Pyongyang University of Science and Technology

I know or have met several people associated with the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). Two weeks go, they detained Tony Kim, a U.S. citizen who had been teaching accounting at PUST. Now they've detained another American, Kim Hak-song. Both are alleged to have committed "hostile acts" against the regime. This bring the total number of Americans held captive in North Korea to four.

photo: Ian Wells, PUST websiite

My own thoughts about PUST have always been ambivalent. The people I know who've taught at PUST have shared really amazing stories about their time at the school which demonstrate the human (and for Christians, the Holy) spirit at work, and the potential for people-to-people exchanges with North Koreans. But at the same time, PUST as an enterprise which is 100% funded by foreigners, raises so many questions about the status of an overtly Christian school operating inside a repressive regime. 

Suki Kim, who worked as an undercover author posing as an English teacher, penned an op-ed questioning whether PUST is propping up the regime. Kim has offered measured criticism against PUST, even implying that PUST may be providing students technical skills which can be transferred for military purposes (which I think is way off mark). 

But she also writes in her op-ed, " Yet there is also a positive aspect to PUST. From living with these foreigners on such an intimate basis, these young, isolated North Koreans are exposed to the glimpses of the outside world and its freedom, which might eventually provide hopes for North Korea’s future."

I wish PUST the best, but news of recent detained citizens connected to PUST is certainly troubling, both from a human rights standpoint, and also for the future of PUST. 

Security and Human Rights in Trump's Foreign Policy: US Alliances and Autocracies

Every U.S. administration in the postwar period has grappled with the tensions between security and human rights and our relationship with autocratic rulers. No place has this been more obvious than in the Middle East these days. The assumption is that the Trump Administration will care less about human rights, particularly if he sees various foreign relationships as transactional. We may be seeing the first signs of his willingness to turn a blind eye to human rights and democracy in favor of preserving strategic ties. Two recent examples come out of the Middle East.


Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

1. Egypt. President Trump invited Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to an official White House visit this week (post-visit analysis is here). As the Washington Post notes:

"Sissi’s arrival at the White House marked a reversal of U.S. policy after President Barack Obama refused to invite him, because of concerns about human rights violations. Trump and his aides did not mention human rights ahead of Sissi’s visit, suggesting that the issue would be raised in private, if at all. Instead, Trump and Sissi appeared focused on security, and they sought to demonstrate warmth, shaking hands during their brief remarks to reporters."

In an op-ed, Bob Kagan and Michelle Dunne referred to U.S. ties to Egypt as a "dysfunctional relationship" suggesting that there may not even be that much security value to relations with Egypt. They advocate cutting ties, much like Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly have recommended for Pakistan.

2.  Bahrain. The Trump administration agreed to resume arms sales, specifically a $5 billion sale of F-16s, to Bahrain, something the Obama administration had halted because of human rights violations against activists and Shiites. Of course, Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy 5th Fleet, and during the Arab Spring, human rights groups criticized President Obama for ignoring the crackdown against protestors.

As reported again in a WaPo article, these decisions are "the latest signals that that the Trump administration is prioritizing support for Sunni-led countries seen as critical to opposing Iran’s influence in the Mideast over human rights issues that Obama had elevated."

As an Asia scholar, I continue to wonder what parallels and lessons might exist with current U.S. support for authoritarian regimes and U.S. relationship with Asian dictators in the 1970s (Philippines, Korea, Taiwan) which were ultimately seen as "successful" in a post-democratic society. Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey are a few contemporary examples worth exploring.

Is North Korea Irrational?

No. For decades academics have been  writing on the rationality of the Kim family (and autocratic survival more generally), but journalists find it easier to sell a story when you can pitch North Korea as a land of crazies. David Kang's earlier academic piece in International Security, his interview on NPR yesterday, and an article from Anna Fifield in the Washington Post all reiterate this point.

If the goal is regime survival, than North Korean actions are indeed rational and successful. Nuclear weapons, strict control of information, and curtailment of freedoms, corruption, deification of regime...all these things are intended to keep the Kim family in power.  North Korea does not play by international rules, it regularly violates norms, and many of its actions are inviolable if not despicable (this is probably true to some degree of all governments). North Korea is certainly and may appear to play by its own rules and logic. But that doesn't make it irrational.

South Korea Post-Impeachment Round-up

I haven't been able to keep up, much less write about the South Korean impeachment, but I'm posting some analysis and discussion for later reading written by friends and colleagues here.

I begin with the Asan Institute's biweekly newsletter, Asan Korea Perspective which gives us a barebones explanation of the grounds for impeachment and outcome of the South Korean Supreme Court's decision to impeach President Park Geunhye. There's also public opinion data related to the impeachment with 77% approving impeachment.

Charges and Court's Ruling. Source: Asan Korea Perspective Vol 2, no.6)

The Washington Post provided a video summary of the impeachment.

Celeste Arrington provides her thoughts at the Monkey Cage and the next steps for an election in which a progressive candidate is assumed to win.

Many praised the Court's ruling as a win for democracy and  South Korea's own democratic process. This included the editorial board of the Washington Post, but they also reminded us that the impeachment itself doesn't solve Korea's many domestic and foreign policy problems. Darcie Draudt also reminds us that several dimensions of South Korean democracy (most notably freedom of speech) the past few years have been in decline. She asks whether the impeachment will actually lead to longer reaching domestic institutional reforms to reduce corruption. And Kathy Moon weighs in with a provocative, but dead center quote in Quartz, "I find worrisome this glorification of South Korea’s protests. If governance structures were working properly then citizens normally would be channeling their concerns through institutional processes—reaching out to their elected leaders, going to the courts. Spilling out into the street is a sign of political dysfunction.”

Anna Fifield provided a barrage of reportage on the effects of the impeachment on everything from North Korea-China relations to the joy and images of celebration of Park's impeachment.

North Korea and Revolutions

Here's a piece by Andrei Lankov evaluating the possibility of revolution in North Korea based on five indicators in James DeFronzo's book “Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements” whether a society is ripe for a revolt. It's overly simplistic, and you can't just check boxes - the causal conditions and antecedents (both structural and agent-driven) are probably more complicated. But it's still worth going through this thought experiment.

South Korea-China Relations and THAAD

Very briefly, this 38 North report is the best run-down of THAAD deployment and the tensions it has generated between the ROK and China. As the author states:

When the decision was originally made, the ROK government anticipated a negative Chinese reaction to THAAD deployment, but went ahead with it for several reasons. First, its anxiety about security and lack of missile defenses had increased significantly in response to the acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile development. Second, the ROK government needed to manage the risk of Washington abandoning the US-ROK alliance. In doing this, it considered THAAD to be one means of filling security gaps and securing conditions for the stable presence of US forces. Third, Seoul understood the system’s effective radar detection range to be limited to the Korean peninsula and is oriented solely to detect North Korean ballistic missiles. Fourth, Seoul needed to demonstrate that it would not permit China to exercise a veto over its right to deploy a system to defend its national security. Fifth, the ROK government dismissed the fear that a THAAD battery in its territory would become integrated into the US ballistic missile defense system as groundless.In addition to these factors, opponents of President Park Geun-hye’s conservative administration won a majority of National Assembly seats in the subsequent general election, raising the prospect that deploying THAAD would have become less politically feasible with further delay.

However, China holds a very different view of the South Korean decision. First, Beijing believes that one THAAD battery can neither deter North Korea militarily nor compel Pyongyang to change its behavior. Second, it thinks the system’s detection range could later be changed to suit US needs, enabling THAAD to potentially target Chinese assets, including strategic missile systems and forcing Beijing to spend more on defenses for its coastal missile bases. Third, Beijing is aware that a long-term goal of the US rebalance to Asia is to check or block China through security cooperation with South Korea and Japan. Fourth, it expects an additional strategic burden from changes to the regional “power balance,” such as new Russian defenses against THAAD that Beijing will also have to take into account.

On a related note, CFR published a study on South Korea's option in Northeast Asia in response to the China factor.

Between Action and Inaction in Syria

This is the most damning op-ed I've seen to date regarding President Obama's foreign policy on Syria. The Washington Post editorials have been highly critical of U.S. inaction for some time as you can read on Aug. 16, 2016, and July 2, 2016, and from editorial page editor Fred Hiat who states that the Obama Administration not only failed  to take action in Syria, but "soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy." But the op-ed by Leon Wieseltier is scathing, calling Obama's words "outrageously hypocritical." Wieseltier writes, "The administration creatively pioneered a third option, which it pursued not only in Syria but also in Ukraine and elsewhere: Between action and inaction, it chose inconsequential action (italics mine). There is the Obama doctrine!"

 

It's hard to place blame on the Obama Administration for the tragedy taking place right now in Aleppo. One might instead blame Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, or perhaps Iran and Russia for inflicting hurt and destruction as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Powers did in a speech which has gone viral (to which the Russian ambassador replied, "I don't want to remind these three countries [US, France, UK] about their role in unwinding the Syrian crisis, which led to such difficult consequences, and let terrorists spread in Syria and Iraq). But where questions lie for the next Administration is whether the U.S., as a great power, has a moral responsibility to push harder militarily against the Syrian government an do more to protect civilians.

Obama's critics argue that there are serious costs to inaction. In contrast, proponents have argued that greater U.S. involvement would have only made the conflict worse, with more death and suffering. Can the U.S. to do more to take a stand against al-Assad in which the costs (in lives and treasure) do not exceed the benefits? I can clearly see the administration has been wrestling between a logic of consequence and a logic of appropriateness resulting in such inconsequential inaction.