Posts Tagged ‘kim jong un’
Taking Stock of North Korean Rhetoric
It’s now almost impossible to imagine North Korea without a barrage of bellicose rhetoric mainly consisting of die-hard nuclear threats. Over the past few weeks, we have been inundated with shrill terms such as zooktang (sledge-hammer blows), beolcho (killing people like cutting the weeds at the ancestor’s graves), “venomous swish of [...]
War and Peace on the Korean Peninsula
Reports coming from the Korean peninsula in the past few weeks have been disturbing and contradictory. On the one hand, tensions continue to escalate as Pyongyang and Seoul are locked in an upward spiral of threats to raze each other to the ground. This is the most severe situation since the 1968 Korean crisis, when the DPRK captured the US [...]
How to Talk Kim Jong Un Off the Ledge
This article was originally published by Foreign Policy. The original can be found here. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Asia is an important opportunity to start fashioning an off-ramp from the crisis on the Korean peninsula. "We are seeking a partner to deal with in a rational and reasonable way," he said upon landing in [...]
North Korea: Turning in the Wrong Direction
When Kim Jong Un assumed power, the world saw him as a young new leader who, given his education in Europe, might be reform-minded. Just over a year later, he comes across more like a reckless bully. Since the beginning of 2013, the security situation on the Korean peninsula has taken a dramatic turn for the worse, following North Korea’s [...]
Kim Jong Un’s Pyongyang Shuffle
Kim Jong Un’s efforts to consolidate power continue 15 months after formally assuming the supreme leadership of North Korea. Evidence of his personal stamp can be seen in a series of senior personnel appointments made at the recent plenary session of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) Central Committee held on March 31, 2013, and the 7th session [...]
Dealing with a Sore Lip: Parsing China’s “Recalculation” of North Korea Policy
Chinese media went wild—as wild as censored media gets—immediately following North Korea’s third nuclear test in February 2013. Global Times criticized the event as a failure of China’s North Korea policy, while Weibo was flooded with frustrated comments that called for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and even the punishment [...]
