Next week s debate will be whether Trump s Iran deal requires congressional approval. If Trump unblocks funds that the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA) required the President to block, the answer is arguably yes. You can count on Trump to claim, as is his habit, that Article II gives him absolute monarchical power, but Article I, Section 8 gives…
In a sense, it s too soon to reflect on the disaster in Iran. After all, Trump s cease-fires have a half-life of a week. There is every reason to think that this one will also fall apart soon enough in Lebanon, over an attack in the Strait, or because of an escalating public argument over what was even agreed. In another sense, it s not too soon to reflect on Trump s well-established record on the…
Donald Trump did not run on isolationism because he was against war. He ran on isolationism because he is a stupid man who always wants to be the smartest man in the room. Thinking deeply, analytically, or strategically about foreign places or the complex national security threats that arise in them bores him, so he surrounded himself with the sort of emotional, reflexive, and opportunistic…
Donald Trump has betrayed more American values and interests than my dog has hairs in January, but let s pause on one subset of them his aid cutoff to Ukraine, his stalling of sanctions against Russia, and his public blustering at Volodimir Zelensky that he had no cards to play. Well, Zelensky is playing them now, and I m sure he s having a good laugh at the expense of Trump and Putin somewhere.…
Update: NK News reports that he s been released (paywall). The Chosun Ilbo is reporting that the well-known North Korea expert, Professor Andrei Lankov, has been arrested in Latvia. It doesn t say why, but Russians have often fallen under suspicion in the Baltic states in recent years as Russia wages a hybrid war against them. Professor Lankov and I fell into some strong disagreements in recent…
A prediction: some legal issues with the prosecution of Nicolas Maduro will soon create significant political problems for Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. The fact that a grand jury in New York has already re-indicted Maduro, combined with the grand jury secrecy rules, means that the Trump administration has been planning this operation for several weeks. I m impressed and surprised that the grand…
In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned us that political parties would use the Spoils System to politicize our civil service, usurp power, and destroy the very democracy that gave them power: They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and…
For the first time since 1945, the two heads-of-state of the United States and South Korea would both prefer to end their two states alliance. Because the alliance is popular with South Korean voters, Lee Jae-myung would deny that publicly. Privately, he wants to preserve the fiction of one, to wind it down slowly, and failing that, to evade blame for the coming divorce. Trump has no such qualms.…
Watch. Enjoy today, as the threat of Russian bombers begins to go up in smoke, for tomorrow, we ll all have to think about stringing steel netting over our airport terminals. * * * Update: I m suddenly seized by the fear that Putin has taken Trump s measure as his puppet and will feel free to respond with unrestrained brutality against Ukrainian civilians. * * * Update 2: Inevitably: * * * Update…
Last Tuesday, British American Tobacco, the world s second-largest tobacco company, along with its Singaporean subsidiary, pled guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy charges and agreed to pay a combined $635 million in criminal and civil fines, penalties, and forfeitures to the Treasury and Justice Departments. The charges arise from an secret joint venture, going all the way back to 2001, in which…
In 1997, a Washington Post reporter was allowed into the city of Hamheung, in the mountains that ring North Korea’s east coast, to investigate reports of a famine in the isolated country. There, he interviewed the director of a local orphanage, who told him that some parents who could no longer feed their children had begun to abandon them “to nature.” Some of these children died where their…
The editors of 38 North are smart, well-informed people, and so I m puzzled by their decision to publish this submission by Heeje Lee and Samuel S. Han, a dentist and a research assistant, declaring Kim Jong-un s victory over COVID. Unlike the usual suspects, Lee and Han don’t avoid all criticism of the North Korean system, its leaders, or its policies. They acknowledge “the weak state of the…
Among sanctions critics who oppose America’s foreign policy goals or sympathize with its adversaries, a common cliche is that “sanctions never work.” A more nuanced criticism from skeptics of American power is that sanctions alone cannot cause states to change the policies that Washington and its allies oppose. A third argument is that sanctions are not an end unto themselves. The first argument…
Between 2017 and 2022, the leaders of the United States and South Korea performed an experiment: what if they froze joint military exercises, said nothing about Kim Jong-un s crimes against humanity, offered aid, and stopped actively enforcing sanctions? The results of the experiment are in. This week, Treasury Secretary Yellen is in Seoul, where she met with President Yoon to discuss, among other…
How many things do you own that were made by slaves—specifically, enslaved North Koreans or Uygurs? The bad news is that no one knows, because most of the evidence is hidden deep within the supply chains. The good news is that this may be changing just enough to make the use of slave labor unprofitable for the retailers you buy from and the sweatshops in China that employ it. Royal Blood-Fresh…
Documents filed with the Justice Department in July show that a group of South Korean investors hired a San Francisco law firm and a South Korean consulting firm to lobby the U.S. government to support reopening a shuttered, looted, and partially exploded manufacturing complex near Kaesong, North Korea. The documents were required to be filed with the Justice Department and made public under the…
Today, the Justice Department announced that for the first time, it has extradited a North Korean national to the United States. Mun Chol Myong, who was based in Malaysia, and whom DOJ claims to be an agent of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, allegedly laundered money through the United States to do deals between the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea (designated in 2013 for WMD proliferation…
Yesterday morning, I was surprised to learn that my tweets about Lee In-young’s master plan to get around sanctions and bail out Kim Jong-un made the Chosun Ilbo and are spreading around Korean YouTube. Because you hate reading long posts—even long posts that you really should read—I decided to hold back for today my examination of why Lee and his colleagues are so motivated to aid and abet…