Quotes of the Day:

"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."

– Ernest Hemingway

"The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

– John Steinbeck

"If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect." 

– Benjamin Franklin

1. Trump suggests U.S. could withdraw its troops if S. Korea does not contribute more to support USFK: TIME

2. Trump rekindles criticism: US forces defending 'wealthy' S. Korea 'free of charge'

3.  Japan's leader Fumio Kishida on countering threat of China and North Korea

4. U.S. calls on N. Korea to give 'full' accounting of Japanese abductees

5. N. Korean media makes no mention of Cuba among nations sending congratulatory messages over late founder's birthday

6. South Korea considers joining alliance for sharing military technology with Australia, US and UK

7. South Korea plans $4B in new weapons investments, including $583M of SM-3s - Breaking Defense

8. The Marine officer who saved 8,000 lives at the ‘Frozen Chosin’

9. N. Korea orders confiscation of all cell phones owned by Russia-based workers

10. N. Korea's single mothers face severe levels of discrimination

11. Kim Jong-un spends $1.82 billion per year on elite perks, report says

12. The shortsighted US-Japan-South Korea military pact

13. Defeat for South Korea’s Ruling Party Won't Dim Pro-US Stance

14. Rehabilitating Syngman Rhee

15. Washington Backed a Coup Against South Korean Democracy

1. Trump suggests U.S. could withdraw its troops if S. Korea does not contribute more to support USFK: TIME

I would like to know what Korean experts are advising Trump. Who is he listening to? Someone should tell him that if there is war or regime collapse on the Korean peninsula that it will have global effects which will harm all Americans. The fastest way to conflict (and cementing a loser legacy) is by removing US troops. Just saying.

Here is the link to the entire Time interview in case you are interested.

https://time.com/6972021/donald-trump-2024-election-interview/

Trump suggests U.S. could withdraw its troops if S. Korea does not contribute more to support USFK: TIME | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · May 1, 2024

By Song Sang-ho

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Yonhap) -- Former President Donald Trump has suggested that the United States could pull out its troops stationed in South Korea if the Asian ally does not make more financial contributions to support them, U.S. magazine TIME reported Tuesday.

TIME's release of its interview with Trump came as Seoul and Washington recently launched new negotiations over South Korea's share of the cost for the upkeep of the 28,500-strong U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) under a deal, called the Special Measures Agreement (SMA).

"We have 40,000 troops that are in a precarious position," he was quoted by TIME as saying. "Which doesn't make any sense. Why would we defend somebody? And we're talking about a very wealthy country."

He was apparently referring to the 28,500 USFK service members.

Based on the remarks, TIME said in an article that Trump "suggests" the U.S. could withdraw its forces "if South Korea doesn't pay more to support U.S. troops there to deter (North Korean leader) Kim Jong-un's increasingly belligerent regime to the north."

In Honolulu last week, Seoul and Washington held the first round of negotiations over a new SMA as the current six-year SMA is set to expire at the end of next year.

Observers have said that the allies had sought to hold SMA talks earlier than usual amid concerns that should former Trump return to the White House for a second term, he could drive a hard bargain over a new SMA in a way that could cause friction in the alliance.

During Trump's presidency, the SMA negotiation was a major bone of contention as he demanded a hefty rise in South Korea's share of the cost for USFK.

Since 1991, Seoul has partially shared the cost for Korean USFK workers; the construction of military installations, such as barracks, and training, educational, operational and communications facilities; and other logistical support.

Former US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before departing for the day at his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs, at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on April 30, 2024 in this photo released by AFP. (Yonhap)

sshluck@yna.co.kr

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en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · May 1, 2024

2. Trump rekindles criticism: US forces defending 'wealthy' S. Korea 'free of charge'

The only thing Kim Jong Un fears more than the might of the ROK/US military alliance is the wrath of the Korean people in the north when they decide to resist his rule.

In the ROK the only person the Korean people in the South fear more than Kim Jong Un is Donald Trump.

Is there anyone more uninformed on Korea?

Trump rekindles criticism: US forces defending 'wealthy' S. Korea 'free of charge'

koreaherald.com · by Ji Da-gyum · May 1, 2024

By Ji Da-gyum

Published : May 1, 2024 - 15:32

Former President Donald Trump leaves the courtroom following the day's proceedings in his trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on Tuesday, (Pool Photo via AP)

Former US President Donald Trump has criticized South Korea's contribution to US Forces expenses, claiming they were "free of charge," and scrutinized the Biden administration's defense cost-sharing talks with South Korea.

"I want South Korea to treat us properly," Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election in November, said during his interview with Time magazine released Tuesday.

Trump reiterated his long-standing personal belief that allies often benefit from US security guarantees without adequately sharing the burden of defense costs, with South Korea, a key Asian treaty ally, being no exception.

"From what I'm hearing, they were able to renegotiate with the Biden Administration and bring that number way, way down to what it was before, which was almost nothing," Trump said.

The former US president, who reportedly proposed the complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea according to a memoir released in 2022 written by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, subsequently raised questions about the legitimacy of US Forces Korea.

"Which doesn't make any sense. Why would we defend somebody? And we’re talking about a very wealthy country. But they're a very wealthy country and why wouldn't they want to pay?" he added during the interview.

Trump repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with South Korea's treatment of the US regarding financial contributions, especially given the presence of US forces stationed near North Korea, but citing inaccurate anecdotes regarding the scale of the USFK.

"We have 40,000 troops, and in a somewhat precarious position, to put it mildly, because right next door happens to be a man I got along with very well, but a man who nevertheless, he’s got visions of things," Trump was quoted as saying, even though only around 28,500 US troops are stationed in South Korea.

The man Trump was referring to here likely refers to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, with whom he had three in-person meetings between 2018 and 2019.

"I told South Korea that it's time that you step up and pay. They’ve become a very wealthy country. We've essentially paid for much of their military, free of charge. And they agreed to pay billions of dollars. And now probably now that I’m gone, they're paying very little," he said.

Trump's claim that South Korea had agreed to contribute "billions of dollars" is also inaccurate.

In 2021, both countries agreed that South Korea would contribute $1.03 billion for defense-cost sharing, representing a 13.9 percent increase from its payments in 2019 and 2020. Additionally, from 2022 to 2025, they agreed to raise defense cost-sharing according to South Korea's defense budget growth rate from the previous year.

Throughout the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021, Seoul and Washington encountered persistent challenges in reaching a consensus on South Korea's contribution to the stationing of US Forces Korea.

During his term, Trump pursued a huge increase, requesting South Korea to pay more than five times the previous amount, totaling around $5 billion.

Negotiations for the 11th Special Measures Agreement, which lays the foundation for South Korea's cost-sharing contributions to US Forces Korea, began in September 2019. After over 18 months, the talks finally concluded in March 2021, shortly after Biden's inauguration, not under the Trump administration.

Seoul and Washington commenced negotiations for the 10th SMA in March 2018 but concluded them in February 2019. However, they only managed to reach an agreement on a one-year deal for 2019, which was an exceptional case given that multiyear deals are more customary in such negotiations.

Trump's comments have drawn attention, particularly as Seoul and Washington have initiated negotiations for the 12th SMA, which is slated to take effect in 2026. These negotiations have started almost 20 months ahead of the expiration of the current agreement in 2025.

Observers noted that the decision by both sides to kickstart defense cost-sharing talks early may have been influenced by the upcoming US presidential election in November, where President Joe Biden faces a rematch with Trump.

The first round of talks took place from April 23 to 25 in Honolulu, Hawaii, during which the Foreign Ministry stated that both sides "explained their respective positions" on the 12th SMA.

koreaherald.com · by Ji Da-gyum · May 1, 2024

3. Japan's leader Fumio Kishida on countering threat of China and North Korea

Excerpts:

Japan faces a changing international order that is anything but peaceful, in either its own neighborhood or beyond. Under Kishida's leadership since 2021, it has more assertively set out a policy of reinforcing its defense forces and of strengthening its alliances with the United States and other Western powers as it builds new partnerships with Asian countries that had sometimes been historically wary of its motives.

China is rapidly developing state-of-the-art military technology and seeking to assert its increasingly dominant regional position amid intensified global competition with the U.S. Its sporadic maritime confrontations with Japan over disputed East China Sea Islands are a sign of the bigger contest. North Korea, undeterred by international sanctions, seemingly achieves nuclear-capable missile milestones by the day while broadcasting fiery rhetoric toward its foes.

...

Kishida's parallel efforts on diplomatic and military fronts follow in part from his previous experience. He served as foreign minister and, briefly, as acting defense minister under the late, influential Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Abe, an avowed nationalist who became Japan's longest-serving premier before being forced to resign in 2019 amid corruption scandals and reports of ill-health, was the first to oversee the major changes in Japan's military mindset and developed the "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" concept which is now ubiquitous in U.S. strategy documents and a cornerstone of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, consisting of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.

Kishida took office in 2021 following the resignation of Abe's immediate successor, Yoshihide Suga, and is widely seen as continuing the legacy of Abe, whose 2022 assassination by a gunman with a grudge against him shocked Japan. "Japan is now sustaining and leading the liberal international order in Asia. It is in Japan's interest and the interests of the region," Nobukatsu Kanehara, who served as Abe's assistant chief cabinet secretary and deputy national security adviser, told Newsweek.

"People are all equal and free and they have rights to pursue their own happiness. This individual freedom fits very much with Samurai spirits of the Japanese."

Like Abe, who, in 2015, was the last Japanese premier to visit Washington, D.C., Kishida took the opportunity during his trip to address a joint session of Congress, making the case for forging an even closer alliance with the U.S. "I was able to gain broad support, applause and the opinions from Congressional members," Kishida said.

Japan's leader Fumio Kishida on countering threat of China and North Korea

Newsweek · by Tom O'Connor · April 29, 2024

World North Korea China Japan World News

More than a dozen times, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida uses the word "peace" as he discusses his country's momentous decision to undertake its largest buildup of military capabilities since World War II.

"Since I became prime minister, we have substantially revised Japan's National Security Strategy," Kishida told Newsweek during an interview at his office in Tokyo on the heels of his first visit to Washington, D.C., as Japan's leader for talks with President Joe Biden. "Now, in that strategy, of course, we will not change the steps we have been taking to date as a peace-loving nation."

U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio walk to the Oval Office for a meeting at the White House on January 13, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Fumio is meeting with Biden... U.S. President Joe Biden (R) and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio walk to the Oval Office for a meeting at the White House on January 13, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Fumio is meeting with Biden to reaffirm the U.S.-Japan strategic relationship in the Indo-Pacific as military tensions rise in the region. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Japan faces a changing international order that is anything but peaceful, in either its own neighborhood or beyond. Under Kishida's leadership since 2021, it has more assertively set out a policy of reinforcing its defense forces and of strengthening its alliances with the United States and other Western powers as it builds new partnerships with Asian countries that had sometimes been historically wary of its motives.

China is rapidly developing state-of-the-art military technology and seeking to assert its increasingly dominant regional position amid intensified global competition with the U.S. Its sporadic maritime confrontations with Japan over disputed East China Sea Islands are a sign of the bigger contest. North Korea, undeterred by international sanctions, seemingly achieves nuclear-capable missile milestones by the day while broadcasting fiery rhetoric toward its foes.

Meanwhile, Japan faces the repercussions of Russia's war on Ukraine as it raises the prospect of a wider war with NATO in Europe and as Moscow also looks to the East, where it has a long-standing territorial dispute with Tokyo.

The sheer imbalance of military power surrounding Japan is displayed in one Japanese government document shared with Newsweek. Japan's troops and aircraft are vastly outnumbered on all three fronts. Beijing and Moscow each command a naval fleet that outsizes that of Tokyo more than four times over.

"Military powers with high quality and quantity are concentrated in Japan's surroundings, where clear trends such as further military buildup and an increase in military activities are observed," the document states.

A Historic Turning Point

For Kishida, the answer is a call to arms, the likes of which have not been seen in Japan since World War II ended nearly eight decades ago with the Japanese Empire's defeat at the hands of the U.S. Kishida's own family hails from Hiroshima, and he grew up hearing the horror stories of survivors of the world's first atomic bombing, which helped end the war and established generations of U.S. preeminence.

Haruo Motohashi

Now, Kishida counts Washington as his most important ally amid what he calls "a historic turning point" for both Japan and the world at large. Japanese attitudes are unrecognizable from the expansionism that saw it conquer much of Asia and the Pacific and stun the U.S. with the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, but the imperialist legacy remains a sensitive topic at home and abroad.

Kishida's offering at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine to Japan's 19th and 20th century war dead—among them World War II war criminals—on April 21 was protested not only by China, but also by fellow U.S. ally South Korea. For both countries it is a symbol of Japan's past and its record of occupation and atrocities. That legacy explained Japan's postwar aversion to rebuilding military strength. Kishida spoke frankly about why it is now engaged in a program that will mean a doubling of military spending over the next five years.

"I think we are facing the most challenging and complex security environment since the end of World War II," said Kishida, whose conservative Liberal Democratic Party has dominated postwar politics. "In such a situation, we have to protect our people's lives and livelihoods."

Power, Hard and Soft

Kishida repeatedly asserts that Japan has demonstrated its aversion to aggression since the war but says it must continue to make efforts to explain its military resurgence. "We have to avoid any misunderstanding here," he said.

The region is distinctly wary of the trend, said Jingdong Yuan, senior researcher and director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's China and Asia Security Program.

"It is important for Japan to demonstrate its commitment to using force only for defensive purposes, place its growing military capabilities within the broader alliance and minilateral security arrangements rather than in unilateral ways," he told Newsweek.

While Japan's policy shift was not the cause of armament in the region, it could help to speed that up if not drive an arms race, Yuan said.

As Japan seeks to win friends and build influence, it is also putting weight on economic development. Plans include a new $30 billion investment framework for Africa and some $75 billion devoted to an array of projects across Southeast Asia, including rail infrastructure, clean energy development and joint maritime security mechanisms.

When hosting the largely Western G7 in Hiroshima last year, Kishida made the point of inviting two representatives of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Indonesia and Vietnam.

While a recent survey by Singapore's ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute shows China has eclipsed the U.S. in terms of which superpower the ASEAN nations would choose if forced to align with one or the other, Japan was chosen as the region's most trusted nation, ahead of both the U.S. and China.

In a sign of Japan's readiness to strengthen ties in the region, Kishida participated in the first-ever trilateral meeting of its kind with Biden and Philippines President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos. Earlier in the month, Kishida and Prabowo Subianto, president-elect of regional giant Indonesia, agreed to strengthen security and other cooperation.

U.S. President Joe Biden, center, speaks during a trilateral meeting with Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Philippines' president, left, and Kishida, second right, at the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 11, 2024. U.S. President Joe Biden, center, speaks during a trilateral meeting with Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Philippines' president, left, and Kishida, second right, at the White House in Washington, D.C. on April 11, 2024. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

China, North Korea and segments of South Korea's society remain suspicious of Japan—in the case of the former two because of its friendship with the U.S. as well as its past, said Ja Ian Chong of the National University of Singapore. But attitudes are different elsewhere in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, he said.

"They may be more eager to encourage greater Japanese participation in regional affairs, given a high degree of trust in Japan from decades of cooperation and view that Tokyo has a major role in supplementing regional stability," he told Newsweek. "Japan will have to be careful not to unnecessarily increase friction with some of its Northeast Asian neighbors while defending its own interests and working with its partners."

Kishida has done much to renew relations with South Korea since taking office. He has also said he could consider unprecedented face-to-face talks with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un to ease rising tensions with the longtime foe, whose nuclear and missile development he calls a threat to Japan and the world. The possibility of such a meeting, Kishida said, was discussed in Washington and in ongoing consultations with Seoul.

People are all equal and free and they have rights to pursue their own happiness. This individual freedom fits very much with Samurai spirits of the Japanese."

- Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida

"We are working toward resolving various issues and contemplating a holding of a summit meeting and we will continue to make efforts to enable this," Kishida said. Talks also continue on a trilateral meeting between Japan, South Korea and China in May.

At a time that Kishida has accused Beijing of intensifying a "unilateral attempt to change the status quo" in the East China Sea, the site of disputed islands known as Senkaku or Diaoyu claimed by both China and Japan, he emphasized that, "we will assert what needs to be asserted, but we will value dialogues as well."

Photograph by Haruo Motohashi for Newsweek

The Abe Doctrine

Kishida's parallel efforts on diplomatic and military fronts follow in part from his previous experience. He served as foreign minister and, briefly, as acting defense minister under the late, influential Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Abe, an avowed nationalist who became Japan's longest-serving premier before being forced to resign in 2019 amid corruption scandals and reports of ill-health, was the first to oversee the major changes in Japan's military mindset and developed the "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" concept which is now ubiquitous in U.S. strategy documents and a cornerstone of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, consisting of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.

Kishida took office in 2021 following the resignation of Abe's immediate successor, Yoshihide Suga, and is widely seen as continuing the legacy of Abe, whose 2022 assassination by a gunman with a grudge against him shocked Japan. "Japan is now sustaining and leading the liberal international order in Asia. It is in Japan's interest and the interests of the region," Nobukatsu Kanehara, who served as Abe's assistant chief cabinet secretary and deputy national security adviser, told Newsweek.

"People are all equal and free and they have rights to pursue their own happiness. This individual freedom fits very much with Samurai spirits of the Japanese."

Like Abe, who, in 2015, was the last Japanese premier to visit Washington, D.C., Kishida took the opportunity during his trip to address a joint session of Congress, making the case for forging an even closer alliance with the U.S. "I was able to gain broad support, applause and the opinions from Congressional members," Kishida said.

Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida delivers a speech during the graduation ceremony of the National Defence Academy in Yokosuka, Kanagawa prefecture on March 23, 2024. Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida delivers a speech during the graduation ceremony of the National Defence Academy in Yokosuka, Kanagawa prefecture on March 23, 2024. YUICHI YAMAZAKI/AFP via Getty Images

Threats From Within

There is less applause at home, where Kishida faces a potential fight over party leadership. The LDP's hold on power is not challenged by weak opposition parties and no parliamentary election is required before 2025, but Kishida's approval rating of just 20 percent means he could be ousted at internal party elections, said Daniel Russel, a veteran U.S. diplomat who now serves as vice president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society, told Newsweek. "His immediate challenge is remaining in office beyond September," Russel said.

On the economic front, Japan has dropped below Germany's output for the first time since the 1960s to become only the world's fourth biggest economy. A declining, aging population is a weight on an economy that has pivoted toward inflation after 30 years of deflation, often referred to as "the lost decades." Kishida said he sought to ignite what he called a "virtuous cycle" by promoting investment through tax-exempt initiatives such as the Nippon Individual Savings Account, promoting both price and wage increases and devoting trillions of yen toward "green development," or "GX," and "digital development," or "DX."

Soldiers of Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) in Japan on April 7, 2018. Japan's leader spoke to Newsweek about dealing with the threat of North Korea and China. Soldiers of Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) in Japan on April 7, 2018. Japan's leader spoke to Newsweek about dealing with the threat of North Korea and China. Richard Atrero de Guzman/NurPhoto via Getty Images

He said that digitalization and increased support for child-rearing families could help offset the demographic crisis. These initiatives are all part of what Kishida refers to as a "new form of capitalism" for which he counts some early successes: including the Nikkei 225 hitting a 35-year record this year.

Yet there is an even more controversial measure that Kishida must consider when it comes to Japan's future: immigration.

In need of labor to fuel Japan's economic growth, Kishida says the Diet, Japan's national legislature, is debating a bill to "create a new system to have motivated people from overseas work in Japan."

The archipelago nation's reluctance to open its borders dates back millennia. Japan fended off Mongol invaders from China in the 13th century and is one of just a handful of nations to have avoided European colonization. Today, Japan eagerly welcomes millions of visitors from around the world, including a growing number of foreign workers, but it remains one of the world's most homogeneous countries, with an estimated 98.5 percent of its population being ethnically Japanese.

"There are still some in Japanese society who are resistant to the idea of continuous, indefinite immigration of labor from overseas," Kishida said, distinguishing the current plans to import more foreign labor from a "full-fledged immigration concept."

Kishida voices confidence in the path Japan is taking under his leadership, but also warns that there can be no underestimation of the daunting social, economic, diplomatic and military challenges it faces.

"In terms of diplomacy as well as security, we are in a very uncertain situation. Therefore, diplomacy, the leader-level diplomacy shall be strengthened," Kishida said. "We need to have defense capabilities as to back up this diplomacy. So even in uncertain times, Japan can fulfill our role to achieve stability."

Photograph by Haruo Motohashi for Newsweek

Newsweek · by Tom O'Connor · April 29, 2024

4. U.S. calls on N. Korea to give 'full' accounting of Japanese abductees

An international human rights upfront approach must address all the human rights issues with north Korea.

U.S. calls on N. Korea to give 'full' accounting of Japanese abductees | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · May 1, 2024

By Song Sang-ho

WASHINGTON, April 30 (Yonhap) -- A U.S. State Department spokesperson called on North Korea Tuesday to offer a "full" account of Japanese citizens abducted by it decades ago, amid reports that a group of their families will visit the United States to seek America's support to secure their repatriation.

Vedant Patel, the department's deputy spokesperson, made the call, reiterating Washington's support for the families.

"The U.S. stands with the long-suffering relatives of Japanese abductees, and we continue to urge the DPRK to right this historic wrong and provide full accounting of those that remain missing," he told a press briefing.

DPRK stands for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel is seen answering questions during a daily press briefing at the department in Washington on Aug. 14, 2023 in this captured image. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)

Japan's Kyodo News and other media outlets reported that the families of Japanese abductees departed for Washington on Monday.

Tokyo has officially recognized 17 citizens as victims abducted by the North in the 1970s and 1980s. Five of them returned to Japan following Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's trip to Pyongyang in 2002, while the other 12 abductees remain unaccounted for.

Pyongyang argues that of the 12 Japanese nationals in question, eight passed away while the other four did not even come to the North. The regime is known to have kidnapped Japanese nationals to train its spies in Japanese language and culture.

sshluck@yna.co.kr

(END)

en.yna.co.kr · by Song Sang-ho · May 1, 2024

5. N. Korean media makes no mention of Cuba among nations sending congratulatory messages over late founder's birthday

The Cuba situation is an embarrassment for the regime.

N. Korean media makes no mention of Cuba among nations sending congratulatory messages over late founder's birthday | Yonhap News Agency

en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Soo-yeon · May 1, 2024

SEOUL, May 1 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's state media on Wednesday did not mention Cuba when it reported a list of countries that have sent congratulatory messages over the 112th birthday in April of the North's late founder Kim Il-sung.

North Korea might have intentionally left out Cuba in an apparent expression of its complaints over Cuba's establishment of diplomatic ties with South Korea in February. Pyongyang has long touted its brotherly ties with the Caribbean nation.

The North's official Korean Central News Agency and the Rodong Sinmun, the main newspaper, carried reports about a long list of officials from various countries who have sent congratulatory messages to Pyongyang over the late founder's birthday that fell on April 15.

China, Russia, Syria and Mongolia were among such countries, but Cuba was not included in the list.

Since North Korea and Cuba established diplomatic relations in 1960, the two Cold War-era allies had maintained close ties and deepened exchanges based on their shared values of anti-U.S. and anti-imperialist stances.

But Seoul and Havana's surprise announcement on the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in mid-February appears to be a heavy blow to Pyongyang at a delicate time when North Korea has defined South Korea as its "primary foe."

On the occasion of Kim's birthday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel wrote on social media platform X that he was sending "affectionate greetings" to North Korea's ruling party, the government and its people.

"We remember his indelible legacy to socialism and the strengthening of the historic and invariable solidarity and brotherhood between #Cuba and DPRK," read Diaz-Canel's message translated into English.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also celebrated the birthday of the North's late founder, saying on his X account that "friendly ties, cooperation and mutual support between both countries are historical and invariable."

Late Cuban President Fidel Castro visited North Korea in 1986 at the invitation of the then leader Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the incumbent leader Kim Jong-un.

This photo, taken March 19, 2024, shows North Korea's Embassy in Cuba. (Yonhap)

sooyeon@yna.co.kr

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en.yna.co.kr · by Kim Soo-yeon · May 1, 2024

6. South Korea considers joining alliance for sharing military technology with Australia, US and UK

South Korea considers joining alliance for sharing military technology with Australia, US and UK

AP · May 1, 2024

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — South Korea is considering sharing advanced military technology with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia through the so-called AUKUS partnership, South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said.

Shin said the possibility was discussed during two days of meetings between South Korea and Australia’s defense and foreign ministers that ended in the Australian city of Melbourne on Wednesday.

The United States and the United Kingdom agreed in 2021 to provide Australia with a fleet of submarines powered by U.S. nuclear technology under the AUKUS agreement to counter a growing military presence from China. AUKUS is an acronym for Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The countries could become involved in cooperation on a wider range of security technologies including artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and hypersonic systems through what is known as AUKUS Pillar 2.

Shin welcomed South Korea’s invitation from the three AUKUS partners.

“We do welcome that AUKUS members are considering Korea as an AUKUS Pillar 2 partner and Korea’s defense science and technology capabilities will contribute to the peace and stability of the development of AUKUS Pillar 2 and regional peace,” Shin said through a translator.

Japan is also moving toward formal talks to become part of AUKUS Pillar 2’s technology development and sharing.

Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles welcomed South Korean efforts to build on its relationship with Japan, which along with Australia, the United States and India form a security dialogue known as the Quad.

“We see this is a very, very positive step forward in the strategic landscape of the region and represents a huge opportunity for Australia to engage with both Korea and Japan,” Marles told reporters.

“Korea and Australia are working together to uphold the rules-based order within our region and, in fact, within the world,” Marles added.

AP · May 1, 2024

7. South Korea plans $4B in new weapons investments, including $583M of SM-3s - Breaking Defense

South Korea plans $4B in new weapons investments, including $583M of SM-3s - Breaking Defense

In addition, South Korea will buy four new frigates and create a new air-to-air missile; all told, the three projects will represent roughly $4 billion in investments. 

By  COLIN CLARK

on April 30, 2024 at 10:35 AM

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · April 30, 2024

Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block 1B guided missile is launched from the USS Lake Erie and successfully intercepted a medium-range ballistic missile target off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii, during a Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Navy test. (DVDS)

SYDNEY — With the specter of an increasingly elligerent Pyongyang hanging over it, the South Korean military procurement agency has formally approved purchase of SM-3 missiles, recently used for the first time in combat against the Iranian missiles fired at Israel.

The SM-3 purchase is one of three major defense acquisition decisions made by Seoul’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) on April 26. In addition, South Korea will buy four new frigates and create a new air-to-air missile; all told, the three projects will represent roughly $4 billion in investments.

However, it all comes with an important caveat: The missile project and SM-3 are not locked in, according to the release. The two projects still must undergo feasibility studies and then be reviewed.

Known as the “maritime ballistic missile interceptor project”, the SM-3s will be installed on Aegis ships and purchased through the US Foreign Military Sales program, according to a DAPA press release, which was translated for Breaking Defense. The project is expected to last from 2025 to 2030 and cost roughly $583 million, the release says.

While the US view of the Pacific always has a China-focus, Seoul’s new SM-3s are most likely to be used to protect South Korea from North Korean missiles and not Chinese weapons. That seems relatively clear after comments by South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik.

Appearing on a Korean interview program, “Sunday Diagnosis,” on April 21, Shin said South Korean armed forces would keep focused on North Korea in the event of a conflict involving Taiwan.

“If a crisis occurs in Taiwan, the South Korean military’s paramount concern is observing the possibility of North Korean provocations and working with USFK (US Force Korea) to establish a firm joint defense posture,” he said last week.

In addition to the SM-3 purchase, DAPA’s announcement included the approval of Batch IV of the Ulsan-class frigates by 2032. The $2.35 billion naval program should involve four ships designed to replace an aging fleet. They are expected to boast improved sensors and electronic warfare capabilities.

Finally, DAPA approved an estimated $1.1 billion project to develop long-range air-to-air missiles for its indigenous fighter under development, the KF-21 multirole plane. The missiles program is expected to last from 2025 to 2038, according to the release. Korea Aerospace Industries has built six prototype fighters. The first production model of what the Korean company calls a 4.5 generation fighter is scheduled to be delivered to the Air Force in the second half of 2026.

The DAPA release makes clear South Korea hopes the locally-designed and built missiles will help boost exports of the KF-21. “In addition, if domestically produced air-to-air missiles are installed as the basic armament of the KF-21, export competitiveness is expected to increase,” it says.

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · April 30, 2024

8. The Marine officer who saved 8,000 lives at the ‘Frozen Chosin’

Where do we find such people?

No mention of it in the article but I wonder if someone is pursuing an upgrade to a Medal of Honor. Based on this short article it would seem like the right thing to do.

The Marine officer who saved 8,000 lives at the ‘Frozen Chosin’

militarytimes.com · by Claire Barrett · April 30, 2024

Kurt Chew-Een Lee spearheaded preparations in December 1950 for 500 Marines to embark on a daring rescue mission. The first lieutenant’s undertaking came during the vicious Battle of Chosin Reservoir, as tens of thousands of Chinese troops streamed in from North Korea and threatened to cut off an American unit.

Traversing five miles across treacherous mountainous terrain, Marines battled against blizzard conditions that cut visibility to almost zero. Temperatures oftentimes plummeted to 30 below.

Despite bullet wounds and a broken arm suffered during a previous engagement, Lee, along with his unit, went on to relentlessly engage the enemy while under intense fire. By the end, their exploits would help preserve a crucial evacuation route for American troops fighting as United Nations forces. Approximately 8,000 men were saved from certain death or imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese.

Born on January 21, 1926, in San Francisco, the slight-of-build Lee — all of 5-feet-6 inches tall and roughly 130 pounds — is believed to be the first Asian-American officer in Marine Corps history. Still, Lee “brought outsized determination to the battlefield,” according to an account in the New York Times.

Kurt Chew-Een Lee. (USMC)

Lee, who enlisted in the Marines at the end of World War II, told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 that he identified most with the Corps due to its reputation of being first into battle.

“I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek, bland and obsequious,” he said.

Lee was assigned during WWII as a Japanese language instructor in San Diego. Swallowing his disappointment at not being sent to the Pacific, he chose to remain in the Marine Corps after the war and commissioned as an officer in 1946.

As the U.S. entered into the Korean War in June 1950, Lee was placed in charge of a machine gun platoon that was tasked with advancing deep into North Korean territory.

Before the fighting began, many of Lee’s fellow Marines questioned whether he was capable of killing Chinese soldiers. Behind his back some even used racial epithets, calling him a “Chinese laundry man.”

For Lee, the questioning of his devotion to his nation was ludicrous.

“I would have … done whatever was necessary,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “To me, it didn’t matter whether those were Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, whatever — they were the enemy.”

Lee’s Chinese ancestry, however, came as a boon on the night of November 2, 1950. Conducting a solo reconnaissance mission amid heavy snowfall, he began to lob grenades and fire rounds at the enemy with the intent of exposing the location of Chinese soldiers who were firing upon his men.

Undetected, Lee crept up on the enemy outpost and utilized his working knowledge of Mandarin to confuse the enemy combatants, who hesitated briefly as Lee called out in their native tongue, “Don’t shoot, I’m Chinese.”

That pause allowed just enough time for Lee’s unit to reposition and drive back the Chinese. For this, Lee was awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor a Marine can receive.

“Despite serious wounds sustained as he pushed forward, First Lieutenant Lee charged directly into the face of the enemy fire and, by his dauntless fighting spirit and resourcefulness, served to inspire other members of his platoon to heroic efforts in pressing a determined counterattack and driving the hostile forces from the sector,” his citation reads.

Less than a month later, while Lee was still recovering in a field hospital from a gunshot wound to the arm he sustained during the early November fighting, the Chinese launched its Second Phase Offensive — aimed at driving the United Nations out of North Korea. Tens of thousands of Chinese forces converged on the mountainous region near the Chosin Reservoir, overrunning the nearly 8,000 American troops stationed there.

Undeterred by his wounds, Lee “and a sergeant left the hospital against orders, commandeered an Army jeep and returned to the front” to link up with the 1st Marine Battalion, according to the New York Times. Lee’s arm was still in a sling.

Using only a compass to traverse the snowy mountain terrain, Lee and his 500 Marines managed to find and reinforce the surrounded Americans, repeatedly driving back Chinese soldiers, according to the Times, and ensuring “the vastly outnumbered Americans were able to retreat to the sea.”

Members of the 1st Marine Division during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. (USMC)

The fighting was so fierce that roughly 90 percent of Lee’s rifle company was killed or wounded, but thanks to Lee’s indefatigable efforts, the evacuation route remained open.

“Certainly, I was never afraid,” Lee told the Washington Post in 2010. “Perhaps the Chinese are all fatalists. I never expected to survive the war. So I was adamant that my death be honorable, be spectacular.”

Lee survived the war, retiring from the Marines in 1968 after serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer. In addition to the Navy Cross, Lee was awarded a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

The men he commanded never forgot their officer.

“I didn’t care what color he was,” Ronald Burbridge, a rifleman in his unit in Korea, said in an interview for a 2010 Smithsonian documentary.

“I have told him many times, thank God that we had him.”

About Claire Barrett

Claire Barrett is the Strategic Operations Editor for Sightline Media and a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.

9. N. Korea orders confiscation of all cell phones owned by Russia-based workers

Information and communications systems that can coordinate collective action are an existential threat to the regime.

N. Korea orders confiscation of all cell phones owned by Russia-based workers - Daily NK English

Russian security guards have also been seen standing guard at construction sites where North Koreans are working, a source told Daily NK

By Seulkee Jang - April 30, 2024

dailynk.com · by Seulkee Jang · April 30, 2024

North Korean workers wait for a flight to Pyongyang at the airport in Vladivostok, Russia, in December 2019. (Courtesy of Kang Dong Wan, professor at Dong-A University)

The North Korean government has ordered the confiscation of all cell phones owned by workers in Russia, Daily NK has learned. As the North steps up its surveillance and control of workers there, it is also cooperating with Russia to prevent defections.

The North Korean consulate in Russia received orders [from the North Korean government] in late April to confiscate unauthorized cell phones in the possession of workers there,” a source in Russia told Daily NK on Apr. 26, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to the source, North Korean workers usually have colleagues from Russia or other countries help them acquire cell phones for use during their time in the country.

In Russia, cell phones that can both make calls and go online are readily available in markets and shops and can be used as long as one has a SIM card.

While North Korean workers overseas are not allowed to have personal cell phones, most of their managers had looked the other way, treating phone ownership as routine behavior.

“Even overseas, North Korean workers have no freedom of movement and have to work all day. The only thing they can look forward to is loading YouTube on a cell phone with Internet access to watch the news or South Korean movies, TV shows and variety programs,” one defector who worked in Russia told Daily NK.

Some North Korean overseas workers have attempted to defect after using their cell phones to access overseas news programs about North Korea that they could not watch at home and learning that the regime’s propaganda is a lie. Cell phones are also a crucial tool for contacting the brokers who help them defect.

Given their understanding of these factors, the North Korean authorities appear to have ordered the total confiscation of cell phones informally held by overseas workers in order to prevent these workers from becoming disloyal to the regime and its ideology.

Workers are also facing more restrictions on movement

The source also said that Russian security guards have recently been seen standing guard at construction sites where North Koreans are working.

“North Korean workers used to be allowed to visit nearby markets or restaurants on Sunday, which is their day off. But they aren’t even allowed to leave the workplace anymore. Russian security guards patrol the surroundings, making sure that North Korean workers don’t leave for an instant,” the source said.

As North Korea and Russia improve ties, the two countries appear to be cooperating more closely than ever on projects aimed at monitoring and controlling North Korean workers in Russia.

“North Korea regards defection attempts by workers in Russia as a serious issue. It’s tightening controls to ensure that defections don’t happen under any circumstances and has arranged with the Russian police and intelligence agencies to arrest anyone caught leaving their jobsite or defecting and to immediately contact North Korea’s state security agency,” the source said.

Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.

Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons. For more information about Daily NK’s network of reporting partners and information-gathering activities, please visit our FAQ page here.

Please send any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.

Read in Korean

dailynk.com · by Seulkee Jang · April 30, 2024

10. N. Korea's single mothers face severe levels of discrimination

Catch 22?

N. Korea's single mothers face severe levels of discrimination - Daily NK English

Children cannot be legally adopted if either parent is alive, so official adoption is not an option for single mothers, a source told Daily NK

By Mun Dong Hui - April 30, 2024

dailynk.com · by Mun Dong Hui · April 30, 2024

FILE PHOTO: North Korean women at the customs office in Dandong in mid-February 2019. (Daily NK)

While it is fairly common for unmarried North Korean women to have children, single mothers receive no support from the government and are even shunned by society, Daily NK has learned.

“Nowadays, you can sometimes see young women having children without getting married. Women used to avoid premarital sex as a legacy of Confucian gender segregation, but young women today don’t value sexual purity like their parents’ generation did,” a source in Chagang Province told Daily NK on Apr. 26, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The occasional birth of children out of wedlock appears to be the result of a more liberal attitude toward sexual relations that has recently spread among young people in North Korea. But a stigma against single mothers is still prevalent in the country, and single mothers are looked down upon in North Korean society. Given this attitude, the authorities do not even keep accurate statistics on the number of single mothers.

“The government has never asked for statistics on [single mothers] or held public meetings about it because it wants to hide the phenomenon, considering it a national shame and a social scandal. But if I had to guess, I’d say four out of a hundred women have children out of wedlock,” the source said.

“The government just sees [the single mother issue] as non-socialist behavior between young men and women that needs to be cracked down on and doesn’t give them any legal protection,” she added.

Discrimination toward single mothers is widespread

The general public views single mothers in much the same way as the authorities. In fact, the source said, contempt, discrimination, and hatred of single mothers are deeply ingrained in North Korean society.

“If a rumor gets out that a woman has had a child out of wedlock, she’ll be labeled a wanton woman for the rest of her life. For men, promiscuity is generally seen as a phase they go through, but women who get pregnant are considered stupid and slutty – they are simply seen as worthless specimens of humanity,” the source said.

Last July, a twentysomething woman in Kimhyongjik County who had an illegitimate child visited the family of the man she had been dating, only to be summarily turned away. “This is what happens when a woman can’t keep her legs closed. Why should we take care of you when you never had a wedding?” one family member told her.

Given society’s general attitude to the issue, a significant number of women who become pregnant out of wedlock have abortions, and even those who have the baby often abandon it or give it up for adoption. Such practices often result in grave violations of the children’s right to life.

“When unmarried women find out they’re pregnant, they can usually terminate the pregnancy medically or by dilation and curettage up to three months, or by more complicated surgery after four months. Women who can’t do that often abandon their child after birth or give it away to strangers,” the source said.

In North Korea, children cannot be legally adopted if either parent is alive, so official adoption is not an option for single mothers, she explained.

“When a teenager in Chunggang County, Chagang Province, had a baby earlier this month, her parents disregarded her wish to raise the child on her own and instead had the baby sent far to the south with the help of some powerful family relatives,” the source added.

Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.

Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons. For more information about Daily NK’s network of reporting partners and information-gathering activities, please visit our FAQ page here.

Please send any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.

Read in Korean

dailynk.com · by Mun Dong Hui · April 30, 2024

11. Kim Jong-un spends $1.82 billion per year on elite perks, report says

What if those funds went to taking care of the Korean people in the north?

Wednesday

Published: 01 May. 2024, 19:05

Kim Jong-un spends $1.82 billion per year on elite perks, report says

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2024-05-01/national/northKorea/Kim-Jongun-spends-182-billion-per-year-on-elite-perks-report-says/2037774

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has spent up to 2.5 trillion won ($1.82 billion) per year on perks enjoyed by his regime’s elites to reward and maintain their loyalty, according to a South Korean government report released Tuesday.

The study, which was conducted jointly by Seoul’s Defense Ministry and the affiliated Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), estimated that up to 65,000 people who are members of Pyongyang’s ruling Workers’ Party, military and government each receive an average of 40 million won in benefits from the regime.

According to KIDA researcher Oh Kyung-seob, the North Korean leader “promotes and consolidates loyalty from the [North’s] elites by distributing gifts as a matter of policy.”

Perks enjoyed by North Korean elites include not only housing, food, health care, personal protection and access to various entertainment and cultural facilities, but also luxury imports that are banned under international sanctions but still find their way into the North.

Such marks of status were on full display in footage of the Workers’ Party plenary session broadcast by state television in December, which showed Premier Kim Tok-hun, Workers’ Party deputy chief Jo Yong-won and Supreme People’s Assembly Standing Committee Chairman Choe Ryong-hae arriving at the meeting in Mercedes-Benz S-class sedans.

Senior KIDA fellow Park Yong-han said the study's estimates “were derived from various sources of information and detailed questioning of high-level North Korean defectors,” but declined to disclose data obtained from specific individuals due to restrictions on sharing South Korean intelligence on the North.

The latest study’s estimates largely align with those of a report filed by the South Korean spy agency to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee in April 2015, which also estimated the number of North Koreas elites to be about 60,000.

Most South Korean experts agree that elites in North Korea include not only Kim Jong-un’s immediate family and his relatives, but also members of the Workers’ Party Politburo, Central Committee, working departments and various other committees, as well as the military’s generals and political advisers and high-ranking officials of the State Council, Cabinet and State Security Ministry.

The authors of the recent study told the JoongAng Ilbo that such privileged North Koreans are subdivided into four different ranks, with members of Kim’s so-called Paektu bloodline, descendants of communist guerrillas and prominent families making up the core of the elite.

Researchers estimated that this core class includes only 22,000 people, or 0.1 percent of the total North Korean population.

The study’s authors also calculated that Kim Jong-un’s family and relatives together spend around 830 billion won per year on luxury goods for themselves — only 28 billion won less than the 858 billion won it would cost the regime to pay for its annual grain shortfall of 1.1 million tons.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]

12. The shortsighted US-Japan-South Korea military pact

Can we really have too much security? Why does the Quincy Institute think that weakness brings peace and security?

I guess I am too much of a Reagan follower: "Peace through Strength."

The shortsighted US-Japan-South Korea military pact

responsiblestatecraft.org · by James Park · April 29, 2024

quincyinst.org

The nations are demonstrating their commitment to security against China and North Korea, but maybe too much

1. regions asia pacific
2. East Asia

Apr 29, 2024

Driven by their common perception that North Korea and China posed growing threats to their nations’ security, U.S. President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed at last August’s summit at Camp David to elevate trilateral military ties to an unprecedented level.

They have been demonstrating this commitment everyday since, some say to the detriment of stabilizing relations with Pyongyang and Beijing.

In recent years, North Korea has steadily expanded its nuclear arsenal and become more aggressive in its rhetoric and posturing. In light of Taiwan’s deepening resistance to the idea of eventual unification with mainland China, an impatient Beijing appears to be relying increasingly on displays of its increasing military might, too, as a way to demonstrate its own determination to bring the territory under its control, raising concerns that it may yet resort to force to achieve unification in the coming years.

Since the Camp David summit, Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo have worked to enhance their collective combat readiness, such as conducting regular joint naval and aerial maneuvers in regional maritime and air spaces, to strengthen deterrence and demonstrate their own opposition to North Korea and China.

Policymakers in the three capitals may believe that continuous reinforcement of trilateral military cooperation and posturing will act as a deterrent to aggressive behavior by Pyongyang and Beijing. However, such optimism may prove unfounded. The evolving Japan-U.S.-South Korea trilateral partnership might pose considerable risks because their approach to deterrence overlooks security dilemmas faced by North Korea and China. In a new Quincy Institute report, Mike Mochizuki and I examine this issue and offer recommendations to address it.

Insecurity about regime survival plays a decisive role in North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and its strategic calculations as to whether and when to use them. An effective strategy to deal with North Korea would therefore seek to deter North Korea but, at the same time, to avoid fueling its anxiety about foreign efforts to engineer regime change or collapse.

Unfortunately, the current trilateral approach appears likely to exacerbate Pyongyang’s worst fears and insecurities in this regard.

In seeking to deter North Korea, Washington, Seoul, and increasingly Tokyo are relying on offensive military capabilities and doctrines to retaliate against possible North Korean aggression. Emphasizing offensive military functions can indeed bolster deterrence in many circumstances, but they may also overshadow their defensive intentions and thereby contribute to North Korea’s conviction that only stronger nuclear capabilities and more offensive nuclear posture and strategy can guarantee regime protection and survival.

As Pyongyang continues to make progress in its nuclear and missile development, U.S., South Korean, and Japanese policymakers may become tempted to respond with a more offensive collective military posture and bigger and more threatening joint exercises. Such a response, however, may exceed the basic requirements for deterrence and can thus fuel escalation dynamics, increasing the risks of actual conflict. In our report, we offer alternative suggestions to deter North Korea without undermining stability.

Regarding the Taiwan issue, Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul have now adopted an implicit yet firm trilateral stance against possible Chinese use of force to achieve unification, stating in their joint communique their strong opposition to unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the region. While the unambiguous trilateral opposition to unification by force can benefit deterrence, it needs to be coupled with efforts to credibly reassure China that the trilateral partnership will not try to promote Taiwan’s permanent separation. I

n terms of reassuring China on the Taiwan issue, all three capitals are falling short so far, as they appear to have become increasingly indifferent to, or even ambivalent about, the importance of reaffirming their respective One China policies in recent years.

The ostensible U.S., Japanese, and South Korean reluctance to reaffirm their One China policies as clearly as they did in previous years risks feeding into Beijing’s suspicion that Washington is orchestrating a containment coalition to pursue a “One China, One Taiwan” policy. Such an interpretation of the trilateral partnership’s intent will likely be bolstered if Washington begins to accept the notion that Taiwan should be permanently kept separate from the mainland for the sake of U.S. regional military advantage.

U.S. policymakers may be tempted to involve Japan and South Korea in joint combat operational planning for a Taiwan contingency, but moving in that direction can make escalation and conflict more likely by compounding Bejing’s fears and fueling its resolve to reshape the status quo in its favor.

To decrease the risk of conflict over Taiwan, we suggest that Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul devote more attention to stabilizing relations with China through credible reassurances on the Taiwan issue. They should also pursue a defensive-denial approach to Taiwan contingency planning, which we explain more in our report.

The three countries should also be alert to the possibility that their transition into an overtly anti-China coalition may prompt Beijing to create a countervailing anti-U.S. military partnership with Russia and North Korea. China has so far maintained a relative distance from the tightening of military ties between Russia and North Korea that has taken place since the former’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russia reportedly proposed China trilateral naval drills with North Korea last year. The fact that such drills have not yet taken place indicates that Beijing remains cautious about the idea of trilateral military cooperation with Moscow and Pyongyang.

Indeed, China has an interest in constructive engagement with the United States, Japan, and South Korea and likely prefers not to further jeopardize it by pursuing an outright military bloc formation with Russia and North Korea. However, its calculation may change if it comes to believe that the Japan-U.S.-South Korea partnership poses too serious a threat to its core interests, such as Taiwan and economic development. The recent call between President Biden and Xi Jinping suggested that Beijing views U.S.-led economic and technological restrictions as second only to the Taiwan issue as an area of concern with the potential for conflict.

With that in mind, Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul should tread carefully with their coordination of “de-risking” with China. U.S.-led “de-risking” risks going beyond simply seeking to reduce Chinese access to advanced technologies with clear military applications to the point of threatening China’s economy. Even while working together to tackle genuine economic challenges posed by China, such as coordinating responses to China’s economic coercion, the three countries should seek to promote inclusive economic and diplomatic engagement with Beijing to reassure it that they do not intend to create a broad exclusionary anti-China economic or technological bloc. We offer several ways to do this in our report.

U.S. policymakers should also keep in mind that President Yoon’s conservative policy preferences and philosophy have played a key role in enhancing trilateral military ties and cooperation. But what would happen if South Korean voters, in 2027, elect a liberal president who would be more sensitive to historical disputes with Japan and prefer a more congenial approach to North Korea and China? In such a case, trilateral cooperation centered on confronting North Korea and China may cease to be viable.

For the trilateral partnership to be more sustainable and synergetic, it should be oriented around reducing tensions and mitigating risks of conflict with China and North Korea. Such an approach would better serve U.S. interests by enhancing regional stability and allowing safer and more productive competition with China. It is also more likely to garner broader public support in both South Korea and Japan beyond the current political alignment between the two countries.

James Park

James Park is a Research Associate at the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program. His research interests include South Korean foreign policy and domestic politics, Chinese security issues, and U.S. policy vis-à-vis East Asia.

13. Defeat for South Korea’s Ruling Party Won't Dim Pro-US Stance

Defeat for South Korea’s Ruling Party Won't Dim Pro-US Stance

dailysignal.com · by Bruce Klingner · April 30, 2024

South Korea’s liberal opposition parties scored a decisive victory in the recent National Assembly elections, routing the ruling conservative party of President Yoon Suk Yeol.

The election earlier this month was seen as a referendum on Yoon’s first two years in office and the results risk turning him into a lame duck for the rest of his single, five-year term. The opposition will be emboldened to impede Yoon’s domestic policies and reform plans.

However, South Korea’s president likely will continue foreign and security policies that closely align with U.S. strategic interests.

Yoon was elected in May 2022 after espousing principled security policies to strengthen South Korea’s alliance with the United States, overcome historic animosities with Japan to focus on current regional challenges, and push back against the rising threats from China and North Korea. He pledged to increase defense spending and improve South Korea’s military.

Yoon delivered on his promises, enabling a resurgence in allied deterrence and defense capabilities against North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile arsenals. In 2022, the U.S. and South Korea resumed large-scale military exercises and Washington restarted rotational deployments of strategic assets (bombers, submarines, and aircraft carriers), both after a four-year hiatus.

Yoon’s courageous outreach to Japan was harshly criticized by the opposition party but invigorated bilateral relations and enabled resumption of trilateral military cooperation with the United States.

Yoon’s April 2023 summit in Washington and the historic Camp David summit in August with the U.S. and Japan were both resoundingly successful in affirming and expanding allied cooperation on wide-ranging security, diplomatic, and economic topics.

Resounding Election Loss for Yoon

South Korea’s unicameral National Assembly is elected every four years, but the one-term president is elected every five years.

In the April 10 election, the progressive Democratic Party and affiliated Democratic United Party won 175 of a total of 300 seats, while the ruling People Power Party and affiliated People Future Party won 108 seats. (The Rebuilding Korea Party won 12 seats and could align itself with the progressive opposition.)

The opposition gained enough seats to fast-track legislation and end filibusters, but fell short of the 200-seat supermajority that would have given it the power to override presidential vetoes, amend the Constitution, or impeach Yoon.

Voter turnout, at 67% of the electorate, was the highest for a South Korean legislative election in 32 years. Major issues included the slowing national economy, rising prices, and various candidate scandals.

Foreign and security issues did not seem to resonate with the electorate. Voters punished Yoon’s party for its perceived mismanagement of the economy and unwillingness to work with the opposition.

Biggest Impact on Domestic, Not Security, Policies

Yoon’s term has been marked by government gridlock, with legislative resistance to his policies as well as his frequent vetoes of National Assembly initiatives.

This impasse will continue, with Yoon finding it difficult to implement his promised reforms to the country’s education, pension, and labor systems.

Yoon isn’t a traditional politician, having spent his career as a prosecutor. He is less interested in polling data on policies or his personal popularity. He has set a firm course for aligning with the U.S. and Japan while raising South Korea’s international role as a “global pivotal state.

Yoon will be undeterred by his party’s loss at the polls and will maintain his foreign and security agenda. After narrowly winning election two years ago, he has faced a majority opposition party in the National Assembly and low popularity ratings throughout his tenure. Despite those factors, he implemented bold foreign policy changes.

However, Yoon now may face greater challenges in implementing his policies due to an energized opposition party that is eager to obstruct his priorities, his own political party’s distancing itself from an unpopular president, and bureaucrats’ fear of being perceived as too closely aligned with Yoon lest it hurt their careers after a possible party change in the 2027 presidential election.

The opposition party is expected to step up its criticism of Yoon’s foreign policies, since it favors a more accommodating stance toward Pyongyang and Beijing, resistance to improving relations with Japan, and greater independence from U.S. policies.

But such policies have less public support due to the failed U.S. and South Korean summits with North Korea in 2018-19, Pyongyang’s rejection of all requests for dialogue, and escalating provocations.

Pressing Ahead on Strengthening Alliances

Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have been stalwart allies in Washington’s efforts to rally Indo-Pacific nations to enhance measures to combat the growing Chinese and North Korean threats.

Both South Korea and Japan have made significant improvements to their militaries and have striven to assume larger security roles in the region.

The U.S. should intensify ongoing initiatives to develop a latticework of multilateral security partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, as well as economic collaborations to reduce China’s ability to economically coerce or retaliate against nations that anger Beijing.

dailysignal.com · by Bruce Klingner · April 30, 2024

14. Rehabilitating Syngman Rhee

I have not yet seen the film, "Birth of Korea," but one thing that struck me reading in the biography of Syngman Rhee was how well he understood America and how effectively he used his many years in the US to lobby for support to Korea.

Rehabilitating Syngman Rhee

The American Conservative · by The American Conservative · April 15, 2024

There’s a scene early in The Birth of Korea, Kim Deog-young’s new film defending the legacy of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, that may go underappreciated. In it, the 85-year-old Rhee visits one of the injured victims of the April Revolution—the landmark 1960 uprising that ultimately toppled Rhee’s government—in the hospital. After exchanging some greetings, the camera zooms in on Rhee’s face as it twitches with grief. Then the film pauses, seemingly moments before tears begin to flow.

It’s a powerful scene, although perhaps not for the reasons the filmmaker intended. Given the overall tenor of the film, it was almost certainly included to demonstrate Rhee’s compassion, to show that, far from the indifferent, self-interested despot Rhee has been portrayed as by North Korean sympathizers and other leftists, Rhee earnestly loved his people and his country and felt deep grief over the violence of the revolution, which killed 180 and injured many more. While the movie does much to rehabilitate specific aspects of Rhee’s leadership and career, it seemingly acknowledges that figures within his administration had, through corruption, mismanagement, and hardline tactics designed to cling to power, provoked the people’s rage.

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The film absolves Rhee of direct involvement in the mismanagement that led to the revolution but sends the message, at least to those familiar with Rhee’s story, of regret. Rhee was a patriot whose role was essential in shepherding the Republic of Korea from its foundation through the tumultuous postwar period. But Rhee’s role has largely been forgotten because Rhee, for all his virtues, ultimately hurt his own cause.

The man known to the English-speaking world as Syngman Rhee was born Lee Seung-man in 1875, in the final decades of the Joseon Dynasty that had ruled the Korean Peninsula since 1392. Born to a family of noble lineage but modest finances, Rhee received an education in the Confucian virtues and philosophy expected of noble families and civil servants. In 1894, he enrolled at a school run by American Methodist missionaries, where he would learn English, establish a deep connection to the United States, and convert to the missionaries’ religion, remaining Methodist the rest of his life.

Much was changing in Korea at this time. Rhee entered an American-run school because a series of reforms that year had abolished the traditional civil service exams. The bureaucracy was reforming, and the small kingdom began reevaluating its relations with its giant neighbors. Industrialized Japan would soon defeat the previous regional hegemon, China, in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95. The Korean Peninsula was now surrounded by Russia, a faltering but still massive China, and an ascendant Japan. While not the global power it is now, with its military bases and dollar-denominated commodities, the United States also left its mark on East Asia through missionaries, who spread ideas about governance as well as religion.

This changing status of Japan and the U.S. would put Rhee on the course that eventually made him the first president of the Republic of Korea. Rhee, now educated in both Confucian norms and Western ideas, became involved in newspaper publishing and pro-independence organizations seeking to curb the influence of Japan and Russia. This ultimately put him at odds with the monarchy. He was implicated in a plot against the king, arrested, and, after a failed escape attempt, sentenced to life imprisonment and torture. While in prison, he authored his first book, The Spirit of Independence, a collection of manifestos on his nationalist thought.

Then came the Russo–Japanese War, in which Japan defeated the tsarist forces in a contest over influence on the Korean Peninsula. The monarchy that had imprisoned Rhee suddenly found itself in need of his services. Thanks to his English abilities and familiarity with Americans, Rhee was sent to negotiations at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to represent Koreans’ perspective. Rhee, despite his distaste for the monarchy, accepted—with an ulterior motive. With 19 recommendation letters from American missionaries in hand, Rhee planned to pursue an education in the United States. He ultimately earned a PhD from Princeton in 1910.

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Korea would not fare so well in the coming years. Rhee had correctly ascertained that the modernized Japanese would impress the Americans with their plans to “help” the Korean Peninsula develop and that the recent reforms of the Joseon monarchy would be viewed as too little, too late. Japan placed Korea under a “protectorate” in 1905, forced the king to abdicate in 1907, and finally annexed the peninsula outright in 1910. Over the next 35 years, Koreans would have their language and culture suppressed, see much of their land fall into Japanese hands, and, with the coming of World War II, their people conscripted into forced labor and, for many young women, much worse (more on that later).

Rhee would spend most of his post-PhD life abroad as a teacher, school administrator, temporarily as president of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai, and mostly as a kind of missionary, seeking to win international converts to the cause of Korean independence.

Most of the world had little interest in Korea’s wellbeing, and this did not change until tensions between Japan and the U.S. began to mount in the 1930s. Rhee wrote another book, Japan Inside Out: The Challenge of Today, in 1941, in which he positioned the Japanese Empire as a threat not only to Korea but to believers in freedom everywhere. Months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the ranks of his supporters, particularly among American Christians, swelled. He continued to voice his people’s interests throughout the war, including decrying the declaration at the Cairo Conference of 1943 that Korea would be free and independent “in due course,” seemingly implying trusteeship.

By the time of Japan’s surrender, interest in Korean affairs had not penetrated the upper ranks of the U.S. military, who were not yet convinced of the peninsula’s strategic value. It has often been asserted that the U.S. chose to divide the Korean Peninsula in 1945 out of realpolitik, drawing an arbitrary line at the 38th parallel to halt the Soviets’ advance and protect Japan. David Fields, a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, argues in Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea that the division was actually forced on the Truman administration by an outpouring of messages from American Christians who, through Rhee’s efforts, had become determined that all of Korea not be abandoned to communism. Hence the Americans, as the Soviets invaded the northern half of the peninsula, asserted their claim to administer the southern half of Korea in July 1945, a month before Japan’s surrender.

For reasons still unknown today, the Soviets accepted, even though at the time they occupied Manchuria and it would have been difficult to stop them had they chosen to seize all of Korea. Ironically, though Rhee would decry national division for years to come and ask for Americans’ assistance in ending it, he may have helped ensure conditions that made division possible.

For the next three years, efforts to foster unified elections on the Korean Peninsula, supervised by the UN, faltered. In 1948, both Koreas chose separate leaders, solidifying the division. Rhee was a known commodity to Americans and had enough support among Koreans to ensure election. He presided over the Republic of Korea for twelve years, through the devastation of the Korean War and post-war reconstruction. His relations with American officials fluctuated. Some admired him and his utter disdain for communism, while others saw Rhee as a loose cannon who was willing to restart the Korean War to achieve unification. Until the end of his rule, Rhee would declare that use of nuclear weapons was a small price to pay to reunite the country.

Under him, the country’s economy grew slowly, to the extent that U.S. officials wondered if Korea might require American aid in perpetuity. In 1960, frustration with the economy, compounded by corruption and blatant vote-rigging, led to the student-led April Revolution. When a police crackdown resulted in widespread deaths and injuries, the ROK military declared neutrality and the Eisenhower administration condemned the government’s repression, sealing Rhee’s fate. He left the government at the end of April, departed for exile in Hawaii the following month, and lived out his remaining days there. Rhee died in 1965 at age 90, and only then was his body allowed to return to Korea.

In Korea, the post-Rhee months brought little change in the conditions that had led to the April Revolution. In 1961, a faction of the ROK military, led by Lt. Gen. Park Chung-hee, seized power. Park declared sympathy for the goals of the April Revolution, condemned the Rhee years for their corruption and launched a modernization program that carried on past his 1979 assassination until democratization in 1987. In that time, Korea transformed from a small republic, bullied and impoverished, to a wealthy exporter of both technology and popular culture.

Park, rather than Rhee, has since emerged as the paragon of Korean conservatism. With the country’s left also viewing Rhee with derision, he had become the forgotten man, with few supporters and even fewer monuments.

The Birth of Korea seeks to change that.

It is not the first effort. Experts who have tracked the development of conservative thought since the country’s democratization say there has been an effort to rehabilitate Rhee’s legacy for some time, essentially since the days of nascent democratization in the early 1990s. Conservative scholars and activists have made efforts to frame Rhee, as well as Park, as necessary for the country’s development and even its democracy. This paid off in the case of Park, thanks to some early stumbles by democratically elected presidents, including the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, in which Korea was forced to restructure its economy in return for a foreign aid package from the International Monetary Fund to prevent bankruptcy. After this, polling revealed nostalgia for Park’s competence, if not his sternness.

“The Park movement emerged in 1997,” said Kieran Macrae, a lecturer at Seoul National University. “That got more traction. But [these conservative scholars] have been just as passionate about Rhee.”

A few things have changed in Korea’s political culture in recent years, seemingly setting the stage for a reassessment of Rhee’s legacy. Park has been, as noted, long beloved on the right for his modernization program, to such an extent that his daughter, Park Geun-hye, was elected president in 2012, during which she declared that her father’s coup had been “unavoidable.” Her rule reached a scandalous and frankly bizarre end when she was impeached in 2016 and arrested in 2017 on accusations of abuse of power, bribery, coercion and leaking government secrets, all stemming from her close relationship with the daughter of a cult leader, allegedly given access to classified documents. This led to five years in the wilderness for conservatives, only returning to the presidency in 2022 under former prosecutor general Yoon Suk Yeol, whose highest-profile case had been Park Geun-hye herself.

In addition to seemingly turning the page on the Park family’s political career, the Yoon administration has also honored Rhee’s memory. The Veterans Ministry honored his independence advocacy this January, a month after Yoon made a personal donation to a memorial for the first president.

The South Korean left has also changed. Led since the 1990s by veterans of pro-democracy, anti-military-rule activists such as Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun (who served back-to-back terms as president from 1998 to 2008), the left has over time shown greater preoccupation with the politics of division, in the sense of seeking friendlier relations with North Korea, and becoming more and more vociferous in their condemnations of the legacy of Japanese colonization and its Korean “collaborators.” Under the progressive Moon Jae-in government, this led to the severing of a U.S.-brokered agreement to compensate the “comfort women”—Korean survivors of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery—and the near-end of a pact on bilateral intelligence sharing.

Ben Engel, research professor at the Institute of International Affairs, told me that Moon’s calls for “root[ing] out this evil,” meaning collaborationism, “recatalyzed this effort to reevaluate” the legacy of Rhee and Park.

“Pro-Japan collaborator” (chinilpa) is an extremely loaded and frequently partisan charge in the Korean context. Park Chung-hee received his initial military training under Japanese rule in the late 1930s until liberation, when he joined the ROK military. In 1965, Park normalized relations with Japan over popular protest, and it was his admiration for Japan’s modernization campaign that inspired his plans for his own country, down to the slight rewording of specific Japanese phrases designed to promote development. For instance, Japan’s “Let’s catch up to the West!” became under Park “Let’s catch up to Japan!” Allegations of being too friendly with Japan have dogged Korean conservatives ever since, particularly during Park Geun-hye’s tenure.

Allegations of pro-Japan sympathies have even been extended to Syngman Rhee, and here anti-Japan activists overplay their hand. Allegations of Rhee’s supposed pro-Japan sympathies downplay his advocacy on behalf of independence, his rejection of U.S. pleas to establish relations with Japan (unlike Park), and his militant assertion of Korea’s maritime claims, with repeated seizures of Japanese vessels that crossed them. They focus on the high degree of continuity between colonial-era administration and Rhee’s government, claiming North Korea did a better job of purging “collaborators.” This gross overreach sets the stage for a film like Birth of Korea.

In the film, Rhee’s life is presented out of chronological order. Much of it, especially his youth and opposition to the monarchy, is skimmed. The film instead focuses on a number of slights to Rhee’s legacy. This includes Rhee’s alleged Japan sympathies, the accusation that Rhee “abandoned” Seoul when North Korea invaded in 1950, and the relative absence of memorials to Rhee, whom the film compares to other national founders like Gandhi and George Washington. Some of these arguments have more merit than others.

As noted, the allegation that Rhee was “pro-Japan” is spurious: To the degree that there were colonial-era officials maintained under Rhee, they were there to provide some degree of competent administration for the new republic. Rhee and the U.S. oversaw the land reform of 1945–50 that took land out of the hands of the Japanese colonial government, as well as companies and individuals, and turned it over to tenant farmers, making them into the owners of small, independent farms of their own. His government, from the outset, largely consisted of fellow independence activists familiar to him, rather than colonial-era leaders.

Fields calls Rhee’s handling of “collaborators” pragmatic, in that only the very worst were to be punished and those “with skills and capital should be welcomed back into the fold,” though not given political power. “He can be criticized for this, but it’s not pro-Japan,” Fields says.

The idea that Rhee abandoned Seoul during the war is also absurd, as a then-70-year-old Rhee had little to contribute on the frontlines. Instead, after the fall of Seoul Rhee presided over ROK forces at the southern tip of the peninsula until Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s dramatic Incheon landing broke North Korea’s line and turned the tide. In the darkest days of the war, when a foreign ambassador asked Rhee if North Korea’s advance would prompt him to flee to Jeju Island, 50 miles from the southern tip of the peninsula, Rhee reportedly revealed the pistol he carried in his pocket, saying he would use it on himself rather than flee any further.

As for the lack of memorials in Rhee’s honor, Fields (who is featured in the film but said he has yet to see it) notes that many memorials to Rhee were erected when he was president. After his departure, they were largely torn down, and they have not been rebuilt. The film does not touch on the Park regime and its opposition to Rhee, which is understandable given that Park and Rhee’s support bases overlap.

Finally, as noted, the film places the blame for the corruption of the day on officials under Rhee, preserving Rhee’s reputation for personal integrity and genuine patriotism. However, it does not wrestle with what Rhee’s reliance on corrupt, self-interested underlings says about his rule. In truth, from early in his presidency Rhee had demonstrated a tendency to rely on old friends and confidants loyal to him to staff his government, marginalizing other anti-Japanese, anti-communist figures of a more independent bent. Many of his future political opponents would come from this camp, making elections not a contest of competing worldviews but referendums on Rhee himself. Furthermore, Rhee’s stacking of the cabinet with loyalists, combined with his advancing age, left him with a dangerous lack of insight into how the country’s governance was carried out.

It did not have to be that way. In 1956, then 81-year-old Rhee had announced plans not to seek reelection after his second term ended. An outcry from pro-Rhee politicians and media seemingly convinced him to change his mind. Had he departed then, not with his 1960 exile, he would likely have the reputation his supporters think he deserves today.

The release of The Birth of Korea in theaters comes sandwiched between a pair of potentially seismic developments. One is the late November release of 12.12: The Day (Seoul Spring in Korean), a film that dramatizes the December 1979 coup following Park Chung-hee’s death, which brought Chun Doo-hwan to power. It became a sensation in Korea, with the biggest box-office receipts of 2023 and, most tellingly, very positive assessment of young moviegoers.

The Birth of Korea looks unlikely to match that film’s results. Nevertheless, it has come out ahead of another event on April 10: National Assembly elections, which will serve as a referendum on Yoon’s term so far. Macrae notes that figures in the Yoon administration have endorsed the film and called it a good tool for learning history.

If the objective is an honest and fair assessment of the first ROK president’s legacy, we could start with the following: Syngman Rhee was a lifelong advocate for his country, one whose devotion to its independence crossed borders, leading him to suffer imprisonment, hardship, and personal deprivation for years on end. He also guided his country out of liberation and war, and there’s an argument that neither would have happened had Rhee not been so successful at building a following among American people of faith.

But the ROK did not emerge as a democratic republic because of Rhee, rather despite him. His administration was characterized not only by corruption but an absence of checks on his power and a strong cult of personality around him as the nation’s founding father. This may have provided a degree of stability for a time, but ultimately fostered resentment.

Perhaps Rhee’s greatest legacy is the one for which he was most disdained at the height of his influence: his hardnosed style in dealing with his U.S. counterparts. Rhee, much like Charles de Gaulle at around the same time, infuriated American allies with his independence, refusing to make peace with Japan or become a destination for its goods, which he said would make Korea an economic, if not political, colony of Japan yet again. It has since been argued that this belligerence in favor of Korean autonomy, but also against communism, led the U.S. to support him with generous aid packages for fear of the conflicts he might otherwise provoke.

Unfortunately, even this tendency was ultimately to his detriment. While in 1956 he contemplated stepping down, by 1960 he had become convinced of his indispensability, refusing to stand aside in that year’s presidential election because he believed the contenders lining up to replace him lacked the stomach to disagree with the Americans. He thus stood for election a fourth time, in a contest where vote-rigging was so blatant that opponents of his regime concluded that public protest, in the form of the April Revolution, was their only recourse.

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But was Rhee wrong about aid? The short successor government that followed him was led by Chang Myon, an opposition politician with strong democratic and anti-communist credentials who had a less tempestuous relationship with Washington. As Rhee predicted, aid declined and was only restored after Park’s coup established confidence in the Korean government’s ability to maintain order and stick to a development plan.

Rhee has other accomplishments, such as the rapid growth of education and literacy rates under his presidency and a more professional civil service that some experts say would later play an underappreciated role in Park’s modernization campaign. But ultimately, the most important takeaway is not that Rhee’s legacy should be saved or discarded; both its positives and negatives should be seen for what they truly were. Rhee was a great independence activist and, yes, leader who guided the country out of its colonization and near-oblivion. He was also overly convinced of his own value, and this led to the destruction of his reputation for more than a half-century.

Fields says there is too much of a temptation to make Rhee into “a demagogue or a demigod,” when in reality “he was a human being who made some very wise and very poor decisions at the same time.” The Birth of Korea may lead to a properly nuanced assessment of his record. But it is only a step in that direction, and people of all countries concerned about their historical record should learn from where it succeeds and where work remains to be done.

The American Conservative · by The American Conservative · April 15, 2024

15. Washington Backed a Coup Against South Korean Democracy

I also have not seen the film 12:12: The Day.

But it was a fascinating time to be in South Korea in the 1980s and able to observe the democracy movement.

Washington Backed a Coup Against South Korean Democracy

jacobin.com · by Kap Seol

Toward the end of last year, a South Korean military strongman achieved a rare posthumous feat. Chun Doo-hwan, who ruled the country with an iron fist for much of the 1980s, saw off the challenge of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Korean box office. After its November release, the film 12.12: The Day, which depicts a period of nine hours on December 12, 1979, during the first of Chun’s two coups, comfortably outperformed Ridley Scott’s mediocre yet world-conquering epic.

By Christmas, the gripping political thriller had sold more than ten million tickets in a country of 51.7 million people. The success of the film was partly driven by fears about South Korea’s current president Yoon Suk-yeol, the former prosecutor general who ascended to the presidency in 2022.

Yoon has been using a cabal of prosecutors to chip away at democracy and solidify his hard-right rule in ways that are reminiscent of Chun’s rule. Chun mobilized a clique of officers in a rolling coup that first seized control of the military hierarchy and then took over the government after massacring hundreds of young protesters in the city of Gwangju.

The movie is now available on global streaming platforms. 12.12: The Day deserves to reach a wide audience as an hour-by-hour depiction of how right-wing, antidemocratic putsches can succeed.

Rival Warlords

In December 1979, much of South Korea was anticipating a “Seoul spring” when they would finally elect their own president under a new democratic constitution. Two months earlier, the military dictator Park Chung-hee was assassinated by his own intelligence chief.

In December 1979, much of South Korea was anticipating a ‘Seoul spring’ when they would finally elect their own president under a new democratic constitution.

Park had ruled the country for eighteen years after ousting its first democratically elected government in a coup in 1961. Kim Jae-kyu, his righthand man and director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), acted out of fear that Park would unleash brute military force to suppress emerging mass campaigns aimed at unseating the authoritarian regime.

While increasingly resorting to repressive measures to maintain control over the country, Park often shrewdly pitted members of his inner circles against each other. He fostered competition among the bureaucracy and the military, inducing officials and generals to vie for his favor in exchange for loyalty.

Such pent-up rivalry ultimately contributed to Park’s assassination. Kim’s sense of humiliation at being outcompeted by a rival who served as the presidential security chief also played a part in his decision to pull the trigger.

Park groomed Chun and his clique of young officers, who were fluent in English and modern warfare and served alongside the US military in Vietnam, to counter the military old guard of those who were educated during the Japanese colonial era and recruited to the officer corps during the Korean war of 1950–53. Chun’s clique coalesced around Hana hoe (“Society 1”), a group founded by Chun and his fellow inaugural graduates of the country’s first four-year military academy during the latter days of the war.

Their pride in having completed four years of West Point–style education and stints of training in the United States meant that these young generals often looked down upon their older counterparts as an ignorant, underqualified bunch. Chun embodied such arrogance and ambition. Two days after Park’s coup in May 1961, Chun, who was then a lieutenant, brought out military academy cadets to march through downtown Seoul in support of the coup. Two years later, in 1963, he almost staged what could have been his first coup to eliminate Park’s rivals.

In the wake of Park’s assassination and the subsequent proclamation of martial law, long-smoldering tensions burst into the open over control of the military and even the country. Chun had the upper hand thanks to his well-organized, highly motivated clique, as well as his control of investigative powers and intelligence gathering under martial law as commander of the all-powerful Defense Security Command.

In the wake of Park’s assassination and the subsequent proclamation of martial law, long-smoldering tensions burst into the open over control of the military and even the country.

The director Kim Sung-su has a cult following outside South Korea for his 2016 noir, Asura: The City of Madness. In 12.12: The Day, he deftly gives expression to the tensions, overblown egos, and bureaucratic opportunism that enabled Chun to circumvent command structures and shoot or arrest his superiors to seize control of the military.

However, Kim’s depiction of Chun’s clique and his old-guard rivals is often too simplistic, relying on a good guys vs. bad guys dichotomy, to do justice to the character of the South Korean top brass at that time. Despite their intense rivalry, both factions shared the common conviction that the military was entitled to a final say in civilian affairs.

Following Park’s assassination, Jeong Seung-hwa (depicted as Jeong Sang-ho in the movie), the martial law commander abducted by Chun’s henchmen, often hinted at a coup of his own when publicly declaring that he and his generals would “veto” a presidency of Kim Dae-jung. Kim, an opposition leader and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was emerging as a presidential hopeful.

What unfolded on the night of December 12, 1979, was more than a coup. It was a feud between two rival warlords, as illustrated in several short scenes in the movie. Many of the old generals treated Chun’s provocations more as a turf war than an act of treason.

The US Connection

One thing starkly absent from 12.12: The Day is a portrayal of Washington’s multiple roles in bolstering Chun after his coup, although there is a brief scene of the defense minister taking flight to an underground bunker of the US Forces in Korea (USFK).

On that fateful night, when he violated the command structure of his own military, Chun mobilized infantry units from the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with North Korea, infringing upon the authority of USFK commander John A. Wickham Jr. The US Army general had operational control of the entire South Korean military, with the exception of paratroopers and the Seoul garrison division. In spite of General Wickham’s strong opposition, the US ambassador William H. Gleysteen invited Chun to a meeting at his residence two days after the coup, facilitated by the CIA’s Seoul station chief, Robert Brewster.

Meeting Chun face-to-face within forty-eight hours of the coup at his own residence was a blatant breach of a US ambassador’s protocol in every possible sense. However, Gleysteen even went further, reiterating Chun’s reasoning and retracting his earlier depiction of the “12.12 incident” as “a coup in all but name” on the grounds that “the government structure remained intact.” He requested the State Department to stop labeling the incident as a coup.

Chun, who had been educated in psychological warfare at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in 1959, maximized his gains from the meeting. He arrived at the gate of the US ambassador’s residence in military fatigues, accompanied by a large group of armed bodyguards. Such high visibility in central Seoul helped accelerate the quiet dissemination of news about his supposedly confidential meeting with Gleysteen, especially among the South Korean elite.

The US ambassador William H. Gleysteen invited Chun to a meeting at his residence two days after the coup, facilitated by the CIA’s Seoul station chief.

In his memoir, James V. Young, a military attaché and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) station chief at the time, recalled many South Koreans asked him from December 14 onward if the United States now supported Chun. If it did not, they wondered, why did he and Gleysteen have such a “cozy” meeting? Whether it was his intention or not, Washington’s man on the ground in Seoul helped prompt the upper echelons of the South Korean bureaucracy and elite to line up with Chun, with varying degrees of opportunism and acquiescence.

CIA station director Brewster’s ties with Chun appears to have long predated the 12.12 coup, although many of his cables to Langley remain classified. Brewster, who died of cancer in 1981, often told General Wickham that Chun was “the only horse in town” and that the United States would need to work with him “even if at arm’s length.”

Chun also attempted to get around Wickham’s authority by sending letters or personal emissaries to former USFK generals in the United States, directly beseeching them for support. Among the recipients was John William Vessey Jr, the vice chief of staff of the US Army. Vessey had become acquainted with Chun during his tenure as USFK commander in the late 1970s, when the South Korean general’s infantry division discovered a secret tunnel dug by North Korea for a large-scale surprise attack.

Vessey was among the fifteen high-ranking policymakers who attended the White House policy review meeting on May 22, 1980, following the mass shootings in Gwangju by paratroopers of unarmed protesters who rose up in defiance of Chun’s coup. It remains unknown how or whether Vessey, the only person in attendance who had befriended Chun, spoke for the mastermind of the Gwangju massacre at the meeting that effectively decided to support his violent crackdown. According to Chun’s own memoir, Vessey introduced him and his staff to Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan’s security advisor, who gave Reagan’s first-ever summit as president in Washington to Chun.

The End of Military Rule

Despite their incompetence and political myopia, Gleysteen and Brewster greatly helped shape the situation in favor of Chun, who performed his own political acrobatics to court US support. This was because Washington did not appear to have a contingency plan for a post-Park regime, despite the brewing political crisis in South Korea.

Washington did not appear to have a contingency plan for a post-Park regime, despite the brewing political crisis in South Korea.

According to a twenty-page analysis issued on June 9, 1979, the CIA expected Park would stay in power into the 1980s, due to his strong authoritarian grip and the inability of student-activists and dissidents to garner political support from the disfranchised. Within the next four months, that assessment proved to be wrong when confronted with Park’s death. However, it was still true that pro-democracy activists were unable to win wider support, except in Gwangju, where students and ordinary citizens banded together, briefly controlling the city after defeating Chun’s loyalist paratroopers.

By late 1979, officials in Washington appeared to be concluding that they might need another military strongman to eliminate volatility and restore the status quo in South Korea. With much of its military and diplomatic resources entangled in the response to the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Cold War politics meant that the United States could not afford another Iran-style fiasco on the Korean peninsula. Any such unrest would risk provoking communist North Korea into over-running Seoul.

In “North Korean Reactions to Instability in the South,” a report released eight days after the 12.12 coup, the CIA estimated the likelihood of North Korea opting for military action at fifty-fifty. However, even in the agency’s own view, widespread public unrest alone would not be sufficient to prompt a North Korean military option. It would have to be coupled with infighting within the South Korean military.

By May 1980, Chun had indeed proven himself to be “the only horse in town.” He ordered the roundup of several thousand dissidents and brutally put down the Gwangju uprising after driving his rival faction out of the military five months earlier.

Washington’s stopgap maneuvers in 1979–80 stood in noticeable contrast to a strategic shift it began to initiate from 1987 onward in response to the standoff between Chun and the Korean populace over his insistence on staying in power. In a five-page memorandum titled “South Korea: The Time Bomb is Ticking,” the CIA’s East Asian analysis director concluded that the United States would need to play a “more assertive role” in South Korea.

Its goal, according to the memorandum, should be to broker a compromise between some of Chun’s ruling party and the opposition party over a new constitution in order to prevent Chun from ramming through his own version to perpetuate his behind-the-scenes control. Otherwise, the analyst warned, Chun’s attempt at clinging to power would likely provoke “political violence either in the form of a military coup or student/labor-led popular uprisings.”

In the summer of 1987, months of mass protests resulted in constitutional reforms ensuring free and direct presidential elections.

In the summer of 1987, months of mass protests resulted in constitutional reforms ensuring free and direct presidential elections. These concessions indeed came in the form of a great compromise between the two major parties at the expense of the neglect of a broader left-wing agenda concerning the rights of labor and social minorities.

It has since not been hard to notice the assertiveness of the United States at major political junctures. However, neither Washington nor the South Korean ruling elite could always get their way. What distinguished the two periods of the late 1970s and the late 1980s from one another was the emergence of a people’s movement in South Korea. Nationalist and left-leaning activism among students and workers had become a force to be reckoned with, not just for the military but also for the United States.

Democracy in Decline

In recent years, South Korea’s democracy has rapidly lost the vibrancy it was once known for and developed its own version of US-style bipartisan hegemony for two pro-business parties. A squabbling legislature increasingly fails to reach any meaningful consensus while politicians in power frequently use prosecutorial powers to discredit and eliminate their rivals.

In recent years, South Korea’s democracy has rapidly lost the vibrancy it was once known for.

The South Korean prosecution is a rarity in democracies as it is empowered to wield unfettered investigative and prosecutorial powers. Since the country underwent democratization in 1987, it has steadily curtailed the influence of its notorious intelligence agency. In contrast, the influence of the prosecution has grown ever stronger, with a role in almost every government organization from the intelligence agency to major embassies.

The director of 12.12: The Day appears to have framed it with the intention of suggesting parallels with South Korea’s current president Yoon Suk-yeol. In his role as prosecutor-general in 2019–20, Yoon successfully thwarted efforts by the liberal Moon Jae-in government to rein in the prosecution service. Two years ago, he ran for president on the ticket of Moon’s opponents, the conservative People Power Party.

Even for those outside South Korea, watching 12.12: The Day should be a thought-provoking experience, and even an inspiring one. We are living in a world marked by the decline of democracy and the rising of the far right. Its contemporary resonances make 12.12: The Day must-see viewing.

jacobin.com · by Kap Seol

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com