also taken steps to get talks going—through the North’s freeze on its testing and the US and South Korean cancellation of three upcoming military exercises—it appears that many of the analysts and reporters writing about Korea fail to understand that the Trump-Kim summit marked only the beginning of a process under which North Korea has pledged to work toward denuclearization in return for a new relationship with the United States.

Both Pompeo and Trump have alluded to that kind of deal in recent months, and the secretary of state underscored US intentions to make a fundamental change in US–North Korean relations when he met with Kim in May. The North has reciprocated, said the Seoul troubleshooter. “I can confirm that the North Koreans have talked about an entirely new arrangement based on new security guarantees,” he told The Nation.

Glyn Ford, a member of the British Labour Party and a former member of the European Parliament, addressed that issue at an international forum on Jeju Island last week. The best way for the United States to get the North to move on denuclearization, he said, is to make some “front-loading” gestures reassuring Kim that the US “hostile policy” is no longer operative, he argued.

“Frankly, he doesn’t want to give up his nuclear weapons and his nuclear deterrent, but he can’t keep both,” said Ford, who has made over 50 trips to North Korea. “So he’s looking for a deal that makes him safe. There’s a lot of talk about CVID [complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization],” he added. “Kim’s looking for CVIS—complete, verifiable irreversible security guarantees. Not ones that are temporary.”

Ironically, Trump himself alluded to the top-secret US intelligence capabilities that will be deployed to verify North Korea’s steps toward denuclearization in his now-famous press conference in Singapore on June 12.

Less than two hours after his meeting with Kim, Trump said the North Korean leader had assured him that he would soon close a major “missile-engine testing site” that the United States knows about “because of the heat.” Trump added, “It’s incredible the equipment we have, to be honest with you.” Although few analysts outside of US intelligence noticed, his words were an allusion to a highly classified form of spying known as measurement and signature intelligence, or MASINT.

As I explained in my 2008 book Spies for Hire, MASINT “uses infrared heat imaging, acoustic signatures, seismic data and other information picked up by air and ground sensors to ‘sniff’ for things like weapons tests and nuclear power activity that other countries want to hide from the United States.” The collection of such data is managed by the DIA and the Air Force Technical Applications Center, downloaded to US technical collection sites such as the huge US station in Pine Gap, Australia, and then analyzed and passed on to military officers and national leaders.

MASINT is used extensively by the CIA as a tool in arms control and, more recently, in tracking the use of IEDs and other weapons by insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan (like most of US intelligence, it’s also highly privatized, with secretive companies like Scitor, a unit of military giant SAIC, doing much of the analysis).

On June 21, Defense News reported from Washington that the Air Force has been flying two “WC-135 Constant Phoenix nuke-sniffing planes” for the collection mission around North Korea. These planes, which were first deployed near the peninsula last September, will soon by augmented by a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft equipped with a $5 million modular kit “that allows it to detect nuclear particles in the atmosphere,” the publication said.

The planes fly out of Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa. When a Defense News reporter, Valerie Insinna, visited the base last February, “the words ‘North Korea’ often seemed like the elephant in the room,” she wrote. Because “the capabilities of all these aircraft are highly classified,” leaders “shied away from talking about the country, and when asked explicit questions about North Korea, avoided mentioning the country by name in responses.”

In an interview before the Singapore summit with The Nation, Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA nonproliferation analyst who was a special envoy to the Six-Party Talks with North Korea during the George W. Bush administration, said “sniffing” technologies would be extremely useful once a verification process begins. “When you have an arms-control agreement, you can bring a lot of technology into the picture,” he said. “You have sensors, plus you have other means.” The combination “can be pretty comprehensive,” he added.

But technologies such as MASINT must be augmented by human intelligence, Robert Carlin, a former analyst of North Korea for the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, told The Nation. He visited the North many times as a senior policy adviser to the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, formed as a result of the 1994 Agreed Framework between the Clinton administration and the North’s former leader, Kim Jong-il.

“What will be equally, and in some sense even more, important” than overhead surveillance “will be the observers on the ground,” Carlin said. “Satellite and other space-based platforms require human analysis to make sense of the data. These people [who do the analysis] are experts. The best of them are very, very good. But that does not rule out the possibility of error, and I have seen some of that in the past. Observers on the ground, trained inspectors, can see what satellites cannot. They can interact with local technicians, engineers, and scientists.”

But as US analysts consider the verification process, he added, they must realize the differences with Iraq, “where we had unfettered access.” North Korea, he pointed out, “is a sovereign state, not a conquered country. We may get some or even much of the access we feel we need to gain confidence about steps the North says it has taken, but we are unlikely to get everything we think we must have, and almost certainly not on the timeline we think we need it.”

Verification, he concluded, “is going to have to be balanced against the North’s insistence on improvements in US-DPRK relations. That’s not impossible to achieve, though it takes a great deal of persistence and tactical prowess.” (The DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is the official name for North Korea.)

Carlin, like Ford, was one of many speakers to address the Korea peace process at the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity. For three days, analysts and former government officials from South Korea, Japan, China, Europe, and the United States shared a broad consensus that the negotiation process triggered by the Singapore accords is proceeding apace, and that they expect North Korea will soon unveil the steps it is prepared to take to keep the talks on track.

Singapore “was quite meaningful and significant” because it “demonstrated [Kim’s] will for denuclearization” and began at “the highest levels” of leadership, Baek Jong Chun, a former South Korean national-security adviser, told one session. That’s important, added Ning Fukui, China’s special representative for Korean affairs, because the summit shattered the hostility that has characterized US–North Korean relations since the end of the Korean War.

Kim and Trump “met each other and talked peace-building,” he said. “That’s huge progress by itself.”

Singapore

t was an electrifying sight that captured the imagination of millions of people living on the crisis-weary Korean Peninsula but sent many Americans spinning into paroxysms of anger and cynicism, depending on their politics and knowledge of the rocky history of US relations with North and South Korea.

On Tuesday, President Trump and Kim Jong-un met and shook hands on Singapore’s resort island of Sentosa, curbing decades of deep and bitter hostility between the two countries and possibly opening a new chapter for the United States in East Asia. Afterward, Trump even boasted that he had created a “special bond” with the North Korean dictator.

The unprecedented meeting was the climax of months of intensive negotiations that began in earnest in March, when Kim, through the mediation of South Korean President Moon Jae-in, unexpectedly invited Trump to meet and settle their vast differences. As their initial encounter began, Trump declared that times had changed—irrevocably.

“I think we will have a terrific relationship,” Trump predicted as he and Kim took a break after their initial handshake. With considerable understatement, Kim responded. “It was not easy to get here,” he said. “There were obstacles, but we overcame them to be here.” His words might have sounded trite, but they underscored the long and complicated road the North Korean dictator and the US president have come.

Less than a year ago, Kim was busy building a mighty nuclear and missile deterrent and threatening to use it if North Korea’s sovereignty was compromised, while Trump was coldly informing the world that he was ready to unleash “fire and fury” to “totally destroy North Korea” if its threats continued. But by June 12, all that was forgotten.

After 45 minutes of alone time with their interpreters, Trump and Kim gathered their closest advisers and aides for a two-hour discussion about denuclearization and other critical issues. Then, after a friendly luncheon at the swank Capella Hotel, the two men reconvened to sign a document in which the US and the DPRK (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s formal name) mapped out a four-part plan to make the peace and establish a new relationship.

The “joint statement” included a pledge to build “a lasting and robust peace regime on the Korean Peninsula” and reaffirmed the DPRK’s commitment, made in Kim’s April 27 “Panmunjom Declaration” with President Moon, to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” In a last-minute addition, the statement also committed each side to restart a project abandoned years ago to jointly recover the remains of US soldiers killed and missing in action during the Korean War of 1950 to 1953.

Speaking to reporters later in the day, Trump said the agreement was the first step in a protracted set of negotiations that will begin immediately and be led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “as we develop a certain trust” with the DPRK. “We’re going to have a lot of people there, and we’re going to be working with them on a lot of other things,” he said. “But this is complete denuclearization of North Korea, and it will be verified.”

As the proceedings unfolded in Singapore, South Koreans throughout the country stopped what they were doing to watch. “This is the starting point for the two countries, which have been enemies for the past 70 years, to begin reconciliation,” Park Jung-eun, the secretary general of the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, an influential progressive coalition, told Yonhap News. “This will be a historic day leading to the end of the Korean War.”

President Moon, in a statement released just after the summit ended, praised both leaders for making a commitment to peace. “The June 12 Sentosa Agreement will be recorded as a historic event that has helped break down the last remaining Cold War legacy on earth,” he said. But, in a note of caution, he added that “this is just a beginning and there may be many difficulties ahead, but we will never go back to the past again and never give up on this bold journey.”

Citizen groups in both South Korea and the United States were pleased with the outcome. “The very fact that the top leaders of North Korea and the U.S…sat together in one place and shared dialogue is historic and signals a new era in which peace on the Korean Peninsula is possible,” the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union (KPTU), one of South Korea’s largest trade unions, said in a statement released on Wednesday.

“The summit, and the high-level exchanges that preceded it, provide strong indication that Kim has made a fundamental shift in North Korea’s approach to the world,” Daniel Jasper of the American Friends Service Committee told The Nation. AFSC has years of experience in North Korea and in May was granted an exception to the US travel ban in order to send a humanitarian mission to the country.

“One major takeaway from our delegation was that it’s clear there was an internal North Korean decision made to engage with the international community beginning around the Olympics,” Jasper added. “Having recently spoken to ordinary North Koreans, I can see that effective cooperation is inspiring optimism and confidence on both sides of the Korean Peninsula.”

But, to the surprise of many observers, including backers of US-DPRK engagement, the statement did not include a clear timeline for North Korea’s disarmament, nor did it provide details of how the US government would monitor and verify the North’s compliance with its commitment to get rid of its nuclear bombs, weapons facilities, and missile-production sites.

“We cannot help but feel some disappointment and anxiety about the fact that the joint statement does not contain an agreement on concrete measures towards the establishment of a peace regime and the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,” the Korean transport union said in its statement.

Suzanne DiMaggio, a negotiating expert at New America, noted on Twitter that the Trump-Kim document “is a bare bones statement of principles. I hope it will serve as a starting point for serious sustained negotiations.” Joseph Yun, who served until March as the Trump administration’s special representative for North Korea, said the agreement was vague. “To me, it was quite disappointing that we really did not put on paper any way that would test the seriousness of Kim Jong Un,” he told The Washington Post.

Leon Sigal, a former State Department official and editorial writer for The New York Times who wrote a history of the 1994 Korean nuclear crisis, disagreed that the agreement let the DPRK off the hook. “I find that kind of ludicrous, considering that both leaders signed it, which hasn’t happened before,” he told The Nation. On the other hand, “we don’t know what details have been worked out,” he added. “Much more will be needed.” And he wondered: “Was there an as-yet-unannounced reciprocal step?”

The apparent lack of specificity was a change from the pledge made by Pompeo the day before the summit. In a press conference at the White House press room at the Marriott, he said that the “ultimate objective” of the US government was the “complete and verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” or CVID for short.

Pompeo also emphasized that the Trump administration would insist on stronger verification systems than in earlier agreements with the DPRK. “The ‘V’ [in CVID] matters,” he said. “We’re going to ensure that we set up a system sufficiently robust that we’re able to verify these outcomes.”

He also said that Trump was ready to provide “unique” security assurances to the DPRK that the United States had never offered before. Exactly what he meant by that was made clear by Trump in his press conference, which he staged shortly after Kim and his entourage departed from the island.

In a stunning announcement that reportedly caught his own aides by surprise, Trump said he would cancel the joint US–South Korean military exercises, which have long been seen by the North as a direct threat to its existence and provided some of the justification for its nuclear program.

“We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should,” he said. “Plus,” he added, “I think it’s very provocative.”

His declaration apparently surprised the Moon government and its military, which hastily put out a statement saying “there still is a need to find out the exact meaning and intention of President Trump’s remarks.” On Wednesday, Moon’s Blue House said it would agree with the suspension “as long as serious discussions are being held” between the US and the DPRK “for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and establishment of peace.”

In any case, the termination of the exercises seemed to go a long way toward convincing the North that Trump has abandoned what Pyongyang calls America’s “hostile policy.” The DPRK itself acknowledged that in an article in its state media that was unprecedented in the detail it offered on the summit.

Noting Trump’s intention to halt the joint military drills, “which the DPRK side regards as provocation,” the statement added that “if the US side takes genuine measures for building trust in order to improve the DPRK-US relationship, the DPRK, too, can continue to take additional good-will measures of next stage commensurate with them.”

ut Trump’s ending of the drills, his newfound friendship with Kim, and the perception that the agreement with the North lacked specifics infuriated US politicians and pundits.

Even as the first images flashed across the world of Trump and Kim shaking hands against the unusual background of US and DPRK flags flapping together, social media and op-ed sections of media sites were filled with denunciations of Trump. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate led the attack.

“In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” charged House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Senate minority leader Charles Schumer, who last week warned that the Democrats might oppose any agreement that didn’t include the now-famous CVID commitment, said on the Senate floor that Trump had “legitimized a brutal dictator.” 

Conservative columnists had a field day. “The spectacle of the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un on equal footing with the president of the United States—each country’s flag represented, a supposedly ‘normal’ diplomatic exchange between two nuclear powers—was enough to turn democracy lovers’ stomachs,” Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Post. Similar analyses were posted all day on Twitter.

Yet even Victor Cha, the veteran hard-liner and former Bush administration official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, thought it was a decent agreement. “Despite its many flaws, the Singapore summit represents the start of a diplomatic process that takes us away from the brink of war,” Cha wrote in The New York Times on Tuesday. “North Korea will not be testing any more missiles or nuclear bombs while the diplomacy continues, and the talks led by Mr. Pompeo will hopefully make progress toward stopping the world’s worst runaway nuclear program.”

The contrast between Asian and US perceptions of the summit and the view from the United States was apparent from the moment I arrived in Singapore.

I watched the initial hours of the Trump-Kim encounter from the International Media Center in downtown Singapore, where over 2,500 reporters from around the world had gathered to cover the summit. As the meeting began, everyone in the huge room seemed mesmerized at the unusual site of the tall American president grasping the shoulder of the younger, and much shorter, Kim.

The mood was electric, and the reporters from Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, France, and many other countries seemed genuinely excited about the prospects of peace in Korea. The feeling of camaraderie in covering a historic event was palpable; frequently during my two days there, reporters from one country could be seen interviewing crews from another.

At the nearby White House press center at the Marriott, the atmosphere was far more subdued. There, the established press corps from CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major outlets seemed interested only in how the summit might affect Trump and his political fortunes, and had little interest in the enormous impact of a peace settlement on South Korea.

At one point on Monday afternoon, as the room waited for Pompeo to arrive, I observed a senior Times reporter in deep conversation with his fellow reporters from ABC News and the Post. As they laughed about the next day’s expected encounter between Trump and Kim, the Timesman joked that he was “covering the Neville Chamberlain summit”—a reference to the British diplomat’s disastrous encounter with Adolf Hitler just before World War II that’s considered a symbol of appeasement the world over. To South Korea, however, the peace talks with North Korea are a matter of life and death.

The lack of interest by the US press corps in how the talks would affect South Koreans was underscored during the press conference with Trump. About half the questions from the White House crew focused on the wisdom of a US president meeting with a dictator—as if this had never occurred before—or how the North Korea talks might affect other aspects of US foreign relations.

About halfway through the hour-long event, a Korean reporter started shouting “South Korea! South Korea!” to divert the discussion back to the impact on his country. Eventually, Trump recognized a woman from Arirang News, who brought the issue home by asking if Trump would be speaking soon to President Moon (yes) and if he was optimistic about the prospects of a peace treaty (yes again).

Watching the spectacle from Seoul on CNN, Seth Mountain, an American teacher and musician, told me that he and his Korean friends found the press behavior insulting. “Nearly every question presupposes a US right to dominate Korea and decide its fate,” he told me in a Facebook message. Media critic Adam Johnson, a sometime contributor to The Nation, had a similar reaction after watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC rip into Trump’s cancellation of the US–South Korean war games.

“Complete, categorical erasure of South Koreans and South Korean left,” he tweeted. “The easiest, cheapest NatSec-flattering banality. Totally partisan myopia.” That about summarizes the US coverage of what may turn out to be the most important diplomatic achievement of the Trump years.

Despite some concerns about the lack of specificity in the agreement, Christine Ahn, the founder and international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, was optimistic about the principles laid out in the US–North Korean document.

“The compass has been set, now it is time to ensure that these principles are followed through with concrete action, and this is where it is crucial for civil society, especially women’s groups, [to] step in,” she said. Clearly, both the Trump administration and the peace movement have their work cut out for them.

But as Trump’s plane from Singapore was landing in Washington on Wednesday morning, the president was already declaring victory. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he tweeted from Air Force One. “Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!” For this president, apparently there is no looking back.

Sometime after 9 am on June 12, at the swank Capella Hotel on Singapore’s Sentosa Island, President Donald Trump will shake hands with Chairman Kim Jong-un, the youthful dictator of North Korea. Their symbolic gesture will shatter decades of hostility between the United States and the communist state and—if all goes well—usher in a new era of peace in Korea and Northeast Asia.

“The summit is all ready to go,” Trump announced Thursday at the White House. “We’ve been preparing for a long time.” He said the summit meetings will be “very fruitful,” but must end with Kim agreeing to disarm. “They have to de-nuke,” he insisted. “If they don’t denuclearize, that will not be acceptable.”

The unprecedented meeting is the direct result of a diplomatic initiative Kim launched in January with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. It culminated on April 27 with a joint declaration to end “the Cold War relic of division and confrontation” through the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. In March, Kim’s offer to meet Trump was conveyed by senior South Korean officials, making Moon a mediator between Washington and Kim’s government in Pyongyang.

“This isn’t a charm offensive, this isn’t some sort of tactical trick,” Joel Wit, a former US negotiator with North Korea, said in response to critics who claim Trump and Moon are being “played” by Kim Jong-un. “There is enormous momentum in Pyongyang behind what they’re doing.” Wit, who is a senior fellow and director of 38 North, a research institute in Washington, spoke this week at a press briefing sponsored by the Stimson Center.

A likely outcome of the Trump-Kim encounter—which is already being called “the summit of the century”—is a joint declaration ending the state of war and transforming the 1953 armistice that ended the fighting into a permanent peace treaty. That would set the stage for an agreement to end North Korea’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, which the United States has viewed for years as a strategic threat. “We could sign an agreement” to end the war, Trump said Thursday. “We’re looking at it.”

For the summit to be a success, however, the Trump administration expects North Korea to announce a firm timetable for disarmament and publicly commit to an international system of verification. In return, Washington is apparently prepared to lift economic sanctions and agree to the full normalization of political and economic relations that North Korea has long sought with the United States.

“The President recognizes that North Korea has great potential, and he looks forward to a day when sanctions on the [North] can begin to be removed,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters at the White House Thursday. “However, that cannot happen until [North Korea] completely and verifiably eliminates its weapons of mass destruction programs.” Once it does, he said last week, “We envision a strong, connected, and secure, prosperous North Korea that maintains its cultural heritage but is integrated into the community of nations.”

The possibilities of a peace agreement, and the benefits it would bring to both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, have captivated Koreans all over the world. “It’s time to declare an end to the Korean War and replace the armistice with a peace treaty to build a stable and lasting peace system on the Korean Peninsula,” a coalition of Korean American groups said in a joint “statement of unity” published on Thursday. “Only a peace treaty will prevent further threats of nuclear and conventional war on the Korean Peninsula.”

But Trump’s decision to meet with Kim has been greeted with skepticism and even derision in some quarters of the US foreign-policy establishment. On June 4, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) issued a harsh letter to Trump indicating that the president could face serious opposition in Congress if he offers concessions before North Korea shows that it has ended its nuclear and missile program.

The letter—signed by seven leading Democrats, including Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Patrick Leahy of Vermont—demands that North Korea dismantle and remove “all [its] nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons” before getting anything in return. “Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” the senators wrote.

Hankyoreh, South Korea’s only progressive daily, expressed shock at the letter’s hostile tone. “These are largely the same as the demands made by US National Security Advisor John Bolton and other hard-liners in the Trump administration,” it noted, correctly. The Democrats’ preemptive and pointed antipathy toward Trump’s potential settlement seems an indication that he may face congressional opposition to any agreement that could be reached in Singapore—ominously mirroring what happened to President Clinton’s Agreed Framework in 1994, under which the North froze its nuclear-development program for nearly 12 years.

But many Americans with expertise in diplomacy and North Korean strategy applaud Trump’s moves. “I really think this is a big deal, and I don’t think they’re getting enough credit for the fact that the administration and the president have up-ended this whole notion that engagement with an adversary is a reward and it should be avoided at all costs,” Suzanne DiMaggio, a negotiator who meets regularly with North Korean diplomats, told a media briefing this week in Washington.

“Instead, they’ve made it clear that meeting with an adversary, probably our greatest adversary at the moment, at least in the president’s mind, is not viewed as a concession,” said DiMaggio, who was the subject of a Nation profile last year. “So, this is a welcome turn to diplomacy, to resolve the whole range of issues we have with Pyongyang.”

The outcome, however, is far from certain. Despite strong statements of intent from both sides to resolve their 70-year standoff, there is still a considerable gap between the US demands for Kim to rapidly disarm and North Korea’s desire for an end to what it defines as America’s “hostile policy.”

To the North, that policy encompasses the US nuclear weapons carried on its armada of warships and bombers in the Asia region; the biting sanctions imposed on North Korea that threaten Kim’s desire to shift from military spending to the economy; and annual military exercises in which US and South Korea forces train for contingencies such as a retaliatory invasion of North Korea.

Moreover, getting here hasn’t been easy. Two weeks ago, Trump angrily canceled the summit after a scathing North Korean attack on Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence for proposing a Libya-style denuclearization plan that the North sees as a thinly disguised pitch for regime change. But the summit was quickly rescheduled after Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s vice minister of foreign affairs, issued a conciliatory statement to Trump and Chairman Kim, in a hastily called meeting with Moon, pledged again his desire for denuclearization.

But, in a sign of the deep division inside the administration, CNN reported on June 5 that State Department officials now believe that Bolton, with his Libya comments, was trying to “deliberately disrupt” the North Korea talks. According to the Los Angeles Times, Trump “told associates in private that he was furious with Bolton for his choice of words and blamed him for spooking the North Koreans.”

With the hard-liners possibly out of the way, Trump now has a chance to accomplish what no other US president has been able to do for over three decades: convince North Korea to permanently end its nuclear weapons program by forging a new diplomatic relationship with the same country the United States nearly destroyed during the Korean War. That violent history seems to have grabbed the president’s imagination, and driven some of his interest in changing it going forward.

“You’re talking about years of hostility; years of problems; years of, really, hatred,” he declared last week after meeting at the White House with Kim Yong-chol, North Korean President Kim’s top adviser and a former spy chief.

Not surprisingly, Bolton wasn’t at that meeting—an early hint of Trump’s unhappiness with his national-security adviser (Bolton will be in Singapore, however, along with Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Secretary of State Pompeo. Also expected there, according to Bloomberg, will be Andrew Kim, the CIA’s top expert on Korea, and Allison Hooker of the National Security Council, who have both had extensive interactions with the Kim government in summit preparations).

Trump’s meeting with Kim Yong-chol marked the first time in 18 years that a senior North Korean official was allowed to visit Washington. For the previous two days, he’d been in New York hammering out final details for the summit with Pompeo, who has now visited Pyongyang twice. Afterwards, Pompeo spelled out clearly what he and Trump would seek to accomplish. “The United States objective is very consistent and well known: the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” he said.

Those meetings brought the two governments together on one point: Both have scaled back expectations from a “big bang” approach, where the entire agreement would be signed, sealed, and delivered before the two leaders went home to their respective capitals. Instead, they jointly view Singapore as the start of a protracted series of negotiations ending, in the US view, with a final agreement on denuclearization.

The summit “will be a beginning,” Trump told reporters last week. “I’ve never said it happens in one meeting.” There is also talk of a follow-up summit, perhaps in Mar-a-Lago in Florida. (“I think it would be well-received,” Trump said on Thursday. “I think he will look at it very favorably.”)

North Korea has also expressed a strong desire for a step-by-step process. “The first meeting [with Trump] would not solve all, but solving even one at a time in a phased way would make the relations get better rather than making them get worse,” North Korea’s Kim Kye Gwan said in the May 25 statement that put the summit back on track.

Ambassador Robert Gallucci, who was the chief US negotiator with North Korea in 1994, agreed with this process at the 38 North briefing this week. “Those of us who have been involved in negotiations know everything doesn’t happen all at once,” he said. “It’s going to happen over a period of time.”

But this step-by-step approach—which is strongly endorsed by President Moon—has drawn sharp criticism from Washington hawks. For the most part, the think-tank intelligentsia and North Korea “experts” believe that an agreement to end the war would be premature if it comes before Kim Jong-un has completely, and irreversibly, denuclearized.

The most prominent of those critics has been Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies—the man Trump almost appointed to be US ambassador to South Korea just a few months ago. Cha set his preferred tone on June 1, tweeting that South Koreans “are moving too fast” on a peace treaty and are thus “trying to box US in.” He repeated this idea on Tuesday morning in testimony before Congress, and his line that a peace agreement is premature without denuclearization was echoed on several of last Sunday’s talk shows.

On CBS, Jung Pak, a Korean-American former CIA officer who analyzes North Korea for the Brookings Institution, described a peace agreement as a “shiny object” that should not be the focus of the initial talks. “We have to remember that we can’t have peace on the Korean Peninsula without denuclearization of North Korea, and that peace without denuclearization is going to be a fake peace,” she said on Face the Nation.

But DiMaggio, who knows the North Koreans well, said it’s important for the United States to understand the views of people who inhabit the divided country.

“I’m always amazed by the pushback to a peace treaty,” she told The Nation on Thursday. “It’s what the Korean people want. The idea of a declaration, publicly together, ending the war” is “not a major concession,” she said. The memories of the war for the North Korean diplomats she knows are visceral, she added. “It consumes them. This is a war they have continued to live.”

The Ploughshares Fund, the peace group that sponsored DiMaggio’s briefing, urged the administration to take a long-term approach to North Korea. The summit “would be a success if North Korea agrees to eventual, phased denuclearization in exchange for phased economic, political and security incentives,” the organization said a statement released Thursday afternoon.

“Complete denuclearization will take time,” Ploughshares continued, “the physical process of eliminating the North’s nuclear and missile arsenal and infrastructure would take years, as would the political process of building the necessary confidence between the parties. All told, this process may take five years or more.”

Given the impatience in Washington with Trump’s policies, that could be a tall order. But whatever Trump and Kim decide in Singapore, the highest-level talks in US-North Korean history will be a milestone for two countries that have been locked in conflict since North Korea was founded as a separate state in 1948. Democratic hawks and think-tank militants may not like that engagement process, but many Americans, along with millions of people in Korea and around the world, are breathing a sigh of relief that the talks are happening at all.

Tuesday, May 22, was a big day for the Koreas in Washington. Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s famous peace-making president, was in town, meeting one-on-one with President Trump on a rescue mission to save his June 12 summit with Kim Jong-un and keep Moon’s dream alive for a historic peace settlement in Korea. Later, Moon was the guest of honor at a ceremony marking 136 years of US-Korean friendship.

But his mission failed, and now that relationship is being tested like never before.

On Thursday morning, May 24, The Washington Post reported breaking news from the White House: “Trump cancels summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.”

In a letter to Kim filled with mixed messages of concern and confrontation, Trump said the summit with North Korea, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, was off.

“Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed” in recent statements from Pyongyang, “I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting,” Trump wrote. What set him off was a blistering polemic published Wednesday night by Choe Son-hui, a North Korean vice foreign minister well-known to US officials and negotiators.

Choe, who is reportedly close to Kim Jong-un, criticized Vice President Mike Pence for his recent warning on Fox News that North Korea could end up like Libya—a state broken by a US-led regime-change operation—if it fails to cut a deal with Trump ending its nuclear-weapons program.

“As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice-president,” Choe wrote. “Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.” It was the third statement from North Korea in a week threatening to cancel the talks.

It’s not hard to understand why Choe would take umbrage at Pence. The US vice president is widely detested in Korea for his rude and grouchy behavior toward the North Korean delegation during the Winter Olympics earlier this year in PyeongChang, where Moon’s diplomacy with Kim got off the ground. Moreover, even as the summit was being planned, Pence was citing John Bolton, Trump’s controversial national-security adviser, on Libya and the necessity of a military option against the North if negotiations fail to end its nuclear program.

But Choe’s statement was shocking in part because she has been one of the chief interlocutors with former US officials and negotiating experts who meet every few months with North Korean diplomats in the informal talks known as Track Two negotiations. American officials were also “pointing to the ‘showdown’ part” of her remarks as a cause of concern, Olivier Knox, who covers the White House as chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, told The Nation via Twitter (“take with a grain of salt,” he added).

Suzanne DiMaggio, a director and senior fellow at New America who specializes in complex negotiations and has met with Choe several times, said she wasn’t surprised. “Trump’s letter points to the ‘open hostility’ in Choe’s statement as the reason for canceling,” she told The Nation in an e-mail. “But a harsh reaction was to be expected given Bolton’s insistence on following a ‘Libya model’—a not-so-subtle nod to regime change. Showing weakness isn’t an option for North Korean negotiators. An old hand like Bolton knows this playbook well.”

Ironically, Trump’s cancellation was announced just hours after North Korea confirmed the dismantlement of the nuclear test site at Punggye-ri in the country’s mountainous northeast. Several dozen reporters from China, Russia, Britain, South Korea, and the United States (including CNN’s Will Ripley and CBS’s Ben Tracy) were invited to observe the action. It was one of the first tangible North Korean steps for meeting US and South Korean demands that it end its nuclear program.

But with the release of Trump’s letter, the days of confrontation suddenly seemed to be back. Speaking on live television an hour after the news broke, Trump said the US military “is ready if necessary” to respond to any “foolish or reckless” act by the North. And in Seoul, where it was past midnight, President Moon called in his security advisers for an emergency meeting, expressed “deep regret” about the cancellation, and said the denuclearization of North Korea should not be delayed, according to Yonhap News.

The fast-moving events came after weeks of increasing tensions between North Korea, South Korea, and the United States over the peace process.

A week ago, angered again by US-South Korean military exercises and offended by US demands for immediate denuclearization without reciprocal steps from Washington, the North canceled high-level meetings with the South and threatened to boycott the summit with Trump. Its strongest language came from Kim Kye Gwan, a senior North Korean negotiator also well known to US diplomats.

Specifically, Kim ripped into Bolton for suggesting the Libya-style denuclearization process, which, as DiMaggio notes, North Korea basically sees as regime change on steroids. The Bolton plan, he said, would “impose” on North Korea “the destiny of Libya or Iraq,” and is therefore a nonstarter. Kim also blasted the administration for saying that North Korea would trade away its nuclear program simply for economic aid and forswear any political concessions.

Kim’s critique stunned the White House and the US media, which immediately began to speculate that the US-North Korean negotiations over its denuclearization were in jeopardy. As Moon and Trump sat down on Tuesday at the White House, the initial news was that the summit may be delayed. “There’s a very substantial chance that it won’t work out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding his usual “We’ll see.”

But as the Korean side of the story emerged, it appeared that Moon might have persuaded Trump otherwise.

Moon told Trump that there was no need for doubt over the North’s willingness to attend the summit, according to a transcript published by his ministry of foreign affairs. The report acknowledged the need for “concrete negotiations” to “achieve denuclearization and the stability of the [Kim] regime,” and Moon predicted that Trump “will be able to bring an end to the Korean War that has lasted over the past 65 years.” The headline in Yonhap News, the government-owned wire service, was “Moon keeps U.S.-N. Korea summit from falling apart, for now.”

To get there, Trump reportedly agreed to a more flexible phased dismantling of North Korea’s arsenal more aligned with Moon’s step-by-step approach. “It would certainly be better if it were all in one,” Trump said in remarks analyzed in The New York Times by a raft of unhappy North Korea experts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings Institution. “Does it have to be? I don’t think I want to totally commit myself.”

Still, the South Koreans were sanguine, and on Tuesday were vowing to get the Singapore meeting back on track. Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security adviser and the man running his North Korea initiative, told the Korean president’s press pool that “there is a 99.9 percent chance” the US–North Korea summit would be held as scheduled.

In the White House meeting, Trump blamed China—and not the North—for the problems that have come up, saying that Kim’s views on denuclearization may have hardened after he visited Chinese President Xi Jinping for the second time a few weeks ago. “There was a different attitude by the North Korean folks after that meeting,” he mused. “I can’t say that I’m happy about it.”

But even experts wary of Kim’s pronouncements said that Pyongyang’s outburst was due to Trump’s and Bolton’s mishandling of the negotiations (earlier in the week, Trump had ruled that Libya was the wrong approach, noting that the country had been “decimated” by US and NATO forces after it denuclearized—effectively throwing Bolton under the bus).

After hearing Trump’s criticism of China, Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, who has in the past raised doubts about Moon’s guarantees to Trump on North Korea, responded: “North Korea’s position has not changed. This is not China’s fault. It’s not Kim’s fault. It is Trump’s fault.” In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, he noted Kim Kye Gwan’s bitter denunciation of Bolton: “we do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.”

Many in South Korea seem to agree. In an extraordinary article from Seoul on May 21, the Post’s Anna Fifield quoted a string of South Korean officials and analysts blasting Bolton as the sole cause for “the sudden problems in the diplomatic process.”

One official close to President Moon, speaking anonymously, said Bolton’s martial approach endangered both North and South. “He seems to think the U.S. can fight another war on the Korean Peninsula, so from our perspective, as the people living on the Korean Peninsula, he is very dangerous,” the official said.

But South Korea could share in the blame as well. At the Panmunjom summit on April 27, the Koreas agreed to establish a peace process that would lead to a treaty formally ending the Korean War, and to begin the arduous task of de-escalating their decades old military confrontation.

In preliminary talks, as a way to kick-start the process, Kim had dropped his opposition to “normal” war exercises between the United States and South Korea, meaning he would accept the drills as long as they didn’t include “strategic” weapons, such as B-52 bombers and nuclear-armed aircraft carriers. Their presence in Korea is viewed by Kim as both provocative and threatening.

But on May 16, a few days into the planned “Max Thunder” air exercises in South Korea, North Korea’s news service, the KCNA, ripped into the exercises, pointing out that the United States planned to deploy B-52s stationed in Guam and advanced F-22 attack fighters based in Japan. The Max Thunder drill “is an undisguised challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and a deliberate military provocation to the trend of the favorably developing situation on the Korean Peninsula,” the editorial said. The KCNA report, released after North Korea canceled a meeting with the South and threatened to boycott the summit with Trump, added, “We will closely watch the ensuing behavior of the US and the south Korean authorities.”

The criticism apparently led to the unusual sight of the Pentagon backing down. On May 18, the US Pacific Command announced that it was scrapping plans for the B-52s (which are configured to carry nuclear weapons) to participate in the air drills, which were originally designed to include Japanese aircraft.

Later, the South Korean defense ministry confirmed the decision, saying “the Max Thunder exercise is carried out to train fighter pilots. Hence, the B-52s are not included.”

After President Moon returned to Seoul on Thursday, his aides suggested that his rescue efforts may have won the day, and that the summit and the peace process might be back on. They also let it be known that its own disputes with the North had been resolved as well. At the end of Moon’s visit, his chief spokesman, Yoon Young-chan, said that the high-level talks between North and South would likely resume after May 25, when the joint military drills are completed.

One reason for Moon’s optimism was the reopening of the important back channel between South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and its counterpart, the North’s United Front Department.

According to Hankyoreh, after Pyongyang initially refused to allow South Korean reporters to witness the dismantlement of its nuclear test site, the two intelligence services “reportedly went to work frantically behind the scenes.” (Until the recent breakdown, ties among the CIA and North and South Korean intelligence have been an important conduit for the three countries.)

The events on Thursday lent an air of poignancy to the ceremony the South Korean president attended on Tuesday. Just a mile north of the White House, in Northwest Washington, the South Korean embassy threw a party, complete with traditional Korean drumming and dancing, to celebrate the restoration of a venerable house that was once the site of Korea’s first diplomatic mission to the United States, which lasted from 1889 to 1905.

The Old Korean Legation, as they now call it, has a sad, tangled history: It was temporarily lost when Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and “forcibly bought” the building before selling it to an American buyer. Tuesday marked its reopening as a Korean national property after its repurchase in 2012.

“Today on this historic site, we raise the Korean flag once again,” said Cheon Joonho, the embassy’s minister for public communications, who was standing in for ambassador Cho Yoon-je. “About 100 years ago, Korean diplomats watched the loss of their country’s sovereignty with an aching heart. If they were here with us today, they must feel very proud that the country they loved has achieved unprecedented economic success with full-fledged democracy.”

Just as in the past, he added, “the situation surrounding the Korean peninsula today is very critical. As we reflect the history of the Old Korean Legation, we can also have hope to attain permanent peace and prosperity of the Korean peninsula, overcoming the present history of division.” Later in the day, after his meetings at the White House, President Moon dropped by the Legation house with South Korea’s First Lady, Kim Jung-sook.

In their own ways, the two events—the summit at the White House and the ceremony at the legation—underscored the complexity of the ties between Korea and the United States, which date back to their first treaty of “Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation” in 1882. But that relationship is often complicated by a mutual history—including entanglements with China, Japan, and North Korea—that is often interpreted differently in Seoul and Washington. That can lead to misunderstandings, just as they have in the current crisis.

But it’s not too late for Trump and Moon to get negotiations back on track, said DiMaggio.

“In order to salvage this process, the Trump administration should step back from all of the contradictory public messaging, including the poorly veiled references to regime change, and speak in one voice that is firmly in support of diplomacy,” she said. “Time isn’t on our side, as the North Koreans have played their hand with Seoul and Beijing well, already eroding Trump’s maximum pressure campaign.”

April 27, 2018, was a historic day for Korea, and for the millions of people on both sides of that tragically divided peninsula. In a meticulously planned event, Kim Jong-un, the 34-year-old hereditary dictator of North Korea, stepped carefully over the border running through the truce village of Panmunjom and clasped hands with Moon Jae-in, the democratically elected president of South Korea.2

Kim’s action marked the start of a remarkable day in which the two nations “solemnly declared” an end to the Korean War, which ripped the country apart from 1950 to 1953. “When you crossed the military border for the first time, Panmunjom became a symbol of peace, not a symbol of division,” said Moon, the son of two North Korean refugees who fled south in 1950. A former student activist and human-rights lawyer who was chief of staff to former president Roh Moo-hyun, Moon ran for office in 2017 on a pledge to make that moment of reconciliation possible.3

Over the next few hours, accompanied by top aides and diplomats, generals and intelligence chiefs, the Korean leaders discussed an agreement that would lead to what they both described as the “complete denuclearization” of the peninsula. The two also “affirmed the principle of determining the destiny of the Korean nation on their own accord,” a signal to both the United States and China that the days of great-power intervention in their divided country may be waning.4

The full Panmunjom Declaration, signed that Friday during an elaborate ceremony broadcast live in South Korea and around the world, included strong commitments to be taken “at all levels” of both societies to forge a lasting peace, including rebuilding key rail and road links, opening a permanent liaison office in the border city of Gaesong, and organizing civic and sports exchanges as well as the reunion of divided families. It marks a huge leap past the tensions of the previous year, when the United States and North Korea appeared to be lurching disastrously toward war, with South Korea caught in the crosshairs.5

To alleviate that possibility, Moon and Kim agreed to “actively pursue trilateral meetings” involving the United States, and later China, “with a view to declaring an end to the War and establishing a permanent and solid peace regime.” The participation of the United States (which led the UN Command during the war) and China (which subsequently pushed US forces out of the North) is necessary because they, along with North Korea, are the only signatories to the armistice that ended the fighting in 1953. (South Korea’s then-leader, the right-wing autocrat Syngman Rhee, refused to allow his generals to sign it.)6

The inter-Korea summit was designed to pave the way for the upcoming meeting between Kim and President Trump, which the White House now says will take place by the end of May, with Panmunjom a possible venue. (Singapore and Mongolia are also in the running.) Trump accepted Kim’s invitation to meet after hearing through Moon’s representatives in Washington that the North Korean leader had promised to discuss ending his nuclear and missile programs in a negotiated process. His guarantees were later confirmed directly by then–CIA director Mike Pompeo during an unprecedented meeting in Pyongyang in early April.7

Pompeo, who was sworn in on May 2 as Trump’s new secretary of state, said the upcoming meeting offered a “real opportunity” to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear program. Kim, meanwhile, has already made some unilateral concessions. Before his summit with Moon, he announced that he had ended all nuclear and missile tests; was closing the country’s only nuclear-testing facility, under a mountain called Punggye-ri; and would accept the presence of US military forces in South Korea as part of a peace agreement.8

Over the weekend, Moon’s press secretary revealed that Kim had further pledged to abandon his nukes if the United States promised not to invade North Korea, and said he would allow international inspectors and journalists into the country in May to witness the dismantling of the test tunnels at Punggye-ri.9

“Through talks it will become clear that I am not someone who will fire nuclear [weapons] on the South, or over the Pacific, or target the US,” Kim was quoted as saying by South Korean officials. And much to the shock of Washington experts—who have long maintained that it could never happen—the day after the historic meeting, North Korea’s official media accorded prominent coverage to the summit and publicly affirmed Kim’s commitment to a nuclear-free peninsula.10

South Koreans, even those who fear and loathe the North because of its invasion during the Korean War, were moved to hear Kim speak for the first time. “We, who live so close by, are not enemies that must fight against each other, but are more families that share the same bloodline, who must unite,” the Swiss-educated Kim said in his short speech at Panmunjom. Many observers, even cynical Americans and journalists, noted that he had greatly softened his tone to communicate his desire for reconciliation.11

“Kim called South Korea by its official name and North Korea by its South Korean name,” The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield wrote in an unusually upbeat report from the summit. He “even acknowledged that North Korea’s roads and railways are far inferior to the South’s, that some North Koreans have escaped and that South Koreans have died in recent years because of North Korean attacks.”12

South Koreans were also touched by Kim’s gesture after he crossed the demarcation line. “I wonder when I can cross to the North,” Moon said in greeting him, according to Korean press reports. “Do you want to cross over now?” Kim replied, taking Moon’s hand as they stepped together into the North. “They made impromptu and casual crossings of the border that were unthinkable in the past,” Hyuk-Kyo Suh, a Korean-American activist in Virginia, told The Nation.13

But almost from the moment of that first handshake, the pundits who shape the US media’s coverage of North Korea were spinning the summit, and Kim’s outreach in particular, as a dangerous, even ominous, event. The groupthink was similar to the pundits’ initial freak-out in March, when Trump first said that he would meet with Kim.14

“Yada, yada, yada,” the perennial hawk Max Boot wrote disparagingly in The Washington Post about the “Korea summit hype,” adding that “there is very little of substance here.” Similar hot takes were offered by Nicholas Kristof and Nicholas Eberstadt in The New York Times, Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post, Robin Wright in The New Yorker, and Michael O’Hanlon in The Hill. Their doubts were repeated and amplified as gospel by the usual critics on cable TV.15

The kicker came on Sunday, April 29, when the Times’ Mark Landler painted the Korean summit as an affront to US national-security interests. Citing every establishment pundit he could find, Landler argued that a resumption of diplomatic ties between the Koreas “will inevitably erode the crippling economic sanctions against the North,” while making it hard for Trump “to threaten military action against a country that is extending an olive branch.” It was depressing to see such overt cheerleading for US imperial control over Korea in the media.16

There is, of course, plenty of hard negotiation to come in order for the settlement by Kim and Moon to be realized. But if peace does come about, it won’t be due either to Trump’s hard-line policies or to the wailing of the Washington intelligentsia. Instead, it will be because of Moon’s diplomacy, as well as support from the mass movement that swept him into power in the “candlelight revolution” that toppled the hawkish government of Park Geun-hye last year. In a poll taken after the inter-Korean summit, a stunning 88.4 percent of South Koreans applauded Moon’s agreement with Kim, while the president’s own approval rating hit a whopping 85.7 percent. Koreans, it seems, have much more faith in the peace process than do their would-be allies in Washington.17

American activists played an important role as well. Women Cross DMZ, an international women’s collective led by its founder, Christine Ahn, along with feminist Gloria Steinem and US Army veteran and former diplomat Ann Wright, put the acute need for diplomacy on the table in 2015, when they traveled across the border with their South Korean allies to meet with their counterparts in the North. Korean-American civic and faith-based organizations have pressed strongly for a treaty to end the war. Peace groups like the Ploughshares Fund, the American Friends Service Committee, Win Without War, and Peace Action have taken the Korea issue to Congress, the White House, and the public.18

Meanwhile, the growing ties between South Korean citizen groups and US peace and antiwar organizations such as Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and US Labor Against the War (which sent a delegation of trade unionists to Seoul after the summit and demonstrated with Korean workers on May Day) are creating a transpacific network that supports the Korean peace process and has melded into a strong voice to counter the hawks and naysayers in Washington.19

“We’ve learned from the South Korean movement about the awesome power of the people to mobilize,” Ahn told The Nation. “We have a responsibility as US citizens to end this war. After all, the US had a hand in Korea’s division, totally destroyed North Korea during the war, and since then has fueled a state of war on the peninsula. It’s on us to end the Korean War and help the Koreas come together.”20

On Friday, the leaders of North and South Korea, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, will meet at the truce village of Panmunjom for a historic summit that many Koreans believe could end the war and state of belligerence that has plagued both sides of the Korean Peninsula since the late 1940s.

Kim’s symbolic crossing of the border into the South could also pave the way for another precedent-shattering event: the planned summit in early June between Kim Jong-un and President Trump. If all goes well in the consecutive summits, the talks could end the threat of war—nuclear war—between North Korea and the United States and usher in a new era of peace in Northeast Asia.

To Korea hands who have seen tensions rise and fall over the years, the upcoming summits are a remarkable sign of progress toward ending a North Korean nuclear and missile program that started in the late 1980s to create a deterrent against the United States and succeeded in 2017 beyond anyone’s dreams in Pyongyang or Washington.

“Last year, the situation on the Korean Peninsula was the most tense, the most negative, I’d ever seen, so these are good, important, impressive steps,” Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor and UN ambassador who has been to North Korea on trouble-shooting missions eight times, told The Nation. “The president took a gamble, but it’s a risk worth taking.”

Richardson, who was interviewed during an arms-control conference in Washington, said he was unsure whether the Kim regime would eventually give up all of its weapons.

“Possible, not probable,” he said. But “they will restrict them, curb their use, and put a freeze on missiles and nuclear weapons. Any kind of progress that defuses the military confrontation is worth the summit.” Like many analysts, he gave credit for the thaw to Moon Jae-in and his Olympic diplomacy. “The reason for the change, in my judgment, is the president of South Korea.”

David Kang, professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California and director of USC’s Korean Studies Institute, expressed amazement at the turn of events.

“If I had said in December, at the height of the worries about a ‘bloody nose’ strike and all that, that within four months we would not only be having summits between North and South Korea, China and the US, but that Kim would have publicly said he doesn’t need to test and publicly floating the idea of denuclearization—well, there’s no possible way people would have taken it seriously,” he told The Nation.

The global interest in the meetings at Panmunjom—which will be televised live to the world via the South Korean government’s summit internet portal—increased over the past week as North Korea, in its preparatory meetings with Moon’s government, made several critical decisions and concessions designed to enhance the atmosphere for his upcoming talks with Moon and then Trump.

First came the stunning disclosure in the media, later confirmed by the South Korean government, that Moon and Kim will announce an end to the Korean War and release a joint statement pledging, at some time in the future, to sign a treaty to transform the 1953 armistice agreement into a lasting peace.

Although such a document will require the involvement of the United States and China, which along with North Korea are signatories to the armistice, it’s a crucial step toward creating a true peace process. “Ending the state of conflict is the core of the whole thing,” John Delury of Seoul’s Yonsei University told Bloomberg. “Peace is as complicated as denuclearization.”

South Korea—which did not sign the 1953 armistice—was cautious to say that any declaration of the end of the 1950–53 Korean War must be tied to an agreement on North Korea’s nuclear weapons. “Without the progress of (the North’s) denuclearization, it would not be realistic to discuss ways to establish peace,” a South Korean official told Yonhap, the government-owned wire service.

To make that possible, Moon revealed on April 19 that North Korea had dropped demands it has made in the past that the United States remove its 28,500 troops from South Korea as the price for a peace deal. Instead, Moon said, it would accept security guarantees and an end to what it has long called America’s “hostile policy.” Kim’s shift “has been confirmed, so that is what is making talks with the U.S. possible,” Moon said, according to a statement released by his office.

In fact, accepting an American military presence in Korea is a topic that’s been discussed in negotiations before, but Kim’s concession still marks a huge change as Kim prepares to do away with a nuclear and missile deterrence system designed to counter the overwhelming US military presence in South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. Moreover, until January, many US officials and think-tank analysts were saying that the purpose of Kim’s nuclear-weapons program was to force the United States to withdraw its troops and force the South to accept unification under Northern terms.

But the dramatic pre-summit statements from Kim were just a lead-in to his public statements last Saturday, when he said he had suspended all nuclear, intermediate-range, and ICBM missile tests; would soon close his only nuclear-testing site; and was seeking to “make positive contributions to the building of the world free from nuclear weapons.”

The declaration, which was made at a meeting of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party and broadcast on North Korean state media, was Kim’s first acknowledgment to the North Korean people that he has shifted from war preparations to a peace process.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, speaking to The Wall Street Journal, called the decision a “very significant pledge” and called on the United States and other countries to respond by asking Pyongyang to sign and ratify the international nuclear test-ban treaty.

Kim’s statements also won strong praise from President Trump, who all last week tweeted a steady barrage of hopeful messages about his dealings with North Korea. “This is very good news for North Korea and the World – big progress!” he said after Kim announced the nuclear test suspension. “Look forward to our Summit.”

The shift was also welcomed by people who watched with increasing worry last year as North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests led Trump on several occasions to threaten the very existence of North Korea.

“We are so far from where we were in December,” said USC’s Kang. “That doesn’t mean that it will all be solved—that’s not the way it works. But the idea that we’re anywhere near even talking about these things is a huge step forward for all of us. And that’s why you do diplomacy—to figure out what’s realistic and what’s not. I’m totally in favor.”

Nobody knows the difficulties more than South Korea. In order for the North to actually achieve denuclearization, “there are still many hurdles that North Korea and the international community must clear,” the progressive Hankyoreh newspaper stated on Tuesday.

First, it said, North Korea must impose a permanent freeze on its nuclear weapons and missile tests, “and then take steps to disable and dismantle its nuclear facilities. After this, North Korea will have to inform the international community of each stage (freezing, disabling and dismantling), and the international community will have to verify these stages by sending inspectors.”

In return, of course, the North would expect the United States to withdraw its sanctions, agree not to deploy strategic weapons such as nuclear-armed ships and planes in Korea, and to move toward full diplomatic and economic normalization between the two countries. But that won’t happen until Kim Jong-un has started to dismantle his nuclear program, a senior Trump official told the Journal. The United States, the official said Sunday, “will not be making substantial concessions, such as lifting sanctions, until North Korea has substantially dismantled its nuclear programs.”

That negotiating process has apparently been discussed by Kim and Trump through a US envoy dispatched to Pyongyang by the president. Last week, the White House disclosed the stunning news that CIA director Mike Pompeo had flown to North Korea over the Easter weekend and met face-to-face with Kim Jong-un—the highest-level contact between the two countries since 2000.

During their discussions, the 34-year-old “supreme leader” assured Pompeo—who is about to become secretary of state—that he was indeed willing to discuss his country’s denuclearization with President Trump during the summit. Pompeo’s meeting “went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed,” Trump tweeted.

A few days earlier, Pompeo, with his trip to Pyongyang clearly in mind, had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he was “optimistic” that Trump and Kim would be having the conversation “that will set us down the course of achieving a diplomatic outcome” to the long-running crisis. This week, the Japanese newspaper Asahi added new details, reporting that Kim “conveyed to Pompeo his willingness to completely dismantle North Korea’s nuclear program, without asking for the withdrawal of American troops from the Korean Peninsula.”

Asahi also reported that a US official, most likely from the CIA, remained in Pyongyang “in an apparent attempt to coordinate the upcoming summit and maximize the results of Pompeo and Kim’s meeting.” If those reports are true, Trump may have good reason for his optimism Tuesday, when he told reporters that Kim has “really been very open and I think very honorable.” He added that the North Koreans “are pressing for talks to begin immediately.”

But Pompeo’s visit to Pyongyang also solidified the perception, which I outlined recently in The Nation, that the intelligence services in the United States and the two Koreas are running the early stages of the diplomacy in Korea. “It seems there’s a new channel between US and North Korean intelligence,” Richardson said in his remarks to the Arms Control Association last week. “I’m all for the meeting between the CIA director and Kim,” he said, but he expressed concerns about the eclipse of the State Department, saying, “I regret that.”

o nearly all of the White House press corps and the Washington punditry class, however, the dizzying events in Korea over the past three months are just another sign of North Korean intransigence and President Trump’s gullibility.

Since the first news emerged of Pompeo’s trip and Kim’s concessions, the reporters who cover North Korea for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream outlets sought out their regular “expert” sources from think tanks and previous administrations to pour cold water on the idea that North Korea has offered anything substantial to either South Korea or the United States. What emerged was another classic “Washington Consensus” on a key foreign-policy issue, led by people who have often been wrong on Korea.

One of the worst offenders was Mark Landler, a White House reporter for the Times. In successive articles last week, Landler tapped into his thin source base—which included officials with Japan’s right-wing Shinzo Abe government—to argue that Kim was only “posturing” and “has no real intention of acceding to demands that he relinquish his nuclear weapons.” The stories were written with Choe Sang-hun, the Times’s Korea correspondent, and Landler’s contributions seemed designed contradict the positive take from South Korea that Choe has been consistently reporting.

In both stories, Landler’s money quotes from Washington were from Evan Medeiros, “a former senior Asia adviser to President Barack Obama” (he is also a managing director with the for-profit Eurasia Group, which is often hostile to North Korea). On the issue of US troops, Medeiros described Kim’s offer to Moon as “a classic, deft North Korean maneuver, which puts us at a disadvantage and makes us look like bad guys if we reject it.” Two days later, in response to Kim’s nuclear-test freeze, Landler quoted Meidoros as saying that the North Koreans are “doing a great job of appearing reasonable, but…positioning themselves to be accepted as a nuclear weapons state in the future.”

In contrast to this utter pessimism, the article ended with Choe’s quote from a Korean analyst in Seoul, who argues that Kim’s offer “means that North Korea is willing to give up an ICBM capability that threatens the United States” and is therefore “good news for the Trump administration.” The Times’s deft editing and the contradictory headline—Kim will “give a little [and] gain a lot”—sends a signal that, despite what the South Koreans say, Americans should be wary of negotiations. (Landler also maligned the importance of a Korea peace treaty, a position I critiqued in a series of tweets over the weekend.)

The Washington Post painted a similarly dismal picture, saying that Kim’s weapons freeze had elicited “considerable skepticism among North Korea experts.” Its lead quote was from Benjamin Silberstein, a North Korea “researcher” at the University of Pennsylvania who is affiliated with the center-right Foreign Policy Research Institute. “There is nothing in North Korea’s statement that signals a willingness to give up their nukes,” he said.

Abraham Denmark, a former Defense Department official and media favorite from the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute, is another common media source. On Friday, he tweeted that Kim’s statements on freezing his nuclear and missile tests were “certainly a positive signal, but not a game changer. No mention of denuclearization, and easily reversible.”

That line—“easily reversible”—quickly became a meme for critics of Trump’s diplomacy and was repeated dozens of times on social media and in television interviews. Even the left-liberal Guardian cast doubt on the outcome, reporting from “experts” who “said that the North Korean leader could be deftly manoeuvring Trump into a trap.” 

The new Washington Consensus on North Korea was summed up on Sunday morning by NBC correspondent Chuck Todd. Kim “seems to be giving very little, but making it seem like he’s giving a lot,” Todd told The Today Show. Later, on Meet the Press, he declared that Kim has “done temporary everything, but he’s not made a declaration of denuclearization.…We’ve given him the meeting [with Trump] and that in itself is a huge gift.” The implication: Kim has conceded nothing, yet Trump has given him everything.

That prompted a reply from Trump himself, who ridiculed Todd in a tweet and later added, “Funny how all of the Pundits that couldn’t come close to making a deal on North Korea are now all over the place telling me how to make a deal!”

Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ and a lifelong peace activist, found herself agreeing with Trump on the press coverage—a situation she called “bizarre.” She disagreed sharply with the idea that North Korea has conceded nothing, pointing out in a tweet that Kim “has agreed to freeze tests of nukes and missiles, denuclearization, and to allow [30,000] US troops to remain in Korea.”

Kevin Gray, a specialist on North Korea’s political economy at the University of Sussex, said the media response to Kim’s summitry reflected the pundits’ “implicit support for the Trump administration taking a maximalist strategy towards the negotiations.”

Their hard-line views, he told The Nation, “push the view that North Korea must first commit to and even carry out complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization before any concessions are offered by the US in return. The problem is, that is the line that has underpinned the failure of US policy toward North Korea for decades.”

Gray, who has been observing Washington’s obsession with Kim Jong-un as a visiting fellow at the Wilson Center in DC, said a final agreement could only come about “through a series of mutual concessions that serve to build mutual trust. The constant barrage of criticism that North Korea’s intentions haven’t changed simply creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to this goal.”

But as Friday approached, the atmosphere in South Korea was charged and hopeful, as thousands of people flocked to Imjingak, the public park at the border between North and South Korea. Despite what the US pundits have to say, a solid 80 percent of South Koreans support Moon and Kim signing a peace agreement to end the Korean War.

On May 7, 2017, two days before Moon Jae-in’s historic election as South Korea’s president, I interviewed the former human-rights lawyer after he spoke to a campaign rally in Gwangju, the industrial city in Korea’s southwest famous for its 1980 citizens’ uprising against a US-backed military government.

Moon had just pledged to 2,000 cheering supporters gathered in front of the city’s high-speed rail station to “raise my voice loudly” to ensure that Seoul was in the lead in any dealings with North Korea. This was a reference to President Donald Trump, whose escalating rhetoric against North Korea was frightening Korean voters and had raised tensions in Asia to a boiling point.

As we sat down to talk in the stationmaster’s office, I asked Moon about the pundits and officials in Washington who were complaining about his pledge to continue the “Sunshine Policy” of his progressive predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. Was Moon concerned about predictions that his laser focus on engagement and dialogue with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would create fissures with the Trump administration and shake up the US-South Korean alliance?

His answer was an emphatic no. “I don’t agree,” Moon said, his face breaking into a wide smile. “To solve the North Korea nuclear problem is in both our common interests. If South Korea takes an active role, that would be helpful to the United States and would relieve the US burden.” Trump, he said, “would also sympathize with my idea and understand me on this issue.”

What I witnessed in that interview was the beginning of Moon’s months-long effort to seize control over the Korea crisis and turn it into a peace process that would ensure that the Korean people were protected from the outbreak of a second destructive war. Today, it’s clear that his gamble has paid off—big time—with one of the biggest political reversals in the history of US foreign policy: Trump’s momentous decision—after months of hair-raising confrontation—to meet face to face with the leader of North Korea, an unprecedented step for a sitting US president.

Moon’s words that day last spring were “prophetic and right on the mark, and he’s done exactly what he said,” says Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA analyst who was a US envoy for the “Six-Party Talks” during the Bush administration. Looking back, in an interview with The Nation, at the events that led up to Trump’s decision to meet with Kim, DeTrani said that “Moon Jae-in has not only taken the lead, he’s taken the lead and run with it in a very impressive way. He has handled this brilliantly.”

Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, of course, claim that Moon’s success is due to the US “maximum pressure” campaign of military threats and sanctions. But that alone would not have brought Kim to the table, says Suzanne DiMaggio, a skilled negotiator with the New America Foundation who has been meeting with North Korean diplomats regularly in what’s called the “Track II” process. “The other major factor is the diplomatic heavy lifting and finessing done by President Moon and his colleagues to get us to this point,” she said.

he contours of Moon’s triumph became clear on March 8, when Chung Eui-yong, his national security adviser, announced on live television at the White House that Trump had accepted an invitation—conveyed by North Korea through Moon’s representatives during two days of meetings in Pyongyang—to meet with Kim sometime in May.

As recounted by Chung to the gathered reporters, Kim Jong-un told South Korea that “he is committed to denuclearization. He pledged that North Korea will refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests. He understands that the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue. And he expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible.” Both South and North Korea were surprised by how quickly Trump accepted the invitation, according to people who have talked to both governments.

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha affirmed Kim’s promises during a visit to Washington this week. Kim Jong-un “has given his word” on discussing denuclearization, she told Face the Nation last Sunday. “This is the first time that the words came directly from the North Korean supreme leader himself, and that has never been done before.”

In the end, the deal is very much along the lines of the “freeze for freeze” proposals—outlined in these pages last fall—in which the North would establish the atmosphere for talks by suspending its nuclear and missile tests in exchange for a moratorium or scaling down of the US-South Korea military exercises that Kim Jong-un had denounced as a threat to North Korea’s sovereignty and had used to justify his nuclear program.

The Trump administration, however, rejects any notion that it has accepted such a swap. Just after the summit was announced, CIA director Mike Pompeo said that Washington had made no concessions to get the meeting, pointing to the fact Kim has “allowed us to continue our exercises on the peninsula, something that’s been fought over for decades.”

That’s true, as Kim’s guarantees confirmed. But South Korean officials have been saying for weeks that the exercises will be scaled down this year and won’t include most of the strategic weapons deployed in the past, such as B-1B bombers or nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his South Korean counterpart, Song Young-moo, announced that the first exercises, called Foal Eagle, will begin April 1, but they didn’t release any details about timing or how many troops will be mobilized.

Instead, Korean officials, speaking on background in South Korea, confirmed that the exercises will be low-key: According to AP, there are “no immediate plans to bring in American strategic assets.” This is clearly a concession, despite Pompeo’s denial and the strange decisions by US media not to report the Korean caveats (the contrast between US and South Korean coverage of the exercises is striking).

 On Wednesday, meanwhile, North Korea finally acknowledged what it called “a sign of change” in US-North Korean relations, attributing it to “the dramatic atmosphere for reconciliation [that] has been created in relations between the north and the south of Korea,” according to official statements quoted in NK News. The US press, in contrast, has moved on from the Trump-Kim summit, with even the usual hawkish voices staying quiet. That’s left the South Korean media to cover the results of the extraordinary process unfolding in Northeast Asia.

There were several turning points in Moon’s quest to place South Korea, as he has said, “in the driver’s seat.” One came last August, when he bluntly warned Trump against embarking on a unilateral military strike against North Korea, which he and most Koreans know would immediately wreak havoc on the south and throughout the peninsula. “No one shall take a military action on the Korean Peninsula without South Korean consent,” he said in an emotional statement.

The other came last December, after North Korea tested its second hydrogen bomb and successfully launched a Hwasong-15 rocket, its most powerful so far, an ICBM capable of hitting targets in the United States. That month, Kim declared that North Korea had completed its “state nuclear force.” He then passed word through his diplomats that this meant that North Korea was ready to stop its testing altogether, even before it had succeeded in fitting a nuclear warhead to a missile capable of re-entry into the atmosphere and hitting a target.

“The interesting thing is, they stopped short of completing an ICBM and a reliable thermo-nuclear warhead,” says Leon Sigal, a former State Department official and editorial writer for The New York Times who wrote a history of the 1994 nuclear crisis called Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea. In the deal they’ve agreed to, he said in an interview, “they’ve given us a suspension of their nuclear and missile programs, which is not trivial because they were on the cusp of having” a reliable nuclear weapon system, he says. “We got something, and they got something.”

Kim’s declaration “was a significant achievement in their eyes,” DiMaggio told me. “Now they can come to the table with maximum negotiating strength, so the timing for engagement now makes complete sense.”

The final step came when the Trump administration dropped its preconditions for talks, which had included a cessation of testing and a prior commitment to denuclearize. That was communicated privately and then publicly shortly before Moon’s Olympic diplomacy, said Sigal, who, like DiMaggio, has been a key player in Track II talks with North Korea.  “They were ready [to talk] when we dropped our preconditions,” he said.

The deal for a summit was supposed to be sealed by a meeting in Seoul between Vice President Mike Pence and his advisers with Kim Yo-jong, Kim’s sister, during the Olympics. But Pence’s boorish and arrogant behavior convinced the North to cancel two hours before it was to begin. Later, Ivanka Trump was accompanied in a trip to Seoul by Allison Hooker, the director of Korean affairs at the National Security Council, but a scheduled meeting between Hooker and a North Korean deputy never materialized. “That was a missed opportunity on both fronts,” said Sigal. 

After this, of course, came Moon Jae-in’s spectacular diplomacy with Kim Jong-un’s representatives in Seoul, and the agreement in Pyongyang for Moon and Kim to hold the third intra-Korean summit in April at the truce village of Panmunjom, to be followed by the unprecedented summit between Kim and Trump. Moon’s approval rating among South Koreans is now hovering at 74 percent, “thanks to positive views of his handling of relations with North Korea,” the Yonhap News Agency reports.

To be sure, the outcome of any Trump-Kim summit is far from certain and will require an unprecedented system of verification if North Korea does in fact agree to eventually give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a normal, and peaceful, relationship with the United States. “That’s a steep mountain to climb,” former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who led US negotiations with North Korea in the 1990s, told a Washington conference last week.

But DeTrani, who was a nonproliferation expert for the CIA and was involved in verification procedures during the Six-Party Talks, believes such a system is entirely possible if the United States and North Korea can agree that monitors would have access to nuclear facilities, including the scientists and technologists working in them, as well as weapons sites that have not been officially declared. “I really believe that if you could get all those pieces together for North Korea, given what’s going on with overhead reconnaissance capabilities and so on, I would think we would probably be able to do a good job,” he told me.

ast week, President Trump appeared to throw a monkey wrench into the negotiating process when he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had been in charge of the administration’s diplomatic approach to North Korea, and replaced him with the more hawkish Pompeo. On March 11, even before the switch was announced, Pompeo confirmed that Trump “has indicated he’s prepared to go have an initial discussion on this incredibly important topic and we’re preparing for that time.”

But the CIA chief’s assurances were not enough for the media, which reacted to the initial news of a Trump-Kim summit with horror and disbelief. After finally getting used to the idea that Trump was committed and was going, reporters became obsessed about the fact that, a week after Chung’s momentous announcement at the White House, North Korea had yet to respond publicly to the offer.

The “silence,” the Times speculated, citing Jung Park, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution, has “raised suspicions” among experts as to whether Kim “really made the offer.” That meme was soon repeated on MSNBC, where North Korea missile analyst Jeffrey Lewis told news-host Chris Hayes that he was suspicious about South Korea’s assurances because they were made at a  “boozy” meeting in Pyongyang between Moon’s representatives and Kim Jong-un.

Sigal, who has extensive contacts on both sides of the DMZ, attributed North Korea’s public silence in part to the closure of the “New York channel” this month when Joseph Yun, the US diplomat who has been leading low-level US talks with Pyongyang through its UN Mission in New York, abruptly resigned from his post. The North Koreans “haven’t confirmed their position because we haven’t sent a clear message to them of our intent through the working-level New York channel or any other official bilateral channel,” Sigal said. Beyond that, “the press has been utterly uninterested in the negotiating side of the story,” he added. “They love the war story.”

DiMaggio, for her part, doubted that President Moon would risk his reputation and presidency on a false promise he had not confirmed with his northern counterparts. “My sense of how the South Koreans are approaching this is they are being quite cautious and disciplined,” she told me. “I don’t think they would relay any messages that didn’t actually happen.”

On the other hand, she was concerned that Pompeo’s elevation to secretary of state could signal that Trump’s impulses will be given full rein as he prepares to meet with Kim, and could put Moon’s carefully planned diplomatic offensive at risk. “It’s clear he’s skeptical of any diplomatic approach,” she said.

“That, combined with his lack of negotiating experience, points to what I would call rough waters ahead. As the nation’s chief diplomat, she added, Pompeo will face a “steep learning curve, especially when you compare him to his counterpart in Pyongyang,” North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, “who is a very seasoned diplomat and a US expert with years of experience.”

DiMaggio, who was deeply involved as an observer at the US talks with Iran over its nuclear program, said the lack of experience could hurt as the talks proceed. “One concern I have is if the administration would move forward with talks and handle them poorly, and then announce them as a failure. That could potentially open the way to a military action after diplomacy is deemed a failed proposition. That scenario really worries me.”

Meanwhile, convinced of North Korea’s seriousness, the Moon government is quickly setting up the foreign-policy apparatus for negotiations and organizing simultaneous talks on resolving the standoff with China, Japan, and Russia. In addition, North Korea sent Foreign Minister Ri this week to Sweden, which represents US interests in Pyongyang, and a second diplomat to Finland to meet with a group of former US and South Korean officials (Finland’s government said Wednesday the talks were “constructive.”) There was speculation that Ri’s talks in Sweden could lead to North Korea’s release of three Americans still held in prison, but by mid-week that had yet to happen.

ooking back over the past year, Pompeo’s emergence as Trump’s key player in North Korean affairs seems inevitable—in part because he has already been playing that role for months.

In 2017, about a week after Moon was sworn in as president, the CIA set up a Korea Mission Center that integrates officers from across the agency to “bring their expertise and creativity to bear against the North Korea target” (intelligence contractors like CACI are busy recruiting to fill the spots). Unusually for a CIA center, it has been fairly open in its work, with Pompeo and the top deputies of the center appearing as speakers at public events, including an academic conference in Washington last October. In contrast, Tillerson spoke little in public about Korea, except in brief interviews with the press.

Pompeo also “became more active in the CIA’s Daily Briefs where he’s personally briefing the president,” said DeTrani, the former intelligence officer. “So I think it makes eminent sense that he would be the point person on what is going on with North Korea.” Moreover, when the talks get to a stage where verification of a testing moratorium and other steps is required, US intelligence assets controlled by the CIA and the National Security Agency will be crucial, he said.

I was convinced that Pompeo was in command on January 23, when he delivered a public speech at the American Enterprise Institute and spent most of his time talking—and answering questions—about North Korea. It was one of the most detailed administration speeches yet on Korea and, to a careful listener, signaled that the Trump administration had thoroughly grasped the significance of Kim Jong-un’s confirmation that he had completed development of his nuclear program and would no longer be testing.

“The logical next step [for Kim] would be to develop an arsenal of weapons” that would have “the capacity to deliver from multiple firings of these missiles simultaneously,” Pompeo said. “That’s the very mission set that President Trump has directed the government to figure out a way to make sure it never occurs.” He added: “The president is intent on delivering this solution through diplomatic means. It is the focus.”

In what had to be a carefully controlled leak, last Friday the Times confirmed that Pompeo has been in close contact with North Korea “through a channel that runs between the C.I.A. and its North Korean counterpart, the Reconnaissance General Bureau,” which combines the country’s formidable intelligence and special forces.

Pompeo, the Times said, is also working closely with Suh Hoon, the director of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), who was in Pyongyang with Chung Eui-yong, the national security adviser. As a deputy NIS director earlier in the century, Suh lent important support to the Sunshine Policy and helped organize, with North Korean intelligence, the previous summits in 2000 and 2007 (Moon was in Pyongyang for the last one, as President Roh’s chief of staff).

Suh’s counterpart and primary host in Pyongyang was Kim Yong-chol, a vice chairman of the Central Committee of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party and the former head of the spy agency who now oversees Pyongyang’s relationship with South Korea. He was also Kim Jong-un’s delegate in Pyeongchang for the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics and, most significantly, was the official who told Moon that the North was willing to have parallel negotiations with the United States.

“He’s a [Workers’] party guy, and has done some bad things in the past,” says Sigal, referring to Kim Yong-chol. According to the South Korean government, in 2010 Kim Yong-chol masterminded the attack and sinking of a South Korean naval vessel that killed 46 sailors and brought North-South relations to an all-time low (North Korea denied involvement, and some Koreans have raised doubts about Kim Yong-chol’s involvement).

Even so, says Sigal, he is one of the best-informed North Koreans on the United States. “People don’t know he was involved with the military-to-military talks with us and the South Koreans” during the Bush administration, said Sigal. “He has a long history of knowledge about the US.”

Joel Wit, a former US negotiator on the 1994 Agreed Framework, told a Monday press briefing at the US-Korea Institute that the CIA’s channel to North Korean intelligence has existed with “ongoing contacts” since 2009,  including visits to North Korea by intelligence officials in 2012 and in 2014 by James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence.

Kim Yong-chol “has been the main contact in this channel for much of the time,” he said. But Wit, who participates with DiMaggio in the Track II talks with North Korean diplomats, cautioned that intelligence channels are “not ideal” and have “serious drawbacks,” compared with diplomacy. “You can’t just send some intelligence analysts off to meet with North Koreans and think that that’s going to work well,” he warned.

espite the dominance of the spies, the negotiators past and present I spoke to were all optimistic that Trump could develop a framework for further negotiations, leading down the road to disarmament talks that would allow North Korea to get rid of its nuclear weapons.

And while they worried about the short time span before the summit and the lack of preparation on the US side, they said there were plenty of past US-North Korean formulations to rely on as precedents. They include declarations about denuclearization, respect for sovereignty, and economic and political normalization made jointly in 1994 and 2000, and the broader Six-Party declaration in 2005.

Most of all, they argue that Trump has a fundamental interest in testing North Korea’s resolve. “To the extent the North Koreans want a fundamentally new relationship with the United States, they’re prepared to do things,” Sigal said. “And that’s got to be tested. And the only way to test it is, you make offers at the negotiating table, see if they take them, live up to your end of the deal, and see if they live up.”  

“All these people who think they know what the North Koreans are going to do,” he concluded with a laugh, “have no clue!”

As the 2018 Winter Olympics began this month in Pyeongchang, Vice President Mike Pence and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were in the reviewing stands on the tail end of Pence’s aggressive propaganda tour in Japan and South Korea designed to counter North Korea’s unprecedented diplomatic presence at the Games.

It was a jarring sight, in part because the Olympics are taking place only a few miles from the border that has divided the two Koreas since the United States and the Soviet Union accepted Japan’s surrender as Korea’s brutal colonial overlord in 1945. That history became a controversial topic when NBC had to fire one of its commentators after he outraged Koreans by speaking glowingly of Japan’s contributions to Korea during that era.

But as Pence and Abe were trying to contain North Korea’s so-called “charm offensive” to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Yukio Hatoyama, one of Japan’s few progressive leaders of the past 70 years, was in Washington to call for reducing US military forces in Okinawa and a more conciliatory approach to the regional tensions brought to a boil by Kim Jong-un’s nuclear and missile program.

“Japan’s role should be to create the conditions for North Korea to come to the negotiating table” and not to increase the pressure, the former prime minister told The Nation in an exclusive interview. He also criticized Abe for supporting a three-way military alliance with South Korea and the United States, saying that most Koreans naturally oppose it because they “feel they were attacked by us in the past.”

In Hatoyama’s view, Japan instead should work with South Korea and China to convince the United States and North Korea to begin talks toward a peace treaty. That could be done, he said, through a proposal endorsed by China under which the North would halt its nuclear-weapons development in return for a postponement of the massive US-South Korean military exercises now scheduled for late March.

“Once a peace treaty is signed, there’s no need to use nuclear weapons because there’s no threat,” he said. “I think the freeze would be enough for North Korea to start negotiating.” His perspective is in stark contrast to Abe, who, while Pence was in Tokyo, avidly endorsed Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of heavy sanctions backed by threats of US military strikes.

But Hatoyama’s views are closely aligned with President Moon, whose insistence on diplomacy and engagement with the North paid off big-time when Kim dispatched his sister Kim Yo-jong, along with his grandfather’s foreign minister and the current ceremonial head of state, Kim Yong-nam, to South Korea as the Olympics opened.

Kim Yo-jong, the first member of North Korea’s ruling family to step foot in South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953, used her visit—which became a media and social-network sensation in Seoul—to the hilt. During her historic meeting with President Moon at the Blue House, she extended an invitation to the South Korean leader to visit Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang for a summit meeting.

If Moon accepts—and all indications at press time are that he will if he concludes the talks would help resolve the nuclear crisis—it would be Kim’s first meeting with a foreign head of state since taking over from his father in 2011. And it would mark a huge triumph for Moon, who had hoped to use the Olympics as a springboard to trigger negotiations between North Korea and the United States to peacefully end the nuclear crisis.

But the inter-Korean diplomacy is viewed by both Trump and Abe as a challenge to their strategy to strangle North Korea economically and then use the powerful US military presence in Japan and South Korea—augmented by Japan’s Self Defense Forces, as Pence breezily suggested to NBC—to force Kim to give up his weapons. The differences between the two approaches were starkly highlighted at the stunningly beautiful opening ceremonies on February 9.

With millions of people watching, a stone-faced Pence, with Abe at his side, sat stiffly as the first united Korean Olympic team since 2006 marched into the stadium to thunderous roars from the crowd. To his right, just feet away in the reviewing stand, President Moon and his North Korean guests stood, waved, and cheered ecstatically. Pence’s behavior—which was denounced by many Koreans as deeply insulting—underscored a deepening rift between the US-Japanese hard-line position and South Korea’s long-term diplomatic strategy.

Just how much those divisions have hardened became clear on February 9, when Abe asked Moon to quickly resume the US-South Korean exercises that North Korea sees as deeply provocative and is one of the reasons for Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program. Moon, whose government is considering another postponement—or perhaps a reduction in scale—of the drills after the Olympics as a way to maintain diplomatic momentum, coldly dismissed the suggestion, saying “the issue is about our sovereignty and [Japan’s] intervention in our domestic affairs.”

In Washington, the US media framed the North-South diplomacy as a strategy designed in Pyongyang to divide Washington and Seoul, and ran extensive interviews with hard-line experts and former US officials warning Moon not to drift too far from the Trump-Abe policies. What happens after the Olympics, Daniel Russel, the former top Asia adviser to President Obama, told The Washington Post, “is going to be the sharp contrast between the charm offensive led by Kim Yo Jong and the spine-stiffening led by Vice President Pence.”

To Hatoyama, a longtime fixture in Japanese politics whose father was foreign minister during the 1970s and whose grandfather was prime minister in the 1950s, the forces arrayed against Moon are a stark reminder of the US pressure he came under when his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) ruled from 2009 to 2012, in a brief respite from LDP control.

Just as Moon is seeking more independence by demanding that South Korea have a say in any use of military force against North Korea, Hatoyama came to office vowing to alter the terms of the US-Japan military alliance. Specifically, he wanted to make public the secret agreements the LDP had made with Washington—including allowing the US military to bring nuclear weapons in and out of Japan—and reduce the burden of the enormous complex of US bases in Okinawa.

In The World According to US Empire, a 2016 book based on US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, my chapter on East Asia chronicled how the Obama administration successfully pressured Hatoyama to drop these policies. That was accomplished by dispatching senior diplomats and Pentagon officials to argue that Hatoyama’s proposals threatened US national-security interests and the US-Japan military alliance itself.

The offensive was led by Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, and Michèle Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy. In 2007, they co-founded the Center for a New American Security, a military think tank closely aligned with the Democratic Party that continues to play a key role in US policy in Asia (both are still on the board of directors, and Campbell is the chairman).

Their campaign began in June 2009. At the time, Hatoyama’s DPJ was about to take over the government in parliamentary elections, and wanted to undo a massive alignment of US bases in Japan. That alignment had been agreed to several years earlier by the ruling LDP, in a pact to “transform” Japan’s military into a more supportive adjunct to the Pentagon in US military operations abroad. “Of course, these initiatives didn’t settle well with the US,” Hatoyama told The Nation.

That response is spelled out in the WikiLeaks cables. “A defeat of LDP,” a top diplomatic official wrote in a memo to Flournoy, “will introduce an element of uncertainty into our Alliance relations with Japan.” He instructed her to meet with DPJ leaders “to re-enforce [the] importance of implementing the transformation and realignment agenda.”

Once the DPJ took over, Campbell made many visits to Tokyo, primarily to persuade Hatoyama’s government not to reverse an agreement with the LDP to reduce the US Marine presence at its primary Okinawa base in Futenma by allowing Washington to build a new facility at Henoko, which is further north on the island. Okinawans had demanded that Futenma be closed after years of violent crimes and rapes by US soldiers and accidents by US aircraft.

The WikiLeaks cables show that Campbell went so far as to tell DPJ officials that their demands on the secret agreements on nuclear weapons could “create a situation that would require the US to respond in a way unhelpful to the alliance.” In another meeting on Okinawa, he said a DPJ proposal for the Marines to redeploy to Guam and leave Okinawa altogether “would not give the US military the flexibility and speed necessary to meet its Security Treaty obligations to Japan” or confront “the dramatic increase in China’s military capabilities.”

In his interview, Hatoyama recalled that Flournoy and Campbell only made their demands to his subordinates, not to him as prime minister. “Obama never requested me directly,” he said. Instead, in a few brief meetings with the US president, Obama told him that any conclusions would be drawn from a US-Japan task force of diplomats and military officials created to deal with outstanding bilateral issues. And that’s what he regrets “the most,” he recalled.

Here’s why. When the DPJ shocked the US government by taking power in 2009, Hatoyama tried valiantly to wrestle control of the state from Japan’s powerful bureaucrats, who traditionally remain in place for years and often retire to take lucrative jobs in the industries they are supposed to oversee. “We said this would be a politician-led administration,” he recalled. “That upset the bureaucrats, not only for this issue but for all others as well.”

That can be seen in their response to the DPJ’s security proposals. In an extraordinary admission, Hatoyama essentially blamed the bureaucrats for spiking his attempts to redefine the US-Japanese alliance. “In reality, LDP administrations were really moved by bureaucrats, who were the real operators,” Hatoyama said. “They were always trying to please the US, trying to guess what they wanted and acting proactively on that.”

One of their tactics, he said, included providing a “fake paper” to him about the strategic importance of the proposed new US base in Henoko; it supposedly claimed that all US bases had to be within 60 nautical miles of sites where the US military stages exercises. But when he as prime minister formally asked the Pentagon if it had a rule like that, “they said no,” he said.

“So what they did was submit a fake paper to a prime minister. And I don’t think it was done by the US at all—it was the bureaucrats, to please the US.” For that reason, “I shouldn’t have gone along” with Obama’s proposals to leave their discussions to the US-Japan task force, he said.

Hatoyama was pushed out after his government acceded to the US demand for the new base at Henoko in 2010, and the DPJ was later disbanded. Henoko is currently being expanded to include new runways that jut into a once-protected natural waterway. But it, too, has been the focus of daily protests and remains a key unresolved issue between Washington and Tokyo.

While in Washington, Hatoyama met with several top lawmakers, including Senators Dianne Feinstein and Bernie Sanders, to discuss the issue. “I’m hoping that opinions from the US might change the course of the government in Japan,” he said. “We need to listen to the voices of the local people.”

Abe, a right-winger whose grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, hounded Korean independence fighters during World War II as a colonial official in Manchuria, was re-elected prime minister in 2012. He is now one of the longest-ruling leaders in Japan’s postwar history. Both he and the US government continue to insist that Henoko is the “only alternative” to the US base at Futenma.

And on Korea, Abe has become Trump’s closest ally in the North Korea crisis. Once the Olympics end, the interplay between Trump and Abe, on the one hand, and Trump and Moon Jae-in, on the other, will largely determine the course of US policy on North Korea.

Hatoyama is hoping that peace can win out. In contrast to what he calls Abe’s “ridiculous ambition” to be the first postwar prime minister to make Japan a military power, he would like to see Japan take a different road. “My definition of a strong politician is not someone who can create a military power,” he said. “It’s someone who can create an environment where you can work cooperatively with neighboring countries.”

So far in Korea, the engagement side seems to be winning. In a wrap-up of the first days of the Olympics, The New York Times concluded that Kim Yo-jong had clearly “outflanked” Vice President Pence “in the game of diplomatic image-making.” Possibly in response to that fiasco, Pence suggested to the Post on his return flight to Washington that the United States would be willing to talk to the North even while its pressure campaign was “ongoing.”

But the offer—which the Post called “an important change” in policy—looked more like Pence trying to overcome the ridicule he endured over his petulant behavior in Pyeongchang. That’s because he still said US economic and military policy won’t change “until [North Korea] takes clear steps toward denuclearization.” To many analysts, that’s a nonstarter.

“As long as the United States insists on North Korea abandoning nuclear missiles altogether, it will be difficult to get North Korea to the negotiating table,” Hatoyama said.

On February 9, in a scenario that would have been unimaginable to most Americans a month ago, North and South Korean athletes will march into the opening ceremonies of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games under a single blue-and-white flag meant to signify the symbolic unity of a country divided since 1945.

The historic event will culminate an intense month of diplomacy and delicate negotiations that began on January 1. That was when North Korea’s “Supreme Leader,” Kim Jong-un, accepted South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s longstanding invitation to participate in the Games, the first Olympics to be hosted by South Korea since the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul.

But the competition will take place in the shadow of a deepening confrontation between the United States and North Korea over Kim’s nuclear and missile program. That conflict, which seemed to reach a breaking point in January with a false alarm about a pending missile attack on Hawaii, has moved the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1953, according to the famous “Doomsday Clock” calculated every year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

“With every threat, every reckless or contradictory tweet from the Commander-in-Chief of our military, we get a little bit further from a diplomatic solution and a little bit closer to war,” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War combat veteran from Illinois, said in a January speech at Georgetown University shortly after returning from a trip to South Korea.

Trump upped the ante Tuesday night in a State of the Union address that completely ignored the hopeful drama about to unfold in South Korea.

Instead, his speech demonized North Korea as a “depraved” regime, echoing language previous presidents have used before launching wars. Taking a page from recent claims by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump announced that North Korea’s “reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons could very soon threaten our homeland,” and described his “campaign of maximum pressure to prevent that from happening.”

Rewriting history once again, Trump repeated his criticism of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations for trying to use diplomacy to resolve the crisis. “Past experience has taught us that complacency and concessions only invite aggression and provocation,” Trump said. “I will not repeat the mistakes of past administrations that got us into this dangerous position.”

His speech was preceded by weeks of reports that Trump and his advisers, led by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, are seriously contemplating taking military action—referred to as a “bloody-nose strike”—to punish Kim for his nuclear threats and the human-rights violations of his government.

The message was underscored hours before Trump took the podium, when The Washington Post reported that Victor Cha, a former official with the Bush administration, had been rejected as US ambassador to South Korea.

The reason, White House sources told the Post, was that Cha, a hawkish official with the Pentagon-backed Center for Strategic and International Studies, had told the White House that he disagreed with the proposals for an attack. “This story is causing shock-waves in South Korea,” Anna Fifield, the Post’s Korea correspondent and Tokyo bureau chief, immediately tweeted. “Victor Cha is well known there and people were reassured he was being sent.”

Cha essentially confirmed that the “bloody nose” strategy was being considered when he wrote an op-ed for the Post that warned Trump against escalating the crisis “into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans.”

After sketching out an aggressive alternative that would include expanding maritime interdiction of North Korean vessels, Cha concluded, “Force will be necessary to deal with North Korea if it attacks first, but not through a preventive strike that could start a nuclear war.”

Back in Seoul, which sits just 30 miles from the border, where any war would begin, the two-week “Olympic Truce” with Pyongyang is seen by many citizens as a chance to show that dialogue and reconciliation is possible, even under such tense conditions.

Under the agreements reached with Pyongyang since January 1, the two sides have formed a joint women’s hockey team that will play as “Korea,” and they’re planning a series of cultural events in Seoul and other cities where North Korean artists, including its famous, all-women Moranbong pop group, will entertain their southern cousins (one of its favorites: the theme from Rocky).

Shortly after the first official Northern delegation came to Seoul to discuss these arrangements, President Moon pleaded for international support for the Olympic peace process. “We must work to make the South-North Korea dialogue lead to talks between the United States and North Korea,” he declared in a weekly address on January 22. “Only then can we peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear issue.”

Kim Jong-un’s government was equally excited—not about nuclear negotiations, which it spurned in the initial Olympic talks with South, but about the joint festivities.

“It’s a gesture for peace and security in the region,” a North Korean diplomat at the United Nations told People magazine in a rare example of outreach to the North by a US media outlet. “The Games are a good step for the national reconciliation of all Koreans.” Altogether, 22 North Korean Olympians will be competing in Pyeongchang.

Not everything with the Games has gone smoothly, however. Some South Koreans, especially younger citizens, were unhappy about the joint hockey team, whose formation was announced without any advance notice to the team or its coach, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.

The critics say that “being forced to come together at the last minute [could] damage the existing team’s camaraderie and can be seen, especially from the outside, as preferential treatment being given to unqualified North Korean athletes,” Kim Haeyoon, a freelance journalist living in Seoul, wrote in The Diplomat.

Still, Moon’s Olympic outreach and his attempts to ease tensions with Pyongyang have been broadly accepted by young people like herself, the 20-something Kim told The Nation.

In an interview, she said some of the resentment about the joint team stemmed from the competitive nature of South Korean society. “Preferential treatment exclusively given to certain group of people can easily antagonize young people here, who are struggling every day to excel in schools and job markets,” she said.

Public opinion bears this out. In one of the first polls conducted after the announcement of the North’s participation, nearly 80 percent favored the decision. But after the flap about the hockey team, a majority, 58.7 percent, opposed formation of the joint hockey team, while 37.7 percent supported it. But on the issue of the North and South marching under one flag into the Olympics, there was majority support, with 51 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed.

Meanwhile, despite the pro-engagement mood in the country, South Korea’s vocal right wing has been busily castigating Moon for his opening to the North. In a sign of the right’s intense hostility to any sign of cooperation with the North, conservative protesters tried to disrupt the public inspections of South Korean facilities by Northern officials visiting Seoul and attacked the Moon government as dominated by communist sympathizers.

The opposition to the North is led by Hong Jun-pyo, leader of the Liberty Korea Party, which split from the ruling party last year over the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye. He was the leading conservative in the presidential elections last May, garnering 24 percent of the vote to Moon’s 41 percent in the five-way race.

“The Pyeongchang Olympics are being twisted into the Pyongyang Olympics through the manipulation of Kim Jong-un’s disguised peace offensive,” Hong declared early on, adding that Moon wants to manipulate the Olympics politically so he can “pass a socialist constitution.” (“Such ridiculous red-baiting defies logic,” the liberal Hankyoreh editorialized in response. “These attempts to present the Olympics as a communist event because of North Korea’s participation could make us an international laughingstock.”)

The dissent, which has been unusual for the popular Moon, has been seized on and exaggerated by the US media as a sign of Korean hostility to his engagement policies toward the North. Last week, for example, The New York Times ran a story about the response to a North Korean delegation to Seoul entitled “Protesters in Seoul Burn Image of Kim Jong-un During North Koreans’ Visit.” The alarming headline and the story itself gave a false impression of a near-riot of Seoul citizens against the North.

But the piece, which was datelined Hong Kong, failed to mention that the fiery protest involved only a handful of people and was led by Representative Cho Won-jin of the one-seat Patriotic Party of Korea. Apparently the reporter didn’t know that Cho’s party is so extreme that it broke with the conservative Hong last year over Park’s impeachment and considers Moon to be an illegitimate president.

Partly in response to the rightist protests, on Tuesday North Korea said it was canceling a joint cultural event the two governments were planning in the North to celebrate the Olympics in early February. This action “brings inter-Korean relations, which have been showing signs of improvement recently, to a crucial crossroads,” Hankyoreh reported.

Pyongyang’s cancellation was also a response to South Korean officials’ saying they were concerned about reports that North Korea was planning to stage a military parade in Pyongyang on February 8. That date, one day before the opening ceremony at the Olympics, marks the anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army.

The parade “is likely to be a quite intimidating event involving a significantly large number of soldiers and nearly all the weapons at North Korea’s disposal,” South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon declared. But in a significant aside that seemed to indicate Seoul’s deeper interest in peace talks, he noted that the US-South Korean military exercises opposed by the North had been rescheduled for March 25. “The key is to lead the US and North Korea to initiate dialogue under those circumstances and during that time,” he said.

There were no such signals from Washington, where the events in Korea were used by hard-liners to buttress their belief that Moon is being manipulated by Kim Jong-un. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham set the pace on January 17, when he declared that “the signals” South Korea is sending to North Korea are “undercutting what Trump is trying to do.”

In fact, like Trump’s speech, the White House has by and large ignored the Korean Olympics thaw. In January, just as the Olympics talks were getting under way, the Pentagon and the US Air Force deployed nuclear-armed B-52 Stratofortress bombers and B-2 Stealth bombers to the US base in Guam, where the US fleet of conventional B1-B bombers has been stationed during the crisis.

This was only the second time in history that the three kinds of aircraft had been together in one place, Navy Times reported. They are there to reinforce the US Pacific Command’s “continuous bomber presence mission” aimed at North Korea, US officials said.

The same day, Representative Mac Thornberry, the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, informed reporters that the US military was conducting “very serious” training for a military conflict with Pyongyang. The Trump administration is “looking at what would be involved with military options when it comes to North Korea,” he said.

Vice President Mike Pence, who will attend the Pyeongchang Games as Trump’s representative, added to the tensions on January 23 by accusing North Korea of trying to “hijack the Olympics…in terms of optics and messaging.” His comment, and the Pentagon’s deployment of its nuclear-armed strategic bombers to the region, prompted a senior North Korean official to contact the Washington Post journalist who reported it, Jenna Johnson.

In an interview with Johnson, Pak Song-il, North Korea’s UN ambassador, accused Trump of advocating “confrontation” at what he called “the sacred place of Olympic Games.” He added, “This only shows how weak their motives are and how shameful their ways of thinking are.”

Meanwhile, even as Trump was speaking Tuesday night, cooperation on the peninsula continued. On Wednesday, the two Koreas announced they will stage four joint taekwondo demonstrations in South Korea on February 7 to celebrate the Olympics. “The North Korean squad will travel to the South by land, across the border,” Yonhap reported.

Symbolically, that crossing will speak volumes: That border is the most militarized dividing line in the world today.

During a week when the two Koreas are finalizing plans for an Olympics truce, foreign ministers from a dozen countries that fought in the Korean War gather in Vancouver, Canada, for an unusual summit organized by the United States and Canada to “demonstrate international solidarity” with diplomatic efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

A principal goal of the summit, US officials say, is to win support for an aggressive program of maritime interdiction to prevent the Kim Jong-un government in North Korea from evading UN-imposed sanctions on oil, textiles, and other products. The ministerial summit was initiated in December by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will also join the meeting.

But the summit could be upstaged by 16 women representing peace groups from the United States, Canada, and other countries involved in its planning. They have come to Vancouver to press for diplomatic and economic initiatives to peacefully resolve the Korea crisis and ultimately bring a formal end to the Korean War through a peace treaty. That devastating conflict, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, ended in an armistice agreement that stopped the fighting but left the country in a perpetual state of war.

The feminists’ presence has already generated attention. On Monday, the women’s delegation was received by Canada’s Freeland and later met with Tillerson’s aides from the State Department. That evening, they held a candlelight vigil near the meeting venue and called for more women to be included in the peace and negotiating process.

“We feel it’s really important to hold these foreign ministers to account,” Christine Ahn, the founder and international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ, the prime mover behind the “Vancouver Women’s Forum,” told The Nation. “The countries that sent soldiers, doctors, and nurses to Korea as part of the US-controlled UN Command also have a responsibility to finally end the Korean War.”

“A naval blockade is not diplomacy,” added Ewa Eriksson-Fortier, a Swedish member of Women Cross DMZ who spent 30 years with the International Red Cross, including two years in 2008 and 2009 as the Head of Country Delegation in Pyongyang. Many communities in North Korea, Eriksson-Fortier said, “still basically live without proper water and sanitation.” The new UN sanctions, particularly the restrictions on oil shipments, will impact those communities by limiting their ability to transport food, take people to hospitals, and use machinery needed to dig out river beds flooded with mud and silt caused by deforestation, she said.

“I see the oil embargo as extremely worrying,” she said in an interview from Vancouver. “Our task is to have a broad dialogue with different countries with a history in Korea.” She added, “I believe the Canadian government is sincere in their intent to promote a peaceful resolution.” Sweden, which with Switzerland runs the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission created in 1953 to supervise the armistice, also sent a deputy foreign minister to Canada.

Washington and Ottawa organized the summit as a way to strengthen international support for the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and military might, which they believe will force North Korea to the negotiating table. The event came about after US discussions with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been actively seeking a way for Canada to help resolve the escalating confrontation between the United States and North Korea.

Last November, Trudeau suggested that one path could be working with Cuban President Raúl Castro, who has good relations with both Canada and North Korea. That possibility “was a topic of conversation” when he met with Castro in 2016, he told reporters. While Canada has voted in favor of the tough UN sanctions on North Korea, Trudeau has also obliquely criticized US policy by suggesting that Canada can take a different approach from the “unpredictable ways [and] military threats” employed by President Trump to pressure the North.

Trudeau’s potential role as peacemaker was given credence on Friday in a report on CBC News suggesting that Canada hopes to use the summit to mount a “robust international show of support for non-military options” that would also be “aimed at the White House.” Quoting sources “with direct knowledge” of the preparations for the meeting, CBC said the Canadian organizers believe that support could help Tillerson “build his case for diplomacy against hawkish elements within the Trump administration.”

But that’s not the view from the State Department. In a briefing for reporters, also on Friday, Tillerson’s director of policy planning, Brian Hook, said the foreign ministers would discuss ways to stop North Korea from evading sanctions, including the possibility of interdicting North Korean vessels on the high seas. The goal is to create “practical mechanisms to exert continued pressure on the Kim regime while demonstrating that diplomatic options remain open and viable,” he said.

Hook said the countries attending the ministerial were UN “sending states” that provided troops and humanitarian aid to the UN Command during the 1950–53 war. That command, which is still run by the Pentagon through United States Forces Korea, had a peak strength of 932,964 on July 27, 1953, the day the armistice was signed. According to USFK, the other countries that dispatched troops included Colombia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Luxembourg.

Neither China nor Russia will attend the Vancouver meeting. In a statement last Friday, a Chinese foreign ministry official said the US-Canada ministerial is “meaningless” because it doesn’t include all the countries involved in the peace process and reflects “a Cold War mentality that can only create divisions in the international community.” The meeting has also drawn flack inside Canada from critics who believe Trudeau is simply following US dictates. “Most of the countries to be represented in Vancouver are those that sent troops in the Korean War to fight against North Korea,” two analysts wrote in the Toronto Star on January 3. “Might not the North Koreans see this meeting as a step in the formation of a Coalition of the Willing, similar to what preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003?”

That’s exactly what the women’s groups hope to prevent. In addition to Women Cross DMZ, they are the Nobel Women’s Initiative, organized by six Nobel laureates; Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, a nonpartisan group that works closely with the UN; the United Church of Canada, a major Protestant denomination; and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which was established in 1915. Two women from South Korea representing the National Council of Churches in Korea and the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, a powerful citizens’ group, are also at the meeting.

In a joint statement released before the meeting, the women said their objective is to urge the foreign ministers to “prepare the table for a diplomatic peace process,” adding that the outcome of the official summit “must support the recent breakthroughs in inter-Korean rapprochement, not derail it.”

In a detailed proposal released on Monday, they recommended that the foreign ministers embrace dialogue “without preconditions” with “all relevant parties…to work towards achieving a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.” A key passage urged UN members to “abandon support for the strategy of maximum pressure, lift sanctions which have deleterious effects on the North Korean people, work toward the normalization of diplomatic relations, remove barriers to citizen-to-citizen engagement, and strengthen humanitarian cooperation.”

When the ministerial opens on Tuesday, the women will present Tillerson and Freeland with a gift of Korean quilt work “to set the table for peace talks,” Ahn said. She said she is hopeful, because Canada also had “a strong track record in helping to normalize relations between the US and Cuba” during the Obama administration.

In 2015, Women Cross DMZ led a historic visit to North and South Korea that crossed the border near the truce village on the demilitarized zone where the current bilateral talks are taking place.

Despite the naysaying of US hawks more interested in war than in a negotiated peace, representatives from North and South Korea met today at the border village of Panmunjom. With surprising ease, they hammered out an agreement that will allow the North to participate fully in next month’s Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

The surprise talks were led by Cho Myoung-gyon, the minister of unification for the Moon Jae-in government in Seoul, and Ri Son-gwon, chairman of North Korea’s “Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland.”

During the discussions, which were beamed live on closed-circuit television to state officials in both Seoul and Pyongyang, Ri agreed to send what he called a “high-level delegation” to the Games, which will last from February 9 to 25. It will be the North’s first participation in the Olympics in eight years.

The delegation will include athletes, a cheering squad, an art troupe, a Taekwondo demonstration team, and a group of reporters, South Korea’s Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung told reporters. The North also “proposed resolving issues regarding inter-Korean ties through dialogue and negotiations for peace and unity on the peninsula,” he said.

The South, in turn, proposed that the two Koreas march together for the Games’ opening and closing ceremonies (it will be the basis for the next discussion) and that they resume reunions of families divided by the Korean War (also undecided). The talks were “a New Year’s gift to the entire nation,” North Korea’s Ri said.

The meeting, one of the most highly anticipated events of 2018, was the first bilateral discussion between the two sides of the Korean Peninsula since December 2015. It also marked the first direct contact between Kim Jong-un’s government and Moon, a progressive human-rights lawyer who was elected president of South Korea last May.

The talks fulfilled promises Moon made during that presidential campaign, when he ran on a platform to restore bilateral diplomacy with North Korea as a way to de-escalate the conflict over its nuclear-weapons program. But his initial calls for bilateral military and Red Cross talks was rebuffed by Pyongyang, which considers him too close to Washington.

The impetus for the talks came in Kim’s annual New Year’s speech on January 1, when he proposed direct discussions with Seoul “over the issue of improving inter-Korean relations by our nation itself,” with the goal to “defuse the current military tension.” Kim also welcomed the upcoming Winter Olympics as a “good occasion for demonstrating our nation’s prestige,” and said he wanted to send a delegation.

Moon accepted the offer almost immediately, and days later the two countries reopened a telephonic “hot line” that was shut down by the North in 2016. Its restoration “creates an environment where communication will be possible at all times,” Moon’s press secretary proudly told reporters in Seoul.

In an important step toward relieving tension at today’s talks, the North Koreans also said they had opened a separate military hotline that had been severed in a dispute over the impeached President Park Geun-hye’s controversial decision to close the jointly run Kaesong Industrial Zone just north of the DMZ. It was the last vestige of the détente-like “Sunshine Policy” that reigned in South Korea from 1998 to 2008.

ut while the bilateral talks were widely praised in South Korea’s media, the US media seemed like a deer caught in the headlights from the first announcement of the breakthrough. Unclear how to respond to a possible outbreak of peace, the press immediately zeroed in on the section of Kim’s New Year’s speech where he declared that his “nuclear forces are capable of thwarting and countering” anything from the United States. Kim also reminded Washington that the “nuclear button” is on his office desk “all the time.”

Although the Supreme Leader left out some of the harsh anti-US language he’s used in previous declarations, the implied threat became the story for nearly every US media outlet covering his New Year’s speech. At CNN, for example, reporter Brian Todd went on the air to warn Wolf Blitzer that the prospect of talks was dangerous because it could mask a North Korean military attack during the Olympics. In some broadcasts, Kim’s offer to talk, and Moon’s quick endorsement, were barely mentioned.

Kim’s reference to his nuclear arsenal also drew a typical response from President Trump. He took to Twitter to declare that he, too, had a “button,” but it was “much bigger & more powerful” than Kim’s. His childish taunt quickly led to speculation about his state of mind and fitness to be president, a topic that dominated the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s first media briefing of the year.

The furor extended well into the next week, with the publication of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s tell-all book about Trump that lifted his most violent threats against North Korea for its title. Someone at the White House—possibly National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster—apparently tried to shift the focus by having Trump claim credit for the apparent thaw between North and South Korea.

“With all of the failed ‘experts’ weighing in, does anybody really believe that talks and dialogue would be going on between North and South Korea right now if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total “might” against the North.” Trump tweeted. By January 6, the president was almost completely on board with the talks.

Asked at a press briefing at Camp David about the potential for negotiations with Kim, he replied: “Sure, I always believe in talking.… absolutely I would do that.” Trump “appeared to be strongly indicating that he would join talks with North Korea after the high-level inter-Korean talks, if the conditions are right,” South Korea’s liberal Hankyoreh concluded.

Meanwhile, after Moon and Trump discussed North Korea’s offer during a phone call, the two governments agreed to delay joint military drills during the Olympics. The temporary halt had been a key demand of South Korea, and helped improve the atmosphere for the upcoming talks with Pyongyang, which notified South Korea that it would join the talks after the halt was announced, according to Yonhap News Agency.

In the lead-up to the talks in Seoul, the mood was close to jubilant. “Hopes are high that inter-Korean relations will improve,” Hankyoreh reported on January 4. “Since Kim delivered his New Year’s address on Jan. 1, North Korea’s actions have been completely aligned with the South’s response.”

But this was definitely not the view in DC, where pundits quickly coalesced around the conventional wisdom that the talks would inevitably divide Washington and Seoul and split the US-Korean military alliance. In the week leading up to Tuesday’s talks, the US media were filled with speculation from former US officials that South Korea was walking into a clever trap laid by the North.

The pace was set early on by The New York Times, in a front-page story on January 1 posted literally hours after Kim’s New Year’s speech. It instantly became the leitmotif for media coverage throughout the week.

Behind Kim’s New Year’s declaration “lies a canny new strategy to initiate direct talks with South Korea in the hope of driving a wedge into its seven-decade alliance with the United States,” reported Choe Sang-Hun and David Sanger, the latter a recipient of dozens of US intelligence leaks about North Korea over the years.

And, they added darkly: “hard-liners” in Seoul and Washington “fear that if dialogue on the Korean Peninsula creates a temporary reprieve from tensions, the enforcement of sanctions could also be relaxed.”

Like Trump’s initial tweets claiming credit, it was as if the South—which first opened unification talks with the North in 1972 and has had two summit meetings in Pyongyang, in 2000 and 2008—has had no experience at this.

In the Choe-Sanger article, the Times cited Robert Litwak—a senior vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars who is well-known in Japan and Korea for his hard-right views on security issues—to back its claim that Kim is seeking to “take the side of the South Koreans, against President Trump.” He was then given a large block of space on the Times’s January 3 op-ed page to spell out his grave concerns for the wayward South Koreans.

“Washington and Seoul should not take Mr. Kim’s bait,” Litwak argued. “Instead, the North Korean offer should be put to the diplomatic test through a united Washington-Seoul front.”

eanwhile, as the prospect of talks increased over the week, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert warned South Korea not to go beyond US guidelines. “Our understanding is that these talks…will be limited to conversations about the Olympics and perhaps some other domestic matters,” she said. Nauert assured the press that South Korea isn’t “going to go off freelancing.”

At the UN, US ambassador Nikki Haley flatly dismissed the potential for progress. “We won’t take any of the talks seriously if they don’t do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea,” she said.

Gen. Vincent Brooks, the commander of the 28,500-strong US Forces Korea, chimed in from Seoul with an admonition to South Korea not to have any illusions about North Korea. “We must keep our expectations at the appropriate level,” he cautioned in a public speech. Under the current structure of the US-South Korea Joint Command, Brooks would command the entire South Korean army if a war broke out.

Underpinning such thinking is the assumption that neither South nor North Korea has the right to make peace on its own terms.

This was spelled out in remarkably candid admissions to the Times’s Mark Landler from two key figures in the historically bipartisan policy on Korea. They are Michael Green, a top Asia adviser to President George W. Bush who was on the 2002 delegation to Pyongyang that killed the 1994 nuclear agreement with North Korea, and Daniel Russel, the former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration.

In a story titled “As North and South Korea Begin to Talk, Trump Watches From Sidelines,” Green—who is senior vice president and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where his responsibilities include CSIS projects on the two Koreas—declared that the North-South talks somehow created a “dilemma” for the Trump administration.

While assuring that “the default position of the United States should be to support North-South dialogue,” Green added a strong dose of caution. “At the same time, they are understandably nervous about the Moon government, which has some members who are too breathless about the prospects for dialogue.”

The arrogance almost leapt off the page; but an even more imperial attitude came from Russel, who is a senior fellow at the Asia Society. “It is fine for the South Koreans to take the lead, but if they don’t have the U.S. behind them, they won’t get far with North Korea,” he insisted. “And if the South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tensions within the alliance.”

“Leash” is an odd term to describe a relationship with a country that’s supposed to be one of our closest military allies. (After reading these comments, I told reporter Aaron Maté on The Real News that it reflects “thinking that South Korea is sort of operating on its own, as if it’s not a real independent country. That’s a real danger here.”)

The onslaught on negative press continued on January 8, when Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies published an article in Foreign Policy that was audaciously headlined “It’s Time to Bomb North Korea.”

Then, just as the talks were set to begin on January 9, US officials let it be known to The Wall Street Journal that they were “quietly debating” the possibility of what they called a “bloody nose” tactic that would involve a “limited military strike” against North Korea’s nuclear and missiles sites without somehow setting off “an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula.”

Later in the day, Axios posted a story based on the Journal’s report that hit the Internet at almost the exact moment the Panmunjom talks began.

Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Foundation, mocked the timing of the alarming stories. “Looks like officials opposed to any talks with #NorthKorea are leaking these stories to undermine any possible diplomatic solutions,” he tweeted. “But it could backfire, convincing Moon that he can’t trust Trump.”

Yet despite the clear signals of disapproval from US hard-liners, the Moon and Kim governments pressed on, saying they would soon embark on “working-level” talks to discuss the details of the North’s participation in the Olympics, the family visits, and “solve bilateral issues among themselves without relying on outside” forces, according to the Joongang Daily.

“This positive atmosphere raises hopes that if South and North can harness their wisdom, these talks may be a chance to break the vicious cycle of hostility and move toward peace on the peninsula,” Hankyoreh proclaimed.

In a commentary published Tuesday, North Korean state media tweaked the US attitude toward the talks, according to CNN Korea correspondent Will Ripley. The “U.S. should properly choose between the two things: whether it would continue [a] military standoff with [North Korea] to meet its end or peacefully coexist,” the editorial stated.

Dates for the next round of talks are not set. To allow some higher-level North Korean officials to attend the Olympics, Moon’s foreign ministry said Seoul may consider easing some of its sanctions imposed on Pyongyang. That could easily set off another round of acrimony with US officials and Korea hard-liners in Washington.

On Wednesday, however, President Moon himself denied any friction between his government and the Trump administration. In a wide-ranging press conference in Seoul, he praised the US president, saying he deserved “a lot of credit” for helping to create the environments for Tuesday’s meeting. “My government has no intention of easing sanctions unilaterally,” Moon said. “The two issues—improving inter-Korean relations and resolving the North Korean nuclear issue—cannot be separated.”

At a time when US officials bluntly warn that the risk of a war with North Korea is growing by the day, two unlikely people from different generations and backgrounds have emerged with the experience, political savvy, and moral authority that could help put the United States on a pathway to peace.

One is William Perry, an engineer, military technocrat, and defense investor who came close to launching a cruise missile to destroy North Korea’s one nuclear facility as President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense in 1994. Perry recently revealed that, on his recommendation, Clinton was ready to send an additional 30,000 US troops to the peninsula “to defend against a surprise attack from North Korea and safeguard Seoul,” and that he had lined up South Korean and Japanese support for his plans.

Perry, now 90 and an emeritus professor at Stanford University, was branded a “war maniac” by the government in Pyongyang when he made those threats. Yet he still managed to negotiate a remarkable agreement in 2000—later scuttled by President Bush after it was approved in principle by his Secretary of State, Colin Powell—that would have terminated North Korea’s missile program entirely and led to a non-aggression treaty between the two countries. He has been speaking out about the dangers of nuclear proliferation for years.

The other is Suzanne DiMaggio, a “dialogue practitioner” and senior fellow at the New America Foundation in New York. She has spent years working with the United Nations and related institutions to reduce tensions in the Middle East and help break down barriers between the United States, Iran, and Myanmar. Her Iran dialogue project is now in its sixteenth year.

Since 2015, DiMaggio has led a private initiative involving former US and European officials and diplomats to meet with North Korean officials to discuss peace and security issues. Last month, she broke her silence on those talks and, with former US diplomat Joel Wit, laid out a potential path for a negotiated solution with Pyongyang in an op-ed for The New York Times that was widely circulated in US foreign-policy circles.

Together, Perry and DiMaggio have helped shift the conversation in Washington away from demands for a “preventive war”—a term invoked by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and endorsed by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who has also suggested “decapitation” strikes to eliminate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un—and nudged it toward diplomacy and engagement.

Here’s the gist of their arguments: A devastating conflict can and should be avoided. But that can only happen if the Trump administration postpones its ultimate goal of denuclearization in Korea and instead uses a combination of security guarantees and economic incentives to persuade Kim to freeze his nuclear and missile program where it stands now.

To meet Kim halfway, the United States must consider North Korea’s security concerns by finding ways to end the US “hostile policy” that North Korea continually invokes to rationalize its nuclear-weapons program. Specifically, Pyongyang points to US sanctions, its massive military exercises with South Korea, and the US arsenal of nukes aimed at North Korea.

Once the conditions for an initial freeze are set, the two sides could then decide on the key issues they would tackle for a broader agreement. That would set the stage for a peace process that would allow Kim to shift his focus from military development to raising living standards for North Korea’s 25 million people. Eventually, with North Korea’s security assured—under guarantees backed in part by China, Perry insists—Kim Jong-un could roll back his program. In other words, denuclearization can remain a long-term objective, but the immediate focus must be what is achievable now.

Their strategy runs directly against Trump’s “maximum pressure” of sanctions and military power until Pyongyang buckles under and agrees to negotiate away its nuclear weapons as a condition for entering talks. It also counters the emerging doctrine from McMaster, Pompeo, and their supporters that conventional deterrence, as practiced for years against Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons, will not work against North Korea because, as hawks like John Bolton believe, its leaders are both irrational and irresponsible.

President Trump “presents a binary choice: complete capitulation on our part, or we have to take them out,” DiMaggio said at a forum on North Korea last week at the Arms Control Association in Washington. “The longer that we delude ourselves that there is a viable military option, the longer the current course of escalation will persist and the greater the chances of this spiraling into military conflict, either by design or by miscalculation.”

In an interview, DiMaggio explained that she was motivated to speak out by the growing talk of war in Washington at a time when the United States has no official relations with North Korea. Her alarm grew recently when a North Korean official told her that Pyongyang itself is concerned that North Korea and the United States “have no arrangements in place to prevent accidents.”

“That concerns me a great deal,” she told The Nation. “I have a simple philosophy: Negotiating with the enemy can be the hardest thing to do, but it’s not impossible.”

Perry knows that from direct experience. Speaking at the same ACA forum, he said his stance on North Korea flowed out of his regret that previous administrations did not complete the negotiations he and Clinton had started with the 1994 Agreed Framework, which he said “delayed North Korea’s nuclear program for a decade” but was “abandoned by both the US and North Korea” in 2003.

When President Bush, with the backing of Dick Cheney and others, refused to sign the 2000 Clinton agreement, “I was not only disappointed, I was very bitter that all this work and effort had been thrown overboard,” he said. Bush tried again with the “Six-Party Talks,” but those failed as well because, in his view, “while we were talking, [the North Koreans] were building.” Pyongyang exploded its first nuclear device in 2006.

In 2016, before North Korea’s test of its first hydrogen bomb and its stunning accomplishments this year in building ICBMs, Perry said he proposed to the Obama administration that it embark on a diplomatic quest to freeze Kim’s nuclear program; unfortunately, his advice was “never pursued.” Now it’s too late to forestall that program, he says, and as a result North Korea has 20 to 25 atomic weapons and several hundred missiles. “We should never have let them get that arsenal,” said Perry. “I believe we could have averted today’s outcome if we’d concluded that agreement in 2000.”

Both DiMaggio and Perry operate out of a sense of humanitarian realism that recognizes the true nature of North Korea, the limits of American power, and the calamity that another Korean war would bring. “We have to see North Korea as it is, not as we’d like it to be,” Perry said. “Now they have a nuclear arsenal, and they’re very happy with it. To say we want them to give up their arsenal before we talk to them is sheer idiocy.” He added: “I don’t believe North Korea will use nuclear weapons in an unprovoked attack. This regime is ruthless and reckless, but not suicidal.”

But he said force, and the threat of force, won’t work against Pyongyang and its hereditary dictators. “It is easy to antagonize but difficult to intimidate the North Koreans,” he said. “Military exercises intended to threaten the North Koreans do not have a history of effectively tempering their actions.” Diplomacy won’t immediately end its nuclear program, but it “could lower the likelihood of blundering into another war,” he said.

And if a war comes, he warned the ACA audience, it would be “devastating” to Japan and Korea and “could entail World War I and World War II casualties.”

Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, said the work of Perry and DiMaggio is essential because the confrontation with North Korea has reached such a dangerous phase. “There’s a growing chorus in this town that wants to go to war,” Cirincione said in a telephone interview. “There are people who believe we have a real military option, that we can launch limited strikes or a massive first strike, and we could win a new Korean War.”

Some, like Senator Lindsey Graham, acknowledge that millions could die, “but they would die over there,” Cirincione added. “This is incredible, immoral, and insane, yet we still may do it.” In this context, the contributions of both Perry and DiMaggio are crucial. The former defense secretary “is one of the most responsible voices in national security, certainly in Democratic circles but also on a bipartisan basis,” Cirincione said. As for DiMaggio, “What Suzanne does is to say, ‘Look, we have options here, there’s a diplomatic opening, the North Koreans want to talk,” he said. “Let’s not shut them off or insist on preconditions that we won’t negotiate unless they surrender. That won’t work.”

“What’s great about Suzanne and Bill is that they’re very measured, tempered, and thoughtful in their approach,” said Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ, an international group of women with ties to both North and South Korea, in an interview. “There’s an arrogance to many Americans working on Korean issues that neither of them possesses. It makes them approachable and helps create dialogue.”

roponents of engagement have their work cut out for them. Over the past few months, as Kim has continued to defy UN and US sanctions by testing his nuclear and missile capabilities, the United States has responded by ratcheting up its military exercises with South Korea and issuing unprecedented threats to destroy the entire country if Kim refuses to dismantle his nuclear weapons program.

President Trump is “not going to accept this regime threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon,” McMaster recently declared.

To turn up the pressure, last week the Pentagon and its South Korean counterpart launched a massive air exercise on the peninsula. It involved about 12,000 personnel and hundreds of advanced aircraft, bombers, and stealth fighters, and included drills to simulate attacks against North Korean missile launch sites and nuclear facilities.

The exercises, dubbed “Vigilant Ace,” were launched in response to North Korea’s test last month of its most powerful ICBM yet, a Hwasong-15 that analysts said could fly more than 8,000 miles and potentially hit any city in North America.

As the drills began, the Pentagon allowed reporters from CBS News and other networks to “embed” themselves in US fighter aircraft based in Japan and South Korea that would lead any attack on the North, underscoring the immediacy of a war to the American public. And on the cable networks, giddy war hawks explain how such attacks could work and discounted any talk of diplomacy or negotiations. “Turn on Fox News, and all you’ll hear are people talking like we have no choice,” said Cirincione.

Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly planning to ditch Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has been the administration’s lone voice for diplomacy along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Tillerson would be replaced by the CIA’s Pompeo. “I’m told that’s going to happen,” said Cirincione of the swap. He recalled hearing Pompeo at last July’s Aspen Security Forum propose “separating” Kim Jong-un from his nuclear program. “That certainly sounded like a decapitation strike to many of us.”

“There’s actually some officials who believe there is a window for military action over the next few months,” DiMaggio told me. “I wish there was more public debate about this issue.”

iMaggio, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Italian father, developed her expertise in negotiations working with organizations affiliated with the UN, including the United Nations Association of the USA. In 2002, she began facilitating what became a high-level dialogue with Iran, and eventually served as the coordinator of the informal talks that led to the sweeping nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015. Toward the end of the Iran talks, she was approached through “third parties” by North Korean diplomats who had heard about that work.

“It seemed like a good time to get involved,” she told me. Since then, she and representatives from US and European nongovernmental organizations have met with officials from the North in Pyongyang, Oslo, and elsewhere as part of a process called “Track 1.5.”

It involves diplomats from North Korea and former US military and government officials, such as retired US Ambassador Thomas Pickering (in diplomatic parlance, “Track 1” refers to official government-to-government talks, while “Track 2” talks involve NGOs from both sides; “1.5” means officials on one side, NGOs on the other). The last such meeting took place November 20-21 in Stockholm, just before North Korea’s latest ICBM test, and were organized by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

In October, DiMaggio shared a stage at a nonproliferation conference in Moscow with Madame Choe Son-hui, the head of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s North America bureau. Choe, a key participant in the Track 1.5 talks, is well established in the North as the daughter of the former vice premier for Kim Il-sung, the country’s first leader, and is said by several experts to have direct access to Kim Jong-un.

Based on discussions with Madame Choe and others, DiMaggio and Wit, the former diplomat, wrote in the Times that the North has entered “the last stage in the development of their nuclear force, implying that they have an endpoint in mind.” After the North test-fired the Hwasong-15 in late November, Kim announced that he had indeed “witnessed the accomplishment of the historic cause of the national nuclear program, the cause of building a missile power.” That led many analysts to the conclusion that Kim was now ready for talks and, as he has pledged, to refocus attention on his country’s beleaguered economy.

“I see that [statement] as a potential opening we should aggressively pursue,” DiMaggio told the ACA meeting. “I would make the case that Kim Jong-un has staked his credibility not only on nuclear development but also on economic development.”

Kim’s announcement, she added, provides a rare opportunity for both sides “to now come to the table from a position of strength.” The upcoming Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, may provide the United States with an opportunity to “tone down” its military exercises with the South and create the atmosphere for talks, she said—a possibility that’s already being considered in Washington and Seoul.

As for North Korea’s concern about the US “hostile policy,” DiMaggio told me there are “potentially negotiable points,” including sanctions and military exercises, that present a “way forward. This is not pie in the sky.” She calls the potential US steps “adjustments”—“not stopping the exercises, but certainly finding a way to tone them down. And of course economic incentives would be another thing to offer.”

When it comes to US military concessions, Perry explained that conventional exercises in which the United States and South Korea work together to “strengthen their ability to respond to an attack” are “not only legitimate, but—probably under the [current] circumstances—are necessary.”

On the other hand, some exercises are “designed to threaten or intimidate the North” and are “quite counterproductive,” he added. As an example, he pointed to recent flights in which the Pentagon flew nuclear bombers “right up to the North Korean borders” and then turned away. Actions like that “are dangerous” and should be avoided, he said.

Cirincione, in his interview, agreed with that sentiment but took it a step further. Through its own actions and threats, the Trump administration “has created this crisis,” he said. “It’s not like the Japanese fleet is steaming toward Pearl Harbor and war will be upon us no matter what we do.” The risks of war are growing, he said, “not because events are driving us but because US policy is.”

That’s exactly what DiMaggio and Perry are trying to reverse. The Trump administration, DiMaggio says, “must move from its dithering approach to a real strategy.”

Even before President Trump arrived Monday night at Osan Airbase in South Korea for the second stop on his five-nation tour of East Asia, thousands of Koreans fearing another war had flooded the streets in eight Korean cities to tell the militaristic president to go home.

The unpopular leader may have gotten the message: In his first public remarks in Seoul, Trump made sure to emphasize his interest in negotiating an agreement with Kim Jong-un over his nuclear-weapons program. “It makes sense for North Korea to come to the table and make a deal that is good for the people of North Korea and for the world,” Trump declared at a news conference. “I do see certain movement.”

Koreans, however, see movement toward war. The protests peaked over the weekend in Seoul, where a coalition of antiwar, trade-union, and civil-society groups organized a “No Trump, No War National Rally” that ended with a march to the US embassy. They demanded that Trump stop his war threats against the North and end the massive military exercises the Pentagon holds with South Korea twice a year.

“We’re opposed to this visit to South Korea by Trump, who is inciting a crisis of war on the Korean Peninsula,” members of the coalition declared in a press conference Saturday in front of the embassy. “I hope that American citizens pay attention to what’s happening here,” Kim Hyun-a, a teacher attending the protest with her students, told The Washington Post. “War brings tragedy.”

Hundreds more were in the streets when Trump arrived. But the antiwar demonstrators—who vastly outnumbered a crowd of right-wing, pro-Trump Koreans the Post felt compelled to highlight—were met by the largest mobilization of police since President Moon Jae-in came to power last May (during the visit, most anti-Trump actions were banned, and the huge police presence could be seen live on CNN and other networks broadcasting from Seoul).

Moon is the progressive politician who once visited North Korea during the brief period of détente in 2007 and was elected on a wave of citizen power known as the “candlelight revolution” (see his May interview with The Nation here). Unlike Trump, Moon has emphasized dialogue and engagement as a way to defuse tensions with Pyongyang. And he has continually warned against the dangers of a war and cautioned the United States not to take military action without South Korean involvement and approval.

But as the crisis on the peninsula has deepened with North Korea’s stream of missile and nuclear tests and the Pentagon’s retaliatory flights of B1-B bombers and F-35 fighter jets into Korean airspace, Moon has disappointed many of his followers by endorsing Trump’s matrix of intensified sanctions and unprecedented military pressure to push the North to give up its nuclear ambitions. He further endeared himself to Trump on Tuesday morning when he made a surprise visit to US Army Garrison Humphreys to welcome the president (when USAG’s expansion is completed in 2020, it will be the largest American military base in the world).

Today “marks the first time the two presidents of South Korea and the United States have come together to a U.S. military base in South Korea to encourage their troops,” Moon declared at a lunch for Trump and South Korean and US soldiers, according to Yonhap News. No fewer than three US aircraft carriers were in the region as Trump touched down, and over the weekend the Pentagon ordered B1-B Lancer bombers stationed in Guam to make another sweep through Korean skies before Trump arrived (“we hope to God we never have to use” these weapons, Trump said in Seoul).

These actions have touched off strong criticism of Moon’s support for the US president. “The current U.S.-South Korea alliance is based on South Korea’s subordination and is a war alliance that is far too dangerous,” Kim Chang-han of the Minjung (“Peoples”) Party, which was formed to oppose Moon’s ruling Democratic Party, declared at the Seoul rally, according to Zoom in Korea, a progressive news site.

In solidarity on Monday, several hundred US, Korean, and Japanese civil-society organizations released a joint statement “calling upon their governments to avert war with North Korea through policies that could lead to regional peace,” according to Korean-American activist Christine Ahn.

The dangers confronting the peninsula were underscored in Washington in the weeks leading up to Trump’s departure for Asia (he is also visiting Japan, China, and the Philippines). Over the past month, Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster has underscored the administration’s tepid interest in diplomacy by threatening military action to stop North Korea’s nuclear program.

Trump “is not going to permit this rogue regime, Kim Jong-un, to threaten the United States with a nuclear weapon” and is willing “to do anything necessary to prevent that from happening,” McMaster recently told Fox News. He pushed that line even further in a November 3 interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK. “If necessary, [Trump’s] prepared to use military force,” McMaster said. “They really have no other option but to denuclearize.”

But McMaster and Trump have not been telling the full story of what a war to end Kim’s nuclear forces would entail. Last weekend, the Pentagon revealed the enormous stakes involved when it informed two members of Congress that nothing less than a US ground invasion could locate and secure all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and prevent them from being used. (To my knowledge, that’s the first time the term “ground invasion” has been used in the context of Korea since 1953.)

A few days earlier, the Congressional Research Service delved deep into the true costs of war, predicting that “tens of thousands” of people in South Korea could die from North Korean artillery in just the first hours of a conflict. “A protracted conflict—particularly one in which North Korea uses its nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons—could cause enormous casualties on a greater scale, and might expand to include Japan and U.S. territories in the region,” CRS said.

In any case, the drift toward war has definitely captured the attention of peace and disarmament activists in Washington. On Monday, Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry, burst into anger at the tail end of an otherwise quiet discussion on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“If you don’t pay attention, we will go to war,” he warned, pointing to the predictions from top military experts in The New York Times on Sunday that the chances of a US war with North Korea are between 30 and 50 percent. “You can feel the winds of war in this town right now,” he said. Worse, chances are high—some say 10 percent—that a war would not be restricted to conventional weapons. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t go nuclear,” he said. In terms of casualties, “we’re talking Korean War, World War II” levels.

Like many observers, Cirincione argued that Trump’s aggressive actions and fiery statements—particularly his threat to “totally destroy North Korea”—have pushed the situation to a breaking point and given the American people false hopes that an air war against North Korea would succeed. “We’ve been living in a world of counterinsurgency and special operations,” he said in a stinging attack on Trump and hubris generated by the high-tech US style of war. “Some Americans think we can do a ground invasion,” he said. “Well, that would bring Korean War levels of combat.”

Trump’s threats to attack North Korea were the basis for new legislation introduced by Representative John Conyers Jr. and Senator Ed Markey. Written by Conyers, a Korean War veteran, the bill would require congressional approval for any military strike on North Korea by “restricting funds available to the Department of Defense” or any other agency from being used to launch a strike without prior approval of the House and Senate. It has over 60 co-signers, according to Conyers’s staff.

The pressing need for the bill was outlined last Friday in a press conference in front of the Capitol attended by about a dozen Democratic lawmakers.

“There is no military option; there is no nuclear option,” declared Senator Jeff Merkley. Representative Barbara Lee, the only member of the House to vote against the 2001 authorization for the Afghanistan war and the daughter of a Korean War veteran, said legislation was necessary because “President Trump’s war-mongering has been really disastrous. We will put some checks on the government not to do a first strike.”

Meanwhile, Seoul was holding its collective breath about Trump’s upcoming speech to the National Assembly, where the left (including the new Minjung Party) holds a substantial number of seats. “Depending on what Trump says during the address, his message to North Korea could send shockwaves across the Korean Peninsula, and the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) could also come under attack,” the progressive Hankyoreh reported.

But so far Trump has held his tongue. Addressing US and Korean troops in his first hour in Seoul, he was sanguine, and his tone “almost blithe,” the Times reported. “Ultimately, it will all work out,” he declared, as Gen. Vincent Brooks, the US commander at Camp Humphreys, stood by his side. “It always works out. It has to work out.” Millions of Koreans hope so as well.

“There’s battle lines being drawn,” Stephen Stills sang in the 1960s song that became an anthem for the anti-Vietnam War movement. Today those same words can be applied to the escalating confrontation between the United States and North Korea over the latter’s nuclear-weapons and missile programs.

That conflict will be front and center when President Donald Trump pays his first state visits to Japan and South Korea in November. In Japan, where Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—Trump’s closest friend in the region—just won a smashing reelection victory, Trump will be honored with an audience with the country’s aging emperor and his usual golf game with the hawkish Abe.

But in Korea, where there is far more ambivalence about Trump’s policies, antiwar groups and unions—many of which backed President Moon Jae-in’s election campaign last spring—are planning major rallies to greet him. As a precursor to what’s to come, South Korean activists this week in the southern port of Pusan handed out leaflets reading “US Troops Go Home!” to US soldiers arriving for another round of military exercises with the South Korean military.

They have good reason to be concerned. Listening carefully to the Trump administration and the government of Kim Jong-un over the last week, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the two sides are trying to signal the limits of their policies—and their patience. Nobody is sure whether these statements are a prelude to the diplomacy long promised by Trump’s national-security team, or the opening salvos of what will be a bloody and destructive war if the situation explodes.

Trump, who appears to have stopped tweeting about Kim, is leaving the policy pronouncements to H.R. McMaster, his national-security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, his CIA director.

Both men have been warning for weeks about the possibility of a risky “preventive” war that would theoretically destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile capability and—in a strategy known as “decapitation”—take out Kim and his military leadership team in Pyongyang. (As if to underscore that threat, a team from the Navy’s SEAL Team Six, which assassinated Osama bin Laden, was aboard the nuclear submarine USS Michigan as it participated in recent bilateral maritime drills with South Korea.)

Last week, in separate appearances before the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, McMaster and Pompeo made clear that Trump’s endgame is the termination of the North’s nuclear program, by any means necessary. Trump “is not going to accept this regime threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon,” McMaster told the organization, which has supplanted the American Enterprise Institute as the spiritual home of the neocons.

McMaster also ruled out the suggestion, made by some former US officials, that Trump should accept the North as a nuclear power, like Pakistan and Israel, and build a system of deterrence similar to the containment policies of the Cold War.

“Well, accept and deter is unacceptable,” said McMaster, who first gained his fame as a counterinsurgency innovator in Iraq during the Bush “surge” of 2008. “And so, this puts us in a situation where we are in a race to resolve this short of military action.” He repeated his bottom line twice: “The only acceptable objective is denuclearization.”

Pompeo signaled that US intelligence has concluded that the North is closer than ever to building a capability to place a nuclear weapon on an ICBM and lob it great distances. “I expect they will be closer in five months than they are today, absent a global effort to push back against them,” he said, adding that “from a US policy perspective, we ought to behave as if we are on the cusp of them achieving that objective.”

He also argued that the United States viewed North Korea as a dangerous threat even if its rockets can’t reach the continental United States. “There are enormous US interests in South Korea and Japan and in Asia, as well,” he said, speaking of the vast string of US Navy, Air Force, and Marine bases that ring North Korea.

But, in an odd aside for a man threatening war, he added that “Intelligence isn’t perfect, especially in a place like North Korea,” making it possible that the United States could be “off by months or a couple of years in our understanding.” (“Hell of a thing for anyone in this [administration] to be considering a first strike on North Korea while the CIA director notes intel ‘isn’t perfect,’” Ankit Panda, a senior editor at The Diplomat, tweeted in response.)

The intense focus by McMaster and Pompeo on military action has led many observers to wonder whether Trump has decided to abandon the negotiations promised since the beginning of the crisis by his top officials at the Pentagon and the State Department, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson.

In August, they co-authored a highly unusual op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which they essentially offered to open negotiations with Kim without preconditions, including the North’s immediate abandonment of nuclear weapons. Talks were possible, they said, if Kim would “signal his desire to negotiate in good faith” by ceasing North Korea’s tests and missile launches for a period of time. However, it’s unclear that such an offer is on the table any longer, even as both Mattis and Tillerson continue to insist that diplomacy is their chosen route.

For its part, the North, which has recently taken to calling Trump “mentally deranged,” has rejected the idea of total denuclearization and instead argued that the United States should make the “right choice” by recognizing it as a nuclear state. That would lead to a “way out” of the current standoff, Choe Son-hui, the director-general of the North American department of North Korea’s foreign ministry, told a recent conference in Moscow attended by several Americans.

South Korean officials who were there told the Yonhap wire service that Choe stated that the North “will never give up its nuclear weapons as long as the US’ hostile policy, including military activities, sanctions and pressure, continue.” Further details of her speech were broadcast on the Russian-state media outlet RT.

“Our weapons are designed for the protection of our homeland from the constant nuclear threat from the US,” Choe said, adding that her government “won’t supply nuclear weapons to third parties, notwithstanding its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).” Moreover, “despite quitting NPT, we are committed to the idea of non-proliferation of our nuclear weapons.”

Choe’s emphasis on the United States’ “hostile policy” offers a ray of hope, says Suzanne DiMaggio, a former United Nations official and a senior fellow at New America who spoke on the same Moscow panel as Choe. In a long string of tweets on October 23, DiMaggio wrote that “there is a ‘way out.’ The US needs to abandon its hostile policies” and “[s]top provocative military exercises & nuclear threats.”

The United States’ priority, DiMaggio added, should be to get talks underway by first engaging in bilateral “talks about talks,” without preconditions, so both sides can “clarify positions” and “explore what’s possible.” And “while not abandoning denuclearization as [an] end goal,” the United States “should set it aside” because “it’s currently outside realm of possibility.”

Instead, she urged that the Trump administration focus on “achievable” goals, such as deterrence and non-proliferation, and then “pursue talks to address” the policies the North considers hostile. While “this would be a longer, arduous discussion,” involving a peace agreement and security guarantees, it’s better than the alternative, she offered.

“We are in dangerous territory,” warned DiMaggio, one of a group of former US officials and intelligence officers who met informally with North Korean officials from time to time, in her Twitter analysis. “In Washington policy making circles, talk of kinetic options is increasingly heard,” she continued (kinetic is a term for lethal military operations). “The longer this course persists [or] intensifies, the greater the chances for spiraling into military conflict by design or miscalculation.”

In a speech that will long be remembered for its ugly belligerence, President Trump told the UN General Assembly last week that “if it is forced to defend itself,” the United States was prepared to “totally destroy” North Korea: not just its military, or its leaders, but the entire population. To many heads of state, a threat evoking the destruction of both World War II and the Korean War violated the very idea of the UN as a body dedicated to resolving global tensions with peaceful means.

“This was a bombastic, nationalist speech,” declared Margot Wallstrom, the foreign minister of Sweden, who grimly watched Trump’s outburst with folded arms. “I must say that we consider any type of military solution absolutely inappropriate,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a German newspaper. Experts on North Korea, meanwhile, argued that the speech played right into Kim Jong-un’s hands by proving his claim that the United States is North Korea’s mortal enemy.

“President Trump has handed the North Koreans the sound bite of the century,” wrote Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who is well-known for his critical analyses of North Korea. “That footage will be used time and time and time again on North Korea’s state television channel.”

Sure enough, Kim followed Trump’s speech with what might be called the insult of the century. In an unprecedented move that sent the Internet into a miasma of laughter and shock, he responded personally to Trump’s threat by calling him a “dotard” and a “frightened dog” that “has rendered the world restless through threats and blackmail against all countries in the world.”

“On behalf of the dignity and honor of my state and people and on my own,” Kim said, “I will make the man holding the prerogative of the supreme command in the U.S. pay dearly for his speech.” He told Trump to expect “the highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.” Later, his foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, suggested that might include a hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean—and then upped the ante by accusing Trump of making a unilateral “declaration of war” against North Korea.

Clearly, Trump’s threat to obliterate a country with 25 million people, many of them with family and relatives in South Korea, had struck a chord. Trump, naturally, struck back on Twitter by calling Kim a “madman,” and announced at the UN that the United States, South Korea, and Japan had agreed on a new set of US sanctions aimed at punishing any company or country that does business with the North Korean regime. Then, as if tensions weren’t high enough, on the night of September 23 the Pentagon sent B-1B Lancer bombers, nicknamed “the swan of death,” to fly over international airspace just off the coast of North Korea—“the first time since the Korean War that a U.S. bomber flew over North Korea’s east coast,” according to the Kyunghyang Shinmun, a major daily in Seoul.

Two days later, after Trump tweeted that if Ri and Kim kept up their threats, they “may not be around much longer,” the foreign minister called his bluff. Standing before television cameras in front of his New York hotel, Foreign Minister Ri said that if a state of war existed, North Korea reserved the right to “make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.” That worried longtime US negotiators with North Korea.

“That’s not the Ri Yong-ho I know,” Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA proliferation expert who met with Ri many times as a special envoy to the Six-Party Talks, told The Nation on Monday. But the escalating rhetoric did not meet the approval of the US public: That afternoon, CBS News put out a new poll showing that 53 percent of Americans were concerned that Trump might act too quickly “and start an unneeded war in Korea.”      

his week, as pundits debated what the next step would be in this global spectacle, few were asking how the standoff got to this point. Nor was it clear why the Trump administration abandoned the path of diplomacy that its top officials, led by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have defined for months as their objective, one strongly embraced by South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Amazingly, on Monday the administration continued to insist this was the case, with a State Department spokesperson telling reporters (despite the president’s words at the UN) that the “United States has not ‘declared war’ on North Korea,” and that “We continue to seek a peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

But a review of recent events and US government statements shows, in fact, that the “military option” against North Korea has eclipsed negotiations as the strategy of choice and become almost conventional thinking in Washington. More darkly, it suggests that the key influence on US policy during this period may have been Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, one of the most obsequious, pro-American leaders in modern Asian history.

Just a month ago, things seemed to be looking up in Korea. In mid-August, Kim—derisively dubbed “Rocket Man” in Trump’s UN speech—canceled plans to shoot missiles toward the US military base on Guam, where the B1-Bs that would lead a military attack on North Korea are based. Possibly in response, the Pentagon quietly reduced the number of US troops involved in the upcoming US-South Korean “Ulchi Freedom Guardian” war games, from 25,000 in 2016 to 17,500 this year. They lasted from August 21 to 31.

But the key elements of the exercises so feared by the North, including training in nuclear warfare and “decapitation strikes,” remained. That apparently triggered its decisions to go ahead with another series of missile tests, including two shots fired over the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Then, on September 3, Pyongyang tested its sixth—and largest—nuclear bomb. Even before that, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, had signaled a shift in US policy by speaking openly of a “preventive war” aimed at stopping North Korea’s weapons programs.

In the weeks that followed Pyongyang’s early September test, Trump and his advisers launched a campaign to convince the American public that such a war might succeed. From Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to UN ambassador Nikki Haley, the idea of a “military option” that could “annihilate” the North became a mantra. Mattis even suggested that the Pentagon was seriously considering an option that could avoid damage to South Korea and other US allies—a claim scoffed at by many analysts, who believe that any US attack on the North would be met with catastrophic retaliation by the North.

For Trump personally, Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test appeared to be the final straw. A few hours after he learned of the explosion, he insulted President Moon by tweeting that South Korea’s “talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work,” and declaring that “talking is not the answer!” Mattis escalated the rhetoric by saying that any “aggression” from North Korea would end with its “total annihilation.” Although the United States is “not looking” for that, he added, “we have many options to do so.”

But North Korea’s actions alone don’t account for this new hard-line posture. Rather, it appears to be the result of the influence of Japan’s Abe, who has become Trump’s most faithful fan and ally on the world stage.

Two years ago in this magazine, I chronicled Abe’s imperialist heritage and his attempts to “transform Japan—with its surprisingly large, tech-driven military-industrial complex—into America’s new proxy army.” Since Trump took office, Abe has become his closest confidant on North Korea and the man he inevitably calls first during every crisis. Their alliance has deepened since the North Korean missile shots over Japan. Frightened by the possibility of a strike on their island nation, Abe and his supporters have rallied behind Trump’s militant policy toward Pyongyang.

On September 17, right before Trump’s UN speech, Abe published an unusual op-ed in The New York Times endorsing the idea of a military attack if sanctions fail to dissuade North Korea. “I firmly support the United States position that all options are on the table,” he wrote. As Abe well knows, a key element in any US attack, along with the B1 bombers in Guam, would be the advanced stealth F-35 fighter jets stationed at the US Marine base in Iwakuni, Japan.

Japanese speakers made similar assertions the following day at a forum in Washington on “past diplomacy with North Korea.” Although it took place at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, it was conceived and sponsored by the US-Japan Research Institute, a Tokyo think tank sponsored by several major universities and financed by Nissan, Toyota, Sony, and other large Japanese multinationals. The basic message was that Japan’s interests must be front and center in any US negotiations with Pyongyang.

Mitoji Yabunaka, the former Japanese negotiator at the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, noted that he has heard many Americans argue that it’s “not realistic” to think North Korea will denuclearize, and that Washington should thus concentrate on managing Pyongyang’s arsenal. That “might suffice US interests,” but it is unacceptable to Japan, he said. “We are already being [threatened], so that doesn’t work for Japan.” The objective of any negotiations “must be clear—denuclearization,” Yabunaka said. “In that sense, I’m encouraged that Trump is sticking to that.”

On September 20, Abe followed Trump’s speech with an aggressive call for a naval blockade on North Korea that would block its access to “the goods, funds, people and technology” necessary for its military programs. Abe also repeated arguments that past negotiations with the North had failed because they had allowed Pyongyang to “deceive” the global community, and said the time for diplomacy was over. What’s needed to force North Korea’s denuclearization is “not dialogue, but pressure,” he said.

On September 22, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force joined the US Navy in drills designed to counter the North Korean threat. Finally, on Monday the 25th, Abe made his intentions clear: He was dissolving Japan’s powerful lower house and calling for a snap election in late October. “By holding an election at a time like this, I would like to test our public mandate on actions against North Korea,” he said. 

To many South Koreans, Abe’s intervention has effectively sidelined President Moon. While he tacitly endorsed Trump’s rhetoric in a meeting with the US delegation during the UN session, Moon laid out a very different approach in his address to the General Assembly.

“We do not desire the collapse of North Korea,” he said. “If North Korea makes a decision even now to stand on the right side of history, we are ready to assist North Korea together with the international community.” Korean media have also reported that Abe’s government opposed Moon’s recent decision to provide $8 million in humanitarian aid to the North despite its missile and weapons tests.

Japan’s growing influence on Trump was noted last week by Choe Sang-hun, The New York Times’s Seoul bureau chief. The day of Moon’s speech, he reported that the South Korean president is viewed by Koreans as “the odd man out,” and quoted Lee Won-deog, an academic expert on Korean-Japan relations. “There is a suspicion that Prime Minister Abe is using his close personal chemistry with President Trump to help shape the American leader’s views on South Korea.” Abe’s loyalty to Trump was also noted last month by The Wall Street Journal. “The Japanese leader’s refusal to let any daylight come between him and Mr. Trump contrasts with other leaders who have hinted at unease with Mr. Trump’s language, including his [recent] threat to bring ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea,” it reported from Tokyo.

Moon himself has downplayed the idea of any splits, telling reporters on his plane back to Seoul, “I do not think the international community has any other option but to pressure North Korea with one voice.” But the tension between the Abe government and Moon’s was palpable upon the latter’s return from New York. In an unusual public display of anger reported by The Hankyoreh, senior South Korea officials complained bitterly to the White House that Japanese reporters, apparently with the support of their government, had “repeatedly printed distorted reports about South Korea-US-Japan summit remarks” last week as a way to weaken Moon’s position with Trump.

Outside of the obvious attempt to sideline Moon, one of the problems with the Abe-Trump alliance, according to some peace activists, is that Japan and the United States are by far the largest financial contributors to the UN and could use that clout to pressure other nations into supporting military action against North Korea. In any case, peace groups hope to persuade the UN to intervene and press for a stronger diplomatic approach.

Last Friday, Women Cross DMZ, a coalition of dozens of women’s organizations that made a peace vigil to North and South Korea in 2015, in a letter signed by nearly 300 women and over 40 major women’s organizations, wrote to UN Secretary General António Guterres urging him to “immediately appoint a Special Envoy” to de-escalate the conflict and “encourage dialogue, compromise and the peaceful resolution of tensions.” And after Trump’s appearance at the UN, three US peace organizations—CREDO Action, Win Without War, and MoveOn—condemned his threats and issued an urgent call for action. “We need to stop this slow roll toward a catastrophic war, and work towards defusing the North Korean crisis diplomatically,” they asserted.

But there might be light at the end of the tunnel. At some point during the tumultuous week, a reporter asked Trump if negotiations were still an option. “Why not?” he shot back. That’s a good sign, said DeTrani, the former intelligence officer. “Negotiations are the only way out.”

August 2017 was a reminder of the scariest, and riskiest, days of the Cold War. All month long, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engaged in a bitter war of words that escalated into tit-for-tat displays of military might and ended with mutual threats of mass destruction. The tensions peaked on September 3 with Pyongyang’s stunning announcement that it had conducted its sixth, and largest, nuclear test—this time of a powerful hydrogen bomb—and had the capability to place the bomb onto an intercontinental ballistic missile. With the crisis spinning out of control, the opportunity for the diplomacy and negotiations promised by Trump’s foreign-policy team in recent months seemed to fade with each passing day.

Ironically, the spiral of events began with a hopeful sign on August 15, when Kim uncharacteristically backed down from a highly publicized plan to launch ballistic missiles toward the United States garrison island of Guam. His surprise decision drew approving comments from Trump as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has been at the forefront of US proposals for diplomacy. He offered that Kim’s “restraint” might be enough to meet the US conditions for talks—a halt to nuclear and missile tests—that he recently laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with Defense Secretary James Mattis.

But Kim, who has said he will negotiate only if the United States ends its “hostile policy and nuclear threats,” had warned that he would reconsider his missile tests “if the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions.” He was speaking of the US–South Korean military exercises launched on August 21 that, according to press reports, included training runs for a preemptive strike against the North as well as a computerized nuclear war game. To counter this show of force, Pyongyang test-fired three short-range rockets and followed up with a medium-range missile shot over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

Predictably, Kim’s moves sparked a US counter-action—a practice bombing run over Korean skies by Guam-based supersonic B1-B Lancer bombers, aided by four stealth F-35B advanced fighter jets flown from the US Marine base in Iwakuni, Japan. Days later, the North announced that it had developed a hydrogen bomb that could be placed on an ICBM—and, as mentioned, promptly tested the device in a massive underground explosion. Trump responded with a tweet denouncing the North as a “rogue” nation. He then insulted South Korea by calling President Moon Jae-in’s preference for engagement “appeasement,” apparently ruling out the diplomacy sought by his top advisers.

Mattis, who had told reporters the week before that “we’re never out of diplomatic solutions,” quickly assured the public that the administration was in lockstep on Korea. After an emergency meeting at the White House on Sunday, he went on camera to say that Trump would meet more threats with a “massive military response” that would be both “effective and overwhelming.” The United States, he added ominously, is “not looking for the total annihilation” of North Korea but only to end its nuclear program. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley followed up on Monday, telling the UN Security Council that North Korea was “begging for war” and should be met with the “strongest possible sanctions.” But she left the door open for talks, saying “the time has come for us to exhaust all of our diplomatic means before it’s too late.”

As the gravity of the situation dawned on Washington, the thin reeds of reassurance from Mattis and Haley seemed to suggest that the path of diplomacy and negotiation remains open—barely. “I don’t think that this administration is ideologically opposed to negotiations,” Victor Cha, a former Bush administration official who is about to be named US ambassador to Seoul, told The Nation on Tuesday. But therein lies a major dilemma.

alking to North Korea is a hard sell in Washington. The predominant view is that direct negotiations are a bad idea because, in the opinion of many officials and pundits, Pyongyang can’t be trusted. Exhibit One for these naysayers is the much-maligned “Agreed Framework” between President Bill Clinton and Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, which ended the first nuclear crisis with Pyongyang in 1994 and was cited by 64 Democrats in a recent letter to Tillerson as a model for future talks.

“The Clinton administration negotiated that deal, and the North Korean government immediately violated it,” CNN’s John King confidently informed his viewers on July 5, just after the North test-fired an ICBM that could hit the United States. King’s view, which he repeated several times that day without providing a single shred of evidence, became the standard line on CNN and the rest of network television, which consistently blocks voices saying that engagement has worked in the past. This take has also become a mantra for advocates of tough sanctions and regime change.

“Engagement? I’ve been there, done that, and got the T-shirts—all of them failed,” Bruce Klinger, a former CIA official and senior research fellow for northeast Asia at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, told a Washington forum last month of his brief contacts with North Korean officials. Even Christopher Hill, a former US ambassador to Seoul who negotiated the “Six-Party Talks” in 2007 and 2008 for the Bush administration, has jumped into the no-talks camp, proclaiming that further negotiations would only “strengthen a rogue regime’s hand.” Similar arguments were made by three former US officials in interviews with The New York Times last week.

But what if these calculations aren’t true, and the official story is wrong? What exactly did the Agreed Framework do, and how and why did it come apart? Did President Clinton’s agreement really give North Korea the bomb, as many Republicans now claim? What did those 64 Democrats mean when they urged Tillerson to “make a good faith effort to replicate” its successes? A careful review of the 1994 agreement and interviews with former US officials with extensive experience negotiating with Pyongyang reveals that blame for its demise should be equally shared by the United States and North Korea. Because that’s not a popular view, and the risks are so high, it’s important to get the story straight.

he 1994 agreement was the United States’ response to a regional political crisis that began that year when North Korea announced its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires non-nuclear states to agree never to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. Although it had no nuclear weapon, North Korea was producing plutonium, an action that almost led the United States to launch a preemptive strike against its plutonium facility.

That war was averted when Jimmy Carter made a surprise trip to Pyongyang and met with North Korea’s founder and leader at the time, Kim Il-sung (he died a few months later, and his power was inherited by his son, Kim Jong-il). The framework was signed in October 1994, ending “three years of on and off vilification, stalemates, brinkmanship, saber-rattling, threats of force, and intense negotiations,” Park Kun-young, a professor of international relations at Korea Catholic University, wrote in a 2009 history of the negotiations.

In addition to shutting its one operating reactor, Yongbyon, the North also stopped construction of two large reactors “that together were capable of generating 30 bombs’ worth of plutonium a year,” according to Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official who helped negotiate the 1994 framework and directs a Northeast Asia security project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. Most important for the United States, it remained in the NPT.

In exchange for North Korea’s concessions, the United States agreed to provide 500,000 tons a year of heavy fuel oil to North Korea as well two commercial light-water reactors considered more “proliferation resistant” than the Soviet-era heavy-water facility the North was using. The new reactors were to be built in 2003 by a US/Japanese/South Korean consortium called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO. (The reactors, however, were never completed).

For Pyongyang, which had been in the economic wilderness since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the biggest prize was the US promise to stop treating the North like an enemy state. Specifically, the two sides agreed to move as rapidly as possible to full diplomatic and economic normalization. Here’s how it played out.

First, the Agreed Framework led North Korea to halt its plutonium-based nuclear-weapons program for over a decade, forgoing enough enrichment to make over 100 nuclear bombs. “What people don’t know is that North Korea made no fissible material whatsoever from 1991 to 2003,” says Sigal. (The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in 1994 that the North had ceased production of plutonium three years earlier.) “A lot of this history” about North Korea, Sigal adds with a sigh, “is in the land of make-believe.”

Second, the framework remained in effect well into the Bush administration. In 1998, the State Department’s Rust Deming testified to Congress that  “there is no fundamental violation of any aspect of the framework agreement”; four years later, a similar pledge was made by Bush’s then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. “I get really aggravated when I hear people in Congress say the agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on,” says James Pierce, who was on the State Department team led by Robert Gallucci that negotiated the framework. “The bottom line is, there was a lot in the 1994 agreement that worked and continued for quite some years. The assertion, now gospel, that the North Koreans broke it right away is simply not true.”

Third, the framework and the ongoing engagement that resulted allowed the Clinton administration, led by Secretary of Defense William Perry, to launch a remarkable set of talks that nearly led to a final breakthrough with Pyongyang. As the negotiations unfolded, Kim Jong-il made a startling offer: In return for an end to enmity, Pyongyang was prepared to shut down its development, testing, and deployment of all medium- and long-range missiles. But the agreement was never completed. (Wendy Sherman, the top deputy to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, later wrote that the two sides were “tantalizingly close.”) “In effect, they were willing to trade their missile program for a better relationship” with Washington, Sigal told me. “And this was before they had the nukes!”

Fourth, the United States itself may have violated the framework by delaying the most important part of the agreement for Pyongyang—US oil shipments and the full normalization of political and economic relations. By 1997, Sigal recalls, the North Koreans were complaining bitterly that the United States was slow to deliver its promised oil and stalling on its pledge to end its hostile policies—the very reason Kim Jong-il had signed in the first place. In a House hearing in 1998, Gallucci warned of failure unless the US government did “what it said it would do, which is to take responsibility” for delivery of the oil. “It was against this backdrop—Pyongyang’s growing conviction the US was not living up to its commitments—that the North in 1998 began to explore” other military options, Mike Chinoy, a former CNN reporter and the author of Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, wrote recently in an incisive article in The Cipher Brief.

Finally, the framework collapsed in 2003 after the Bush administration—which had come to office with grave doubts about the agreement—dredged up US intelligence from the 1990s to accuse the North of starting a highly enriched uranium program as a second avenue to the bomb. (It hadn’t yet, though it was scouting the world for enrichment machinery to use later.) Bush tore up the framework agreement, exacerbating the deterioration in relations he had sparked a year earlier when he named North Korea part of his “axis of evil” in January 2002. In response, the North kicked out the IAEA inspectors and began building what would become its first bomb, in 2006, triggering a second nuclear crisis that continues to this day. “I think they were [cheating] to hedge their bets because we were cheating too,” Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Colin Powell in 2002, recently told The Real News.

In other words, the full story is complicated, and blame can easily be cast on both sides. But the results were disastrous, as Sigal summarized in his masterful history of US–North Korean negotiations published last year by the Korean Institute for National Unification and Columbia Law School.

“When President Bush took office, North Korea, thanks to diplomacy, had stopped testing longer-range missiles,” he wrote. “It had less than a bomb’s worth of plutonium and was verifiably not making more. Six years later, as a result of Washington’s broken promises and financial sanctions, it had seven to nine bombs’ worth [of plutonium], had resumed longer-range test launches, and felt free to test nuclear weapons.” Since then, he noted in a recent commentary, “any achievements have been temporary” because “neither side kept its commitments or sustained negotiations.”

In fact, the situation worsened during the Obama administration, which never got negotiations back on track despite Obama’s promises during his 2008 campaign that he would talk to North Korea’s leaders. Trump is dealing with the residue of these failed policies, and seemed to grasp that when he reluctantly endorsed the idea of direct talks on August 9. “They’ve been negotiating now for 25 years,” he told reporters. “Look at Clinton. He folded on the negotiations. He was weak and ineffective. You look what happened with Bush, you look what happened with Obama. Obama, he didn’t even want to talk about it. But I talk. It’s about time. Somebody has to do it.”

Trump’s facts, as usual, are off the mark—but his conclusion that talks are necessary is sound. To conduct them, however, his administration will have to deal with the same political attacks that helped sink the Agreed Framework. And then, as now, the opposition is likely to come from foreign policy hardliners who don’t believe that diplomacy has ever worked with North Korea.

ost histories of the Agreed Framework overlook a critical fact: one month after it was signed, the GOP captured Congress for the first time in four decades. “No sooner had the agreement been concluded than the Republicans took control of the House and Senate, putting it in jeopardy,” Sigal wrote in his history. Even before the ink was dry, Newt Gingrich and other party leaders, notably Senator John McCain, were attacking the framework as a sellout that would essentially bribe North Korea to follow international law on nuclear proliferation and put the United States at further risk. “We’re going back to the days of President Carter, of appeasement,” McCain told The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in October 1994.

Over the course of the agreement, the GOP delayed critical funding for KEDO and the fuel oil, forcing the Clinton administration to seek funds elsewhere and significantly delaying shipments—“in some cases for years,” says Chinoy. That created difficulties for the US diplomats who were directly involved with the North Koreans in implementing its terms, recalls Pierce, who spent many days in Pyongyang working with North Korean officials to monitor where the fuel oil was flowing after it reached the North. “We scraped [the funds] together, because we knew we weren’t going to get any more money from Congress,” he says. “But we had to deliver on our side.”

The North Korean government, well aware that Congress and the executive had equal power, viewed these delays as an abrogation of the agreements made in 1994. Yet despite its anger, the government of Kim Jong-il, who consolidated power shortly after his father’s death, made no attempt to reprocess the spent fuel that was stored under IAEA inspection at Yongbyon or to restart the reactor. But as a defensive measure, Pyongyang started to build medium- and long-range missiles, which had never been part of the negotiations. By 1997 it had tested two of them, causing shivers of fear at the Pentagon.

In 1998, in a desperate attempt to persuade the United States to end its hostile policy, North Korea offered to put its missile program on the table for negotiations. When Clinton demurred, Pyongyang launched a three-stage rocket called the Taepodong in a botched attempt to put a satellite into space. This led Clinton to appoint Defense Secretary Perry his envoy to Pyongyang to begin the missile negotiations that came close to ending the standoff.

A key factor in Kim Jong-il’s decision to re-enter negotiations was the progress he had made in lowering tensions with South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung. Since winning office in 1996, the South’s former opposition leader had championed a new “Sunshine Policy” toward the North that sought to end the country’s division through economic, political, and cultural engagement. In 2000, in an extraordinary scene that gave hope to millions of Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the two Kims met for the first intra-Korea summit meeting in history and declared that their peninsula would be nuclear-free.

Those developments gave impetus to the US–North Korean talks. Not long after the North-South summit, Marshal Jo Myong-rok, a high-ranking North Korean who was Kim’s second-in-command, visited Washington, DC, and met President Clinton and other top US officials at the White House. They signed a joint communiqué designed to end US–North Korean tensions once and for all, and pledged to begin talks to “formally improve” bilateral relations, including replacing the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War with “permanent peace arrangements,” according to Sigal. Soon after, Albright flew to Pyongyang to meet with Kim.

The missile deal—including Kim’s commitment to end all production and testing—was to be capped with a visit to Pyongyang by Clinton himself. But he never made the trip, largely because his advisers kept him in Washington during the legal imbroglio that shook America over the disputed 2000 election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. The agreement was never signed, although North Korea’s missile moratorium lasted until 2007. “That was the moment when everything could have gone differently,” Perry told The New York Times in a recent podcast about the 1999 talks.

hen came the neocons, and talks went out the window. “Under President Bush, the clock was turned back, the [Agreed Framework] became a Clinton mistake, something to be voided and then abolished,” wrote Park, the professor of international relations at Korea Catholic University.

Chief among the framework opponents was Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defense secretary. During the Clinton years, he had chaired a national commission on missile defense that identified North Korea and Iran as dangerous “rogue states” that necessitated tough policies and, of course, a robust missile-defense system. Meanwhile, at the State Department, John Bolton, also a die-hard opponent, sharply criticized the terms of the framework as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. (Today he says that the United States can only eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program by “eliminating North Korea.”)

Early on in his administration, Bush signaled his displeasure with Clinton’s Korea diplomacy when he met at the White House with Kim Dae-jung. Kim, still basking in the glow of his 2000 summit with Kim Jong-il, hoped to convince Bush that negotiations should continue. But he was humiliated when the president told him, on live television, that he did not trust North Korea and would not endorse Kim’s “Sunshine Policy.”

A few months later, when pragmatists at State under Colin Powell decided after a review to restart talks with Pyongyang, the hard-liners—led by Bolton—seized on the uranium “discovery” from 1998 to scuttle the framework. “I wanted a decisive conclusion that the Agreed Framework was dead,” Bolton later explained.

In October 2002, Bush sent James Kelly, a deputy assistant secretary of state, to Pyongyang to deliver an ultimatum to North Korea. He had strict orders from Vice President Dick Cheney and Bolton not to negotiate in any way—a dictate he followed even after his North Korean interlocutors denied that they had a uranium program in place but offered to discuss the accusations. “Kelly had minders from both the VP’s office and John Bolton’s staff,” recalls John Merrill, the former chief of the northeast Asia division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. “He had absolutely no room too explore the issue. Instead, he took what they said as an admission that they had a program and went home.”

According to this account, the North Koreans told Kelly that the country had a “right” to a uranium program but was willing to discuss the issue as part of the broader negotiations over missiles. But the hard-liners in the administration rejected the offer and decided to terminate the framework. Within months, Pyongyang had thrown out the IAEA inspectors, withdrawn from the NPT, restarted Yongbyon, and was on its way to its first bomb.

Condoleezza Rice, in her memoirs about her experience in Bush’s government, described the US refusal to talk to the North Koreans about the highly enriched uranium program, or HEU, as a huge mistake. “Because [Kelly’s] instructions were so constraining, Jim couldn’t fully explore what might have been an opening to put the [nuclear] program on the table,” she wrote. Later, when she ran for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton picked up on this theme, blasting the Bush administration for using the HEU program as an excuse to abrogate the Agreed Framework. “There is no debate that, once the [framework] was torn up, the North Koreans began to process plutonium with a vengeance because all bets were off,” she told The Washington Post.

Since then, many analysts have cast doubt on whether North Korea actually had a full-fledged uranium-based nuclear weapons program in 2002, suggesting instead that what it really had was a pilot program for uranium enrichment that “thus posed no serious and imminent threat to the security of the United States,” according to Park, the international-relations scholar. In 2007, a senior US intelligence official seemed to confirm that when he told Congress that the CIA only had “mid-confidence” that a uranium program existed. (The North eventually developed one, and displayed its facilities in 2010 to US scientists.)

Still, Pyongyang hung on: In October 2003, it offered to abandon its nuclear-weapons program if the United States would sign a non-aggression pact similar to the language worked out with Clinton and Perry. But this was a bridge too far for Bush. “We will not have a treaty,” he said. “That’s off the table.” By 2006, North Korea had processed enough plutonium to make a bomb, and it exploded its first nuclear device that same year. (For a detailed timeline of US–North Korean talks, see this chronology published by the Arms Control Association.)

et despite the enormous influence of the neocons under Bush, talks continued between Washington and the North, as well with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, under the Six-Party Talks. Amazingly, in 2006, three weeks after North Korea tested its bomb—the “red line” that the United States had been trying to head off since the 1980s—Bush agreed to open direct talks with Pyongyang as part of the Six-Party process.

These talks were a result of North Korea’s declaration in 2005 that it would be willing, if certain conditions were met, to abandon its nuclear weapons and return to the NPT. In February 2007, after the stalemate and crisis that led to the 2006 test, the North suspended its nuclear testing and shut down its reactor; a few months later, it agreed to disable its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon. In return, the United States promised to ease sanctions and take North Korea off the list of countries sponsoring terrorism. But the agreement soon fell apart over the issue of verification of Pyongyang’s enrichment and plutonium activities.

As with Clinton’s 2000 agreement, Bush’s negotiations were eased by developments inside Korea, including the second North-South summit in October 2007. But soon after that meeting, South Korea’s progressive president Roh Moo-hyun was succeeded by Lee Myung-bak, a right-winger dead set against the Sunshine Policy. Backed by a new conservative government in Japan, which also rejected engagement, Lee demanded a system of written verification that Bush quickly agreed to.

North Korea, however, bitterly opposed the demand as a violation of the 2005 accords signed by the Roh government. In response, both South Korea and Japan cut off their energy assistance to the North, leaving the Six-Party Talks in limbo. (Lee’s hard-line policies, which were also adopted by his successor, Park Geun-hye, greatly heightened tensions with the North and helped bring on the current crisis, current President Moon Jae-in told me in an interview with The Nation in May.)

The Six-Party Talks, however, didn’t fall apart until the first months of the Obama administration. According to Sigal’s detailed history, President Obama and Jeff Bader, his top adviser on Asia, decided in 2009 to adopt President Lee’s proposals to use the suspension of energy aid as pressure to force North Korea to accept the verification plans they were now demanding. Lee also had the advantage of a close, friendly relationship with President Obama, which The New York Times characterized as “a presidential man-crush.”

The idea of direct talks with the North, championed during Obama’s 2008 campaign, was abandoned. Washington’s policy, according to Sigal, became “pure pressure without negotiations.” Officially, the doctrine was known as “strategic patience,” but behind it was an assumption that North Korea was headed for collapse. The Obama-Lee pressure tactics only increased tensions, leading to further North Korean nuclear and missile tests, as well as a shelling incident in 2010 that almost caused a military confrontation.

As the situation deteriorated, Obama embarked on a series of military exercises with South Korea that increased in size and tempo over the course of his administration and are now at the heart of the tension with Kim Jong-un. Still, dialogue continued sporadically, particularly through a channel of former US officials that has included Sigal.

In 2010, the North proposed through this channel to ship out its nuclear fuel rods, the key ingredient for producing weapons-grade plutonium, to a third country in exchange for a US commitment to pledge that it had “no hostile intent” toward the North. But the Obama administration “didn’t even listen,” according to Joel Wit, a former negotiator who participated in the meeting. In 2015, Pyongyang made a sweeping proposal for a peace treaty that would end the enmity; this, too, was rejected out of hand.

By the end of 2016, as David Sanger chronicled in the Times, Obama had decided on an aggressive cyber strategy that used electronic attacks to “sabotage” North Korea’s missiles and its supply chains. As Obama left the scene and Trump arrived at the White House, relations were frayed almost beyond repair.

n April of this year, following a series of missile tests, Trump turned up the heat, and tensions since then have gone through the roof. Yet, as I reported in The Nation, North Korea clings to the idea that negotiations will be possible only if the United States ends the “hostile policy” that Pyongyang thought Washington had jettisoned with the Agreed Framework 1994.

Today the Trump administration is trying to combine sanctions against Pyongyang with pressure on China to bring the North to the table. That may have worked to a certain degree: Kim Jong-un’s pullback on August 14 came hours after Beijing said it would immediately ban imports of North Korean coal, iron, and seafood. This decision followed China’s extraordinary August vote in favor of the tough sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council.

But at some point, the United States is going to have to sit down with Kim’s representatives and seek to hammer something out that will put the North on the path to denuclearization—or accept it as a nuclear power and seek to temper its program, as James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, and other former US officials have proposed. (Some past negotiators disagree.) Last week, CNN’s Will Ripley reported, Pyongyang told him that a US acknowledgement of its nuclear program would clear the way for diplomacy.

At the UN this week, China and Russia argued again that the best way to start those talks is a “freeze for freeze,” in which the North suspends its nuclear and missile testing in exchange for a moratorium or scaling back of the massive US-South Korean military exercises that have so inflamed the North. While this exchange has been rejected by the Trump administration (Haley called it “insulting”), a former US negotiator recently reminded a group of Korea watchers in a confidential conference call that Clinton’s suspension of the US “Team Spirit” exercises in South Korea were “critical” to getting the Agreed Framework passed. Meanwhile, a recent poll suggests that 60 percent of Americans favor a negotiated settlement with North Korea.

As in 1994, the trade-off will have to come between ending the enmity and finding the peace. Somewhere in the history of those negotiations, Tillerson and his president may find the key to resolving a conflict that dates back to 1945 and the dawn of the Cold War. But they will have to do it with the full cooperation of South Korea, as President Moon has frequently reminded Trump. “No one should be allowed to decide on a military action on the Korean Peninsula without South Korean agreement,” Moon declared in an unusually blunt statement on August 15. The purpose of sanctions and pressure, he added, “is to bring North Korea to the negotiating table, not to raise military tensions.”

Yoon Young-kwan, who worked with President Moon as South Korea’s foreign minister in the Roh Moo-hyun administration, reinforced those comments on September 5 at a Washington conference on US-South Korean relations. During these tense times, he said, “we must keep our diplomatic channels open and explore what is possible.”

He pointed to the clause in the 1994 framework on normalizing US-North Korean political and economic relations. “North Korea had high expectations of that,” he said. “We must provide them with some kind of incentive” to negotiate. As the historian Bruce Cumings reminded us a few weeks back, another war of “fire and fury,” as Trump famously threatened on August 9, is out of the question.

On August 14, the Korean Central News Agency issued a surprising statement from North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator, Kim Jong-un. The “Respected Supreme Leader,” KCNA said, had decided to “watch a little more” the conduct of the United States before proceeding on a vow to fire missiles near the Pacific island of Guam to create “an enveloping fire.”

A few hours later, The Wall Street Journal reported that North Korea “had pulled back its threat to attack a U.S. territory.” In response, President Trump triumphantly took to Twitter to praise Kim’s “very wise and well reasoned decision.” The exchange eased—temporarily, at least—a nuclear-war scare that began a week earlier, when Trump threatened to rain “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea if it didn’t mend its ways.

So what’s next? Just days before Kim’s pullback, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis took to the pages of the Journal to lay out the terms of the “diplomacy” they have promised as a way to defuse the crisis. While the United States has no interest in regime change, they asserted, North Korea’s “long record” of “dishonesty” made it “incumbent upon the [Kim] regime to signal its desire to negotiate in good faith” by first ceasing its nuclear tests and missile launches.

This was clearly a rejection of the recent Chinese and Russian “freeze-for-freeze” proposal, which would exchange a cessation of Pyongyang’s tests for a moratorium or scaling back of Washington’s massive war games with South Korea, including the Ulchi–Freedom Guardian exercises that began on August 21. Moreover, the Tillerson-Mattis assurances were undercut by comments from H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national-security adviser, that the United States is fully prepared for a “preventive war” to stop North Korea “from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.”

As the North Koreans well know, those plans are highly advanced. Two days before Trump declared that US forces in South Korea were “locked and loaded,” NBC News broadcast a detailed report that the Pentagon had plans to strike some “two dozen North Korean missile-launch sites, testing grounds and support facilities” using B-1B heavy bombers stationed at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. The NBC report added that the B-1s could fire their missiles from outside Korean airspace, thus making it possible to launch unilateral strikes—a major concern to South Korea.

What happened next was hardly surprising. North Korea declared that it was “carefully examining” plans to launch missiles toward Guam. As historian Bruce Cumings noted in The Guardian, North Korea’s statements had “a concrete, predictable nature,” especially when compared with the Trump administration’s more general threats that North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons could, in Mattis’s words, “lead to the end of the regime and destruction of its people.”

Yet even as he backed down, Kim issued a warning: “In order to defuse the tensions” and prevent a war, the United States should stop its “arrogant provocations” and “unilateral demands” and “not provoke [us] any longer.” Over the weekend, Kim responded to McMaster’s new tack by declaring that the Korean People’s Army “will take resolute steps the moment even a slight sign of the preventive war is spotted.”

As a wide range of American experts and former policy-makers have argued, if the United States is serious about negotiations, it must respond to Pyongyang’s fears by offering an “off-ramp” with something in return. The dual-freeze proposal “could lead to a breakthrough in the impasse, but this would require Washington to seriously consider its own responsibility for resolving the nuclear problem,” wrote John Merrill, the former chief of the Northeast Asia division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, in a recent op-ed for the Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asian Review.

Specifically, that means addressing North Korea’s concerns, including its belief that nuclear weapons are its only defense against a United States that turned the country into ashes during the Korean War and is threatening to do so again. The North is also (understandably) worried about the war games, in which thousands of US and South Korean soldiers train for nuclear strikes as well as “decapitation” operations that would eliminate North Korea’s leadership. And therein lies the way out.

North Korea says that it will not negotiate until the United States formally ends the state of enmity that exists between the two nations—steps that both sides agreed to take during the only successful round of US–North Korean negotiations, in the late 1990s. It restated that formula in August, when Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho told a forum of Asian diplomats that the North would not put its nukes and missiles on the bargaining table “unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the U.S. against the [North] are fundamentally 
eliminated.”

Washington should see that as an opening and consider concrete steps to convince North Korea—as well as the South—that it wants to resolve this conflict without a war. Number one on that list should be an offer to curtail the military exercises that began in late August and will pick up again—with a far greater number of troops—next spring. But there’s only one way to know if this approach will work: Send Secretary Tillerson to Pyongyang, and start talking. Judging by his recent compliments to Kim’s “restraint,” that may be about to happen.

President Trump’s belligerent and aggressive threats to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea in response to its rapid advances in nuclear weaponry and ballistic missiles has set the world on edge and left many Americans asking whether a war—possibly even a nuclear one—is about to break out.1

That question became acute when Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who has been a lone voice for diplomacy within the administration, made an about-face after Trump made his reprehensible comments from his New Jersey golf club. North Korea, Mattis said in a public statement issued by the Pentagon, should not take any action that “would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.”2

The chilling language from the administration was reminiscent of President Truman’s warning just before he dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945. If Japan doesn’t accept the US terms of capitulation, he said, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Tens of thousands died when he unleashed that power—and nearly 3 million were killed when the United States firebombed North Korea during the Korean War only five years later.3

Apparently delighting in the attention, Trump doubled down on his threats for the rest of the week, ending it on Friday sounding like a cowboy drunk on power: by tweeting, “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” All that was missing was a war whoop.4

But any hopes for a different approach were dashed by the media, particularly CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, which bought into the war fears with a 24/7 onslaught in which every utterance from Trump was treated as the hottest of news. When the usual guests appeared—mostly former spooks and generals—the conversation was all about numbers and death: How far can North Korea’s missiles go? How many people would die in a war? Do we have the capability to take them out?5

One of the most ubiquitous of the commentators is Gordon Chang, who became famous on the basis of his simplistic and bombastic books about China and North Korea. He spends his days hopping from CNN to MSNBC, spouting his view that military confrontation is inevitable because Kim Jong-un want to “blackmail Washington in hopes of breaking the U.S. alliance with South Korea,” as he wrote in The Daily Beast this week. Despite his scare-mongering, nobody in the South seemed concerned.6

Over on Fox, the man of the day was John Bolton, one of the Bush administration’s famous neocons, who thinks the only way to stop North Korea’s nuclear program is “to end the regime in North Korea.” On Wednesday night, he was on Hannity, arguing for preemptive strikes “before North Korea has dozens and dozens of nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles that can hit the United States.”7

On Thursday, NBC News ran a detailed story on how far that planning has gone, reporting that the Pentagon has plans to strike “approximately two dozen North Korean missile-launch sites, testing grounds and support facilities.” Reporter Cynthia McFadden said on the air that the six B-1B bombers from Guam that would deliver this payload could fire their missiles from outside South Korean airspace, thus making it possible to launch unilateral strikes without the approval of the Moon Jae-in government.8

That’s a frightening thought to Seoul, where people are well aware of the catastrophe that would follow a US attack. On Monday, following an hour-long telephone discussion with Trump, President Moon carefully contradicted the US president, warning that “South Korea can never accept a war erupting again on the Korean Peninsula.” And the US strike plans may have prompted an emergency meeting on Thursday night in which the US and South Korean national security advisers agreed to discuss all military steps against North Korea in advance.9

War, war, war.10

Missing from the US media discourse was any discussion of what North Korea is trying to achieve with its nuclear and missile arsenal, why it fears the United States, or how the United States could address its concerns through negotiations.11

A rare exception came on Thursday, when Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who has been focusing on nuclear proliferation since the early 1980s, popped up on MSNBC. He said that Trump and company “have to stop the reckless, dangerous, scary language which they are using. It’s exactly what [the North Koreans] are most concerned about, and will most likely lead to them continuing to test nuclear weapons and ICBM capacity.”12

Also on Thursday (and receiving virtually no press attention), 64 Democratic House members released a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressing “profound concern” about Trump’s comments and supporting Tillerson’s recent proposals for direct talks with Pyongyang.13

In a significant passage, they urged him to “make a good faith effort to replicate” the successes of past negotiations, including the 1994 Agreed Framework in which North Korea froze its nuclear program for over 10 years and the two sides pledged not to have “hostile intent” toward the other (I’ll be taking a deep dive into that agreement and how it fell apart in a feature for The Nation next week).14

In fact, North Korea’s desire to end the enmity with the United States has been the driving force behind its military program for decades, and it continues to be the one issue that it says will bring its leaders to the negotiating table.15

In Kim Jong-un’s July 4 statement about its ICBM launch that day, the North made that clear, saying that the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (its formal name) “would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the US hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.”16

The most recent formulation of this position came this week, when North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho told a forum of Asian diplomats in Manila that the DPRK would not put its nukes and missiles on the bargaining table “unless the hostile policy and nuclear threat of the U.S. against the D.P.R.K. are fundamentally eliminated.”17

Amazingly, in most press reports, including The Washington Post, that last clause about the “hostile policy” was left out, leaving Americans with the impression that the North is refusing any and all negotiations. But analysts familiar with the North’s policies argue that the United States ignores this formulation at its own peril and argue that it’s imperative for the United States to test Kim’s statements.18

“Experience in past negotiations tells us that the North Koreans can use this sort of vague conditionality however it suits them,” Robert Carlin, a former CIA and State Department intelligence officer who has visited North Korea on official business over 30 times, wrote in the publication 38 North this week. “Sometimes it prevents progress, but sometimes it actually gives Pyongyang the maneuver room it needs to move ahead. How will we find out? One way seems obvious: go and talk to them.”19

Meanwhile, there were hints on Friday from the Associated Press that the Trump administration is doing just that by meeting with North Korean diplomats through the once-busy “New York channel” at Pyongyang’s UN Mission in New York. Right now, that slim channel—and the broader hope of peace talks—may be our only hope of finding a resolution to this worsening crisis.20

Jared Kushner has been busy, and not only with the Russians. This week, amid the hoopla surrounding his meeting with a Moscow lawyer about the 2016 election, the The New York Times published an intriguing story about his role in a plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

Last Saturday, Trump adviser in chief Stephen Bannon, with Kushner’s backing, went to the Pentagon to arrange a discussion between Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and “two businessmen who profited from military contracting,” the Times reported. These weren’t ordinary contractors: They were Erik Prince, the notorious founder of Blackwater, the all-purpose mercenary army, and Stephen Feinberg, a New York financier who owns and controls DynCorp International, the largest US contractor in Afghanistan.

At the meeting (which neither Prince and Feinberg would confirm), they urged the Pentagon to turn the war over to what they call “private military units” who would fight for profit as an alternative to the Pentagon’s recent proposal to send thousands more US military troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. To their apparent disappointment, Mattis, the Times reported, “listened politely” to their audacious proposal, but “declined to include the outside strategies” in a review of Afghanistan policy that is being led in the White House by Trump’s national-security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

The Times story screamed conflict of interest. Prince, as most Americans know, cut his mercenary teeth sending his private army into Afghanistan with the CIA shortly after 9/11. He then became persona non grata in the US government after contractors under his command killed dozens of civilians in Iraq. But after selling his company and moving on to organize a private army for the United Arab Emirates, he became a key adviser to Trump on military issues. In an interview with Bannon’s Brietbart News a day after his Pentagon meeting, he spelled out his proposals.

To be sure, the war in Afghanistan, particularly logistics and surveillance operations, is already heavily contracted, as I’ve documented here over the years. But under Prince’s approach, the actual fighting would be done by mercenaries, presumably in his employ. The United States “would see CIA, special operators, and contractors working with Afghan forces to target terrorists,” he told Breitbart. “I say go back to the model that worked, for a couple hundred years in the region, by the East India company, which used professional Western soldiers who were contracted and lived with trained with and when necessary fought with their local counterparts.”

On Thursday, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s deputy assistant for national-security affairs, seemed to endorse the proposals when he was asked about the Mattis meeting in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“It’s not about bilking the government,” he said. “It’s about the opposite. It’s about saving taxpayer money. It’s about creating indigenous capacity.” Turning to Prince himself, Gorka had the highest praise. “This is man who hires former operators [from] a first-tier Special Operations Force, retired individuals.” They will go to Afghanistan “not to go and fight instead of somebody else, but to help the Afghans, to help local indigenous forces to protect their own territories,” he said. “So this is a cost-cutting venture. We’ve opened the door here at the White House for outside ideas because the last 16 years have been disastrous.”

Feinberg’s expertise is much broader: He helps provide the capital that feeds the military-contracting industry. Through Cerberus Capital Management LP, the $30 billion private-equity firm he co-founded in 1992, Feinberg has acquired dozens of companies engaged in military and intelligence operations. As Bloomberg News reported in a detailed profile last February, “Feinberg has bought companies that refuel spy planes, train Green Berets, make sniper rifles and watch America’s foes from space. He’s handed out jobs, lobbying contracts and campaign cash to some of the most powerful people in the nation’s capital.”

Unlike Prince, however, he, is virtually unknown to the American public, and likes to keep it that way. For those who have never heard of him, here’s a snapshot of who he is, the significance of his private-equity industry, and how he and other national-security investors could benefit in the event that Mattis changes his mind and decides to send Blackwater—or its latest incarnation—back into Afghanistan.

einberg first came to public attention last February, after Cerberus informed investors that he might be appointed to a high-level position in the Trump administration that would require him to provide “voluminous information” about conflict-of-interest issues. Trump, it turned out, wanted Feinberg to lead a “broad review” of US intelligence agencies, and was also considering him for top spots at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security.

Feinberg got in the door in part because he is a close friend of Bannon’s, who is notorious for his proposals to destroy “the administrative state” by privatizing or eliminating essential public services. During the 2016 campaign, Feinberg was part of a group of private-equity and venture-capital investors who advised Trump and became his “staunchest defenders” during the race, according to a Wall Street Journal report last November. Among them were Wilbur Ross, the chairman of WL Ross & Co., who is now secretary of commerce, and billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of intelligence contractor Palantir Technologies Inc.

But after Feinberg’s name was floated to lead his review of intelligence, Trump got pushback from US officials who feared his involvement would “could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview,” the Times reported. Meanwhile, lawmakers got nervous; at a Senate hearing in late February, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), said she was concerned that “an individual who runs a private equity firm” was being considered to review intelligence for Trump.

So Feinberg’s name quickly disappeared—until last week. Now, it appears that Trump has given the financier the green light to operate on his own, with help from Bannon and Kushner. It’s a two-front press, with Prince selling his mercenary interests and Feinberg his visions for his private-equity industry.

s US military and intelligence operations have been privatized over the past 15 years, the companies that work for the government have becoming increasingly reliant on deep-pocketed investors with strong ties to the Pentagon and the 16 agencies that make up the “intelligence community,” or IC.

Enter private equity. With their extensive connections to current and past national-security officials, and with access to huge pools of private capital that invest in their funds, private-equity firms have become de facto managers of the contracting industry. Their power is magnified by the huge number of mergers and acquisitions in recent years.

In the world of spying and surveillance, these deals have led to an incredible concentration in the industry, with five corporations now employing about 80 percent of all intelligence contractors. Many of these were reshaped, and owe their current market power, to private-equity funds such as the granddaddy of national-security investing, the Washington-based Carlyle Group.

Carlyle was led for many years by Frank Carlucci, a former deputy director of the CIA, who was a pioneer in the early years of privatized intelligence. Over a period of about 10 years, it bought (and then sold) many top contractors. Until recently, it owned a majority share of Booz Allen Hamilton, a key NSA contractor and a key adviser to the IC with extensive contracts in most major agencies in civilian and defense intelligence.

Another fund, Veritas Capital, sold DynCorp to Cerberus in 2010 and has relied for its advice on retired generals Barry R. McCaffrey and Anthony C. Zinni as well as Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration. More recently, DC Capital Partners, an offshoot of Veritas, has become a key investor in intelligence with the purchase of military-intelligence contractor Michael Baker International. Its advisers include former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden.

einberg’s Cerberus is best known for its Republican executives, such as former vice president Dan Quayle and John Snow, who was George W. Bush’s treasury secretary. Quayle got his start as a top Cerberus executive during the 1990s buying and selling “distressed assets”—also known as bankrupt companies—in Asia. More recently, Quayle and Snow have been managing Cerberus’s investments in European property debt.

In the arena of national security, Feinberg’s firm has cultivated ties with some of the most established names in intelligence. One of them, according to the Bloomberg profile mentioned earlier, is Leon Panetta, who was President Obama’s CIA director and “an adviser to Cerberus on security and intelligence matters.” Another is Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director under Obama who worked for Feinberg for a time after he retired in 2013, also according to Bloomberg.

So it’s not surprising that Feinberg’s pitch to Mattis this month was broader than Prince’s. His plan, reported the Times, “would give the C.I.A. control over operations in Afghanistan, which would be carried out by paramilitary units and hence subject to less oversight than the military, according to a person briefed on it.”

And then there’s DynCorp, the centerpiece of Cerberus’s huge investments in national security; few companies are as well positioned for the Trump presidency. DynCorp is heavily involved in all aspects of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for years has been engaged in military and intelligence operations, including flying planes for the drug wars in Central America, operating surveillance aircraft for the Afghan military, and training US-backed armies in Iraq and Liberia. It’s also much bigger than Blackwater ever was: In 2015, it was awarded a $100 million contract by the US Army to provide “advisory, training and mentoring services” to Afghanistan’s national army and police (Trump’s cutbacks at the State Department, however, have cut into its earnings in recent months).

Providing private warriors would not be the only function for Feinberg’s companies, however. Trump, for example, has said he is pushing the Pentagon to create “safe zones” in Syria, where US military forces and civilians from the US Agency for International Development would “protect” Syrians fleeing from the war. This plan has yet to come to fruition, but could be rolled out after the US and Russia organize their cooperative relationship in Syria announced by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson after Trump’s recent meeting in Germany with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

This is exactly the kind of operation DynCorp is experienced in—and why it’s a major player in the International Stability Operations Association, the lobbying arm of the private-security industry. “DynCorp is a highly successful provider of critical support to military and civilian government institutions, and also have important commercial business in aviation, infrastructure development, security and logistics,” the company’s description claims on the ISOA website.

Feinberg, if he is successful in pressing Mattis, would be in a perfect position to take advantage of these actions, which were once called “nation-building” but after the Iraq War were renamed “stability operations.” But whether Mattis goes along is another question. As the Times noted, “while Mr. Mattis believes that Mr. Prince’s concept of relying on private armies in Afghanistan goes too far, he supported using contractors for limited, specific tasks when he was the four-star commander of the Pentagon’s Central Command.”

So, even with business as usual, Feinberg could find an angle.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who swept to power in May elections after promising to defuse tensions with North Korea through diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement, arrives in Washington on Wednesday, June 28, for his first meetings with Donald Trump and his hawkish national-security team.

Many Koreans hope the summit will clear the way for Moon to move ahead with his efforts at peace-making, which he has modeled on the “Sunshine Policy” adopted by South Korea’s last two progressive presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. According to a recent poll, nearly 80 percent of South Koreans support the renewal of dialogue with North Korea, which lies just 30 kilometers north of the capital, Seoul.

“We expect Moon will be able to ease tensions between North Korea and the United States, which will also lead to improvement of the relationship between the two Koreas,” Gayoon Baek, the international coordinator of People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), an influential peace-and-justice organization based in Seoul, told The Nation. Her coalition, she added, is hoping that Moon will “open an unconditional dialogue with North Korea which could lead to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

In a sign of what’s to come, President Moon last weekend welcomed a delegation of North Korean athletes to the World Taekwondo Championships in Muju, South Korea. He used the occasion to propose that North and South Korea form a unified team to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, which will take place in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang. “Sports are a powerful tool to demolish walls and separation,” Moon declared.

But the new president, who spoke to The Nation in an exclusive interview two days before his election, is likely to face stiff resistance to some of his ideas in Washington at a particularly volatile time in US-Korean relations.

Two weeks ago, Moon drew Trump’s ire when he ordered his government to delay US deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, until it conducted a full environmental review. THAAD has been the subject of fierce protests from residents in the rural town of Soseong-ri, where the first batteries were set up with the blessing of former president Park Geun-hye, who was impeached in March and later arrested for corruption and abuse of power. On June 24, several thousand demonstrators chanting “No THAAD, No Trump” gathered in downtown Seoul and later circled the US Embassy to demand THAAD’s immediate withdrawal.

Moon drew the line on THAAD after learning in late May that the Pentagon had secretly brought in four more launchers for the system into the country, and that his own defense chief—a holdover from the Park government—had failed to inform him of this. (When the system is finally deployed, it will include at least six rocket launchers, “with 48 rockets designed to intercept aerial threats flying over the peninsula,” The Korea Herald has reported.)

“The failure to provide critical information regarding South Korea’s security rightly incensed Moon, and ensured he will clean house,” Scott Snyder, the director of the Program on US-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote after the incident. He added that the delay was inevitable given Moon’s “longstanding criticisms that the previous administration had failed to manage the THAAD decision and deployment in a transparent manner.”

But the deep gap between Moon’s government and the United States on this issue was thrust into relief when Senator Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat and the minority whip in the Senate, met with Moon in early June and defended the Pentagon. “It isn’t that we were sneaking in to put [THAAD] in place,” he told Korean reporters. “I don’t think there has been any effort by the U.S. in any way to mislead the Koreans about what we are proposing.”

Meanwhile, on the eve of Moon’s visit, his foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, assured Washington that the THAAD review doesn’t mean the US deployment will be canceled altogether. “My government has no intention to basically reverse the commitments made in the spirit of the ROK-US alliance,” she said in a conciliatory address in Seoul. Moon and Trump, she added, “see eye to eye on North Korea nuclear and missile issues.”

The discussions won’t be easy, however. Last week, US officials were seething over North Korea’s treatment of an American tourist, Otto Warmbier, the Virginia college student who was imprisoned for 17 months by the Kim Jong-un government and suddenly returned to the United States in mid-June in a coma. He died a few days later, sparking emotional denunciations from the Trump administration and Congress, which in response may soon pass an outright ban on US citizen visits to North Korea.

“North Korea has to be held accountable,” Representative Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican, promised CNN after Warmbier’s funeral last Friday. “There will be more of that later.” Christopher Hill, a former high-ranking diplomat who led the US delegation to the six-party talks with North Korea from 2005 to 2009, took to The New York Times to oppose further visits by Americans. “Given the danger to United States citizens in the country, it is time to take the unusual step of imposing a ban,” he said.

North Korea, according to the Associated Press, was aware of Warmbier’s condition a year ago and failed to relay the information to the US government during months of sporadic negotiations about him and three other Americans being held by the North. But while the student’s doctors dismissed North Korean claims that his coma was induced when he contracted botulism and then took a sleeping pill, they did not find any evidence of brutalization or torture. “When asked whether [the brain damage] could be the result of beating or other violence while in prison, [doctors] said that Warmbier did not show any obvious indications of trauma, nor evidence of either acute or healing fractures,” The Washington Post reported.

The mystery of how Warmbier got his brain injury may not be easily solved. After his death, his family asked that no autopsy be performed. “No conclusions about the cause and manner of Mr. Warmbier’s death have been drawn at this time,” the Warmbier family’s medical examiner in Ohio said afterward. In an official statement on June 23, North Korea’s foreign ministry denied any mistreatment, saying that “we provided [Warmbier] with medical treatments and care with all sincerity on a humanitarian basis until his return to the U.S., considering that his health got worse.”

Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor who has helped get several prisoners released from North Korea, told NPR that Warmbier was probably the victim of an interrogation that went wrong. “It affected his brain [and] he then went into a coma,” he said. “I don’t think they’re foolish enough to engage and torture a 21-year-old boy who just stole a political banner.” In any case, US activist groups seeking to end the standoff through dialogue and engagement expressed hope that Congress would not ban US citizens from visiting North Korea.

“While we do not know the full account of what happened during his imprisonment in North Korea, we believe Otto should not have been detained—nor lost his life,” Women Cross DMZ, the women’s peace group that visited North and South Korea in 2015, declared. “Rather than use Otto’s case to continue a policy that further cuts off communication, we call for improved channels of dialogue between North Korea and the United States.”

That idea has currency in Washington. On Monday, at the same Seoul forum where the foreign minister spoke, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, proposed that the United States and North Korea establish interest sections in each other’s capitals to “help prevent miscalculations stemming from a lack of communication” and establish conditions for direct negotiations, according to The Korea Herald.

Yet even as President Moon was expressing sorrow and anger over Warmbier’s death, Moon and his foreign-policy advisers were portrayed by the US media as undercutting American policy. The coverage was epitomized by a visit to Seoul by CBS reporter Norah O’Donnell, who spent two years of her youth living with her Army family at Yongsan, the sprawling headquarters of the US military command in South Korea.

In a televised interview with Moon that received front-page coverage in South Korea, O’Donnell offended many Koreans by telling the former human-rights lawyer that it’s “not clear” whether President Trump “will agree to allow you to negotiate with the North Koreans without any preconditions.”

Moon replied politely. “I have never mentioned a dialogue with no preconditions whatsoever,” he informed O’Donnell. “I believe that first we must vie for a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. And then, as a second phase, try to achieve the complete dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program. And I believe there are voices supporting such a step-by-step approach even within the United States.” He was referring to recent statements from former officials such as William Perry, who negotiated directly with North Korea in the 1990s as President Clinton’s defense secretary.

Two weeks ago, Perry made several appearances in Washington, where he said a North Korean freeze of its missile tests, combined with a reduction in US-South Korean military exercises, were ideas “worth considering” as a way to restart negotiations with the North. He also told a seminar on North Korea sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and the Korea Peace Network that the United States should respect the Moon government’s wishes to remove THAAD, arguing that the system was of “little use” in defending against North Korean missile attacks.

Even the RAND Corporation, long known for its hawkish stance on Korea, recently endorsed the idea of negotiating a peace treaty with North Korea to end the state of war. Clapper backs the idea as well. “At least engaging in discussions leading to a peace treaty would relieve [North Korea’s] fear of attack, and also deflate one of their major assertions they use to instill fear among their people to justify their grotesque commitment of resources to their military,” he said on Monday.

Taking note of the shifting tone in Washington, The New York Times’s David Sanger reported on June 21 that the Trump administration “has come under growing pressure” to open negotiations on a temporary freeze of North Korean missile tests in exchange for reductions in US military exercises on the peninsula.

But President Moon was clearly rattled by O’Donnell’s audacious assumption that he needed permission from President Trump to talk to the North. “Resumption of dialogue with North Korea may need to be pursued in close cooperation and consultation with the United States, but South Korea does not need to be allowed by the U.S. to do so,” Moon’s chief spokesman told Yonhap News, the country’s official news agency, within hours of his CBS interview.

The public should expect similar fireworks during this week’s summit, predicted Christine Ahn, the founder and spokesperson for Women Cross DMZ. She recalled the disastrous 2001 meeting between the late Korean president Kim Dae-jung and former President George W. Bush, when she said Bush “humiliated” Kim by publicly rejecting his policies of engagement. “Like Emmanuel Macron [France’s new president], Moon should be prepared to push back,” she said.

Gwangju—Moon Jae-in, a human rights and labor lawyer who came of age protesting authoritarian military governments backed by the United States, assumed South Korea’s presidency Wednesday after a snap election that repudiated nearly a decade of right-wing conservative rule.1

Moon, 64, took office after securing about 41 percent of a total popular vote of 32.8 million, far ahead of his closest rival, the conservative Hong Joon-pyo, who ended up with 24 percent. It was the largest margin in Korean election history, the wire service Yonhap reported.2

“I will restore a government based on principle and justice,” Moon declared Tuesday night in a nationally broadcast speech from Seoul’s Gwanghwamun district, which is famous for its political protests. “I will be the proud president of a proud nation.”3

After being sworn in Wednesday, he startled the nation with a ringing declaration calling for a new foreign policy based on negotiations and dialogue. “I will do whatever it takes to help settle peace on the Korean Peninsula,” including visiting North Korea, Moon told the National Assembly. In a nod to Washington, he also declared he would “further strengthen the alliance between South Korea and the United States.”4

Moon’s election was the direct result of the impeachment of his predecessor, Park Geun-hye, who had embraced Washington’s hard-line policies toward Pyongyang. She was brought down after millions of citizens angry about corruption, economic mismanagement, abuse of power, and the uncertain future of Korean youth flooded the streets of Seoul and other major cities in a peaceful movement now known as the “candlelight revolution.”5

In an exclusive interview with The Nation after a Sunday-night rally in Gwangju, Moon said his election, and the movement that preceded it, was the culmination of his nation’s long march toward democracy. “We have had many remarkable achievements,” he said. “But all those events couldn’t complete the civil revolution. Now we’ve finally done it through the candlelight movement. This is a remarkable achievement, of which we should be proud.”6

Moon, a former human-rights lawyer, traced South Korea’s democratic history back to 1960, when its first president, Syngman Rhee, was overthrown. He ticked off the highlights of the past 30 years: the student-worker demonstrations in Pusan, his hometown, that preceded the assassination of the country’s first military dictator, Park Chung-hee, in October 1979; the bloody Gwangju Uprising in May 1980 against the martial-law regime imposed by another general, Chun Doo-hwan; and the Korean people’s final push for democracy and direct presidential elections in June 1987.7

“Whenever democracy has fallen into a crisis, the Korean people have sprung up in rage,” he told me. In fact, Moon played an integral part in that movement. As an activist, he was arrested twice in the 1970s and ’80s for protesting against Park (who was Park Geun-hye’s father) and Chun. He later became a labor lawyer, representing workers who had difficulty finding representation. Moon is best known as the chief of staff for South Korea’s last progressive president, Roh Moo-hyun.8

ith Park in jail, Moon aimed his campaign at dismantling Park Geun-hye’s “old regime,” as he called it on Sunday. His platform and campaign statements challenged nearly every policy of the remnants of her Saenuri Party, which split in two after her impeachment.9

During his run, Moon called for reform of the country’s powerful conglomerates, or chaebol, which dominate the economy; a stronger focus on job creation for youth through new industries such as alternative energy; and increased wages and holiday time for workers.10

Jin Joo, a public employee in Gwangju active in the Green Party of South Korea, said Moon’s campaign also spoke to voters angry about “the extreme situation” in South Korea over the Park government’s attacks on freedom of expression and political rights. An opinion poll a few weeks before the election found that 27.5 percent of the people chose “justice” as their top priority, above national security or economic growth, The Korea Times noted.11

The public, said Joo, was particularly incensed by the Park government’s failure to rescue the hundreds of students and teachers who drowned in the tragic Sewol ferry accident in 2014, as well as its role in the death of Baek Nam-gi, an activist killed by a water cannon shot by police during a labor demonstration in 2015. Another factor was Park’s imprisonment of labor leader Han Sang-gyun, who was sentenced to several years in prison for organizing the demonstration where Baek received his fatal injury.12

“With Moon’s election, we got to have our next president much sooner than expected,” Joo told me. The political atmosphere created by the candlelight protests leading up to the impeachment, she added, has allowed people to raise issues that “previously no one talked about,” such as LGBT and disability rights. (That didn’t always work for Moon, however. A few weeks ago, a lesbian activist confronted Moon at a campaign rally after he said during a televised debate that he “opposed” homosexuality.)13

ut as Moon indicated in his first speech, his election also represents the public’s desire for peace and reconciliation in their divided country. During the presidencies of Lee Myung-bak (2008-13) and Park, tensions escalated sharply with North Korea over its nuclear and missile-testing program. The situation intensified this spring, when the North tested several more missiles, leading to threats of pre-emptive strikes by the Trump administration. In April, the United States and the North appeared to be moving toward war. But as I reported, the situation caused far more concern in Washington than in South Korea.14

To alleviate the tensions, Moon has promised a more “open and humanitarian” approach that would be marked by a return to the “Sunshine Policy” of South Korea’s last two progressive presidents, Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003) and Roh Moo-hyun (2003-08). During their years in office, they reached out to Pyongyang with economic projects and cultural and political exchanges. In 2007, when he was Roh’s chief of staff, Moon traveled to North Korea when Roh held a summit meeting with Kim Jong-il, the father of North Korea’s current dictator, Kim Jong-un.15

At his Gwangju rally on Sunday, Moon said he would “raise my voice loudly” to place South Korea in the lead in any dealings with North Korea. He also pledged to renegotiate a deal the Trump administration struck with Park Geun-hye to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system, known as THAAD, in South Korea.16

Last month, however, the Pentagon deployed the system without waiting for the election. This led Moon to criticize the move as a fait accompli and angered many South Koreans who oppose THAAD and continue to demonstrate against it. Because his policies on North Korea appear to be at odds with the more confrontational approach taken by the Trump administration, the US media framed Moon’s election as a major challenge to the United States.17

Moon’s election sets “up a potential rift with the United States over the North’s nuclear program,” David Sanger of The New York Times predicted Wednesday. Just after the election results were announced, Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist and CNN analyst, tweeted that “South Korea just elected an anti-American president.”18

In the weeks leading up to the vote, former and current US officials made it known they were unhappy with Moon’s potential policies. “We are headed for serious trouble,” a former US diplomat told Donald Kirk, a veteran reporter in Seoul, adding that a clash is “unavoidable.”19

In his interview with The Nation, Moon was adamant that his more conciliatory approach toward Pyongyang would benefit the United States. “To solve the North Korea nuclear problem is in both our common interests,” he said. “If South Korea takes an active role, that would be helpful to the United States and would relieve the US burden.”20

Rather than blame President Trump for the recent tensions, as many Koreans have, Moon pointed to the failures of the Park government. “The relationship between North Korea and the US has been getting worse and worse because South Korea hasn’t performed its role well,” he said.21

Asked about US critics who think his approach is problematic, Moon responded emphatically, “I don’t agree.” He expressed the belief that Trump “would also sympathize with my idea and understand me on this issue.”22

Daniel Pinkston, a Seoul-based military analyst who has been studying North Korea for decades, said Moon’s US critics should “take a deep breath and see what happens.” In a telephone interview, Pinkston said a US-South Korea clash was possible in part because Trump’s national security team is so disorganized, with top positions on Asia policy unfilled. “We don’t even have an ambassador here,” he said. “The Koreans need to understand that the Trump presidency is abnormal.”23

At the same time, Pinkston added, Moon’s government could be constrained by US- and UN-approved sanctions on North Korea aimed at forcing Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program. As an example, he pointed to a recent proposal from Moon for South Korea to trade its rice for rare earths from the North as a way of solving Pyongyang’s rice shortage and allowing South Korean companies to buy rare minerals at a discount. Some critics have said that could violate the UN sanctions, an issue that Moon would have to negotiate.24

The success of Moon’s policies will also depend on the willingness of North Korea to reciprocate on any offers from the South, said Pinkston. “Will there be a rift? It all depends on how it’s managed,” he said.25

Whatever the case, Moon is acutely aware of the pain from Korea’s division and America’s role in the war. In December 1950, his family fled the North during the initial phase of the Korean War with a group of 14,000 refugees who were brought to the South in a flotilla organized by the US Navy and its merchant marine. Moon, who was born in 1953, wrote favorably about the Americans who helped his family in his autobiography, From Destiny to Hope.26

hese experiences make the right-wing attacks on Moon as a “North Korean sympathizer” sound as ludicrous as the accusations from US pundits that he is “anti-American.” But if he wanted to openly criticize the United States, he declined my offer when I asked him about his thoughts on the Gwangju Uprising.27

During his campaign stops here, I heard Moon say he would honor the spirit of the uprising when he became president. But in 1980, I reminded him, the United States refused to support the democratic aspirations of Gwangju and instead approved the deployment of Korean troops from the joint US-South Korean Command to put it down. Does he believe the US government should apologize?28

I was surprised by Moon’s response. First, he offered his “deep thanks” to me for my reporting on Gwangju, which he said “revealed the facts and truth to the world.” That was important, he added, because at that time, “South Korea was under dictatorship and the Korean press was controlled.”29

As for the United States, he added carefully, “We expected a more active US role [at the time of Gwangju]. But since then, we’ve won enough power to achieve democracy by ourselves. So I don’t think we need to be bound by the past or care about [an apology] for the US role. It doesn’t matter, because we have moved on, and established democracy for ourselves.”30

Not everyone here will agree with Moon on that issue. But it’s hard to think of a better way to tell the world that a new South Korea has emerged, and is ready take its rightful place in the sun.31