Does Biden have a North Korea Policy?

Not Really

By Daniel Sneider : Lecturer, International Policy at Stanford University and APP member

Toyo Keizai, June 29,2021

Speculation about a resumption of negotiations between North Korea and the United States is once again in the air. While senior American officials talk about “interesting signals” from Pyongyang, the North Koreans rush to say, not so fast, let’s see what you have to offer. The newly appointed American North Korea special envoy, Sung Kim, was received like visiting royalty in Seoul.

Is this the beginning of the much-awaited North Korea policy of the Biden administration, a prelude to talks, or perhaps to provocations designed to up the pressure for concessions?

Reading between the lines, and based on recent conversations with senior South Korean and U.S. officials, it is clear that in reality, there is no North Korea policy in Washington. There is a China policy, and the priority is to strengthen alliances to build a broad front against China.

When it comes to the Korean peninsula, the Biden administration is focused on keeping South Korea inside the alliance camp. Senior administration officials ended their review concluding there is little to be gained from negotiations with Pyongyang.

They assess that the North Koreans are only prepared to offer what they put on the table at the failed Hanoi summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un – an exchange of a limited freeze of some nuclear facilities in exchange for lifting the sanctions which continue to undermine the regime’s survival.

“The Americans are probably not that interested in talking to the North,” Andrei Lankov, a leading authority on North Korea based on Kookmin University, told Toyo Keizai.

“The only result such talks are going to produce might be some refined version of the ‘Hanoi compromise’, and such a deal is not going to sell well with the U.S. Congress, U.S. public and U.S. media. So, President Biden, fully understanding that no spectacular victory is possible in dealing with North Korea, seemingly prefers to concentrate on more important issues –above all, China.”

Veteran American policy makers on North Korea share that understanding, and see mainly efforts to offer the progressive South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in nominal support for its almost desperate pursuit of a progress toward the goal of engagement with the North.

“The essence of the Biden policy approach is to maximize your options,” says Evans Revere, former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific and a veteran of talks with North Korea.

“That requires them to talk about the goal of denuclearization, to beat their breast about sanctions, but also to tell the North Koreans that we are prepared to talk. It also explains why they are working so hard to keep the South Koreans on board and happy.” Meanwhile, however, “we have bigger fish to fry – the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians.”

From that perspective, the summit meeting in late May in Washington between Moon and Biden was a great success. In the negotiations on the joint statement issued by the two leaders, led on the U.S. side by White House Indo-Pacific director Kurt Campbell, the U.S. was mainly concerned with getting Seoul to line up on the China issues.

South Korean senior officials acknowledge there was heavy pressure to get them to echo the language of the joint statement with Japan on Taiwan and human rights issues, though they point to some softening of the wording and their insistence not to name China in the document.

President Moon went into the summit eager to shore up his sagging domestic standing, following tough local election losses and increasing fears that conservatives could mount a comeback victory in next year’s presidential vote.

According to senior American officials, the Blue House priority going into Washington was not to discuss North Korea policy but to get help on the supply of vaccines to counter rising Covid-19 infection rates. And Washington delivered in the form of half a million doses, targeted at the South Korean military.

Moon also wanted badly to convey the optics of a close and friendly relationship with the new administration, which is popular back home. South Korean senior officials emerged almost gushing about the Moon-Biden relationship, marked by more than 5 hours of talks and personal chemistry.

They contrast that to the last meeting between Moon and Trump, in September 2019, described as “simply awful.” Trump apparently spent the entire time complaining about the level of South Korean contribution to shared defense costs, berating Moon for not yielding to his outrageous demands for a five-fold increase in South Korea’s contribution.

South Korean officials insist there was significant dialogue and understanding reached on how to handle North Korea. Largely that was a matter of the White House bending over backwards to at least convey their readiness to talk to Pyongyang, while retaining the familiar stance of seeking denuclearization and maintaining sactions pressure until there are real concessions. The decision to appoint Amb Sung Kim as the new special representative for North Korea was made only days before the White House summit, a response to pleading from Seoul.

Kim, who notably will retain his ‘day job’ as the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, is a tough, seasoned Korea expert. He served as Amb to South Korea, ran North Korea policy in the last years of the Obama administration, and led the working level talks with the North Koreans leading up the Singapore Summit.

He has few illusions about the prospects for negotiations with Pyongyang, and that view is shared by his deputy, Jung Pak, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who came over from the Brookings Institution think tank.

The Moon administration is pressing for Washington to approve steps to ease sanctions against the North, hoping that will bring Pyongang to the table. Unification Minister Lee In-young is the voice for this in Seoul, calling for a “flexible application of sanctions.” His views, however, are not shared by the Foreign Ministry, which tends to mirror the American position.

The visit of Kim and Pak to Seoul provided a glimpse into the power struggles within the Moon administration on North Korea policy. The Unification Ministry demanded and won direct meetings with the Americans and the dissolution of a joint working group that had enforced tough sanctions, to the dismay of the progressives in Seoul and the North Korean regime.

The South Koreans have one open channel to the North, well informed sources say, and claim to be receiving encouraging messages from Pyongyang about resuming talks.

“Moon would like to have talks with North Korea, but only as long as these talks do not annoy the U.S. too much and do not constitute an open violation of the sanctions regime,” says Lankov, who is a Russian-educated North Korea expert.

For now, agrees Revere, the South Korean government is content. “As long as Washington is making positive noises about dialogue and engagement with North Korea, as long as Washington continues to do things that underscore Washington’s interest in dialogue, then South Korea can remain hopeful during the remaining months of Moon’s administration there is some hope for resumption of dialogue,” the former senior official told Toyo Keizai.

North Korea and China in the game

In Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un seems to have read these tea leaves quite well. He too very deliberately keeps the door open to dialogue but makes it clear that there must be something substantial in it for him.

He let loose his somewhat unconventional sister, Kim Yo Jong, to rudely brush off the vague talk from U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan about ‘interesting signals’ from the North, followed up by the North Korean Foreign Minister’s statement that they have no interest in talks “which would get us nowhere, only taking up precious time.”

The regime meanwhile is admitting serious internal problems, such as food shortages, reflected in unusual inflationary spikes for basic goods on the country’s semi-free markets.

There remains a deep fear of potential spread of Covid in the North, leading the regime to continue tight border controls, despite the severe economic impact. Some analysts suggest that this might make Kim Jong Un ready for an elusive deal to significantly rollback the nuclear and missile program in exchange for economic assistance.

Despite unease over dependency on China, Kim Jong Un can still rely on his powerful neighbor and treaty ally as a safety valve if things get worse.

“If the North Koreans are willing to accept Chinese food aid, they can easily get it,” says Lankov. “As long as the North Koreans decide to relax their irrationally tough quarantine regime and start getting Chinese aid, China will give them as much as they need.”

Relations between North Korea and China are now in an upswing, manifested in a flood of effusive propaganda celebrating their alliance and the Chinese role in the Korean war.

Lately, the Chinese have put a priority on that partnership over the goals of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. With the Biden administration’s focus on confronting China, there is even more incentive for Beijing to keep North Korea alive and well.

The price, for now, may be that North Korea not raise tensions with Washington by carrying out missile or nuclear tests designed to force talks on its terms.

But the Chinese will also have little interest in resolving the underlying security issues or in enforcing tight sanctions. The Biden administration’s new version of ‘strategic patience,’ as the Obama administration’s policy was labeled, is always subject to North Korea’s own readiness to maintain the status quo. Certainly, in Pyongyang, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, but no one in Washington, or in Seoul or Tokyo, can sleep well either.

What Happens to APP Interns

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Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism’ Review: Portrait of an Independent Mind

by Dinyar Patel

A member of the British House of Commons at a time when Indians in India couldn’t vote, he argued that the empire was impoverishing his homeland.

By Tunku Varadarajan

Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2020

When the British government announced in 2014 that it would install a statue of Mohandas Gandhi in London’s Parliament Square, there were complaints in certain quarters that the wrong anticolonial Indian was being honored in the heart of an erstwhile empire. The statue, some said, should be not of the Mahatma—however great his status as tormentor-in-chief of the British Raj—but of Dadabhai Naoroji.

If there were many befuddled people who said “Dadabhai who?” at the time, there will be far fewer who will say so now, given the publication of “Naoroji,” by Dinyar Patel, an absorbing biography of the first Indian ever to be elected to the House of Commons. Naoroji won election as a candidate for William Gladstone’s Liberal Party in 1892. He represented Englishmen in a London borough at a time when Indians in India had no right to vote and no parliament of their own.

As struck as we may be today by the irony that the House of Commons was the only legislature for which Naoroji—a man with few rights in his own land—was entitled to run, we would also do well to note the unseemly fact that this “pioneer of Indian nationalism” is almost entirely forgotten in India.

There are many reasons for Naoroji’s absence from contemporary India’s nationalist memory bank. One is an intellectual failing to which Mr. Patel draws apt attention: Historians of South Asia, he writes, “have almost reflexively shunned political elites” who do not “mesh well with the Marxist and postcolonial traditions that still dominate” the Indian academy. Naoroji was a textbook man of the elite. He was an anglicized, highly educated Parsi (or Zoroastrian), a member of a tiny ethno-religious minority that fled to India from a recently Islamized Persia in the eighth century. The Parsis prospered greatly in their new Indian homeland, especially under the British, who favored them for their lighter skin and warmed to their embrace of Western ways, even as they remained faithful to their own tenacious religion.

The dogmatic anti-elitism of Indian historians is matched, says Mr. Patel, by their unwillingness “to accept biography as a legitimate form of scholarship.” Naoroji’s isn’t the only story to have gone largely untold by scholars, and there can be few major countries with a history as rich as India’s that have been as biographically neglectful of their prominent men and women. Luckily, Naoroji’s personal papers survive, although “forbiddingly vast,” damaged and disorganized. Mr. Patel—a Parsi himself, and now an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina—spent two years poring over Naoroji’s private correspondence, some 15,000 documents in all. His book grew out of eight years of study at Harvard, principally for his doctoral thesis. But the erudition of his enterprise, while everywhere evident, is never daunting.

Naoroji, born in 1825, deserves a sage biography. He was a scholar himself, becoming, at the age of 29, the first Indian to secure a full professorship at a British government university. He taught mathematics and natural philosophy at a college in Bombay, yet did so for only a year before setting sail for England in 1855 to partner in a business venture with wealthy Parsi confreres. In Europe, Mr. Patel tells us, Naoroji awakened to the gulf in prosperity between colonized India and the imperial West. He was, for instance, “simply stunned by the prosperity of the French countryside” and in London “felt the stark distance between mother country and colony.”

India now seemed, to the sensitive young Parsi, to be “the very byword for poverty and powerlessness,” and his appetite for commerce was soon dwarfed by a passion for nationalist politics. He embarked on what was to be a lifelong campaign to convince the British that they were “draining” India of its wealth. This “drain theory,” as it became known, disconcerted the British, and Naoroji developed it, Mr. Patel writes, “in an era when many Britons took it for granted that imperialism was a beneficent force and a stimulus for growth and prosperity in their colonies.” Through a “colossal assemblage of facts and figures”—mined from data made available to him by the British authorities themselves—Naoroji sought to demonstrate that imperialism was making Indians poorer by the year.

Paradoxically, it is this enterprise that may explain why Naoroji is an eclipsed figure in India today. Since Independence, most Indians have taken utterly for granted his once-radical view that the British Raj paupered India. Also working against any postcolonial celebration of Naoroji is the fact that he sought to persuade the British that their impoverishing of India was unacceptable, precisely because it fell short of Britain’s own moral values. He titled his own magnum opus on the subject, published in 1901, “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India,” again making the point that true “Britishness” was fairness.

Although he was a founding member of the Indian National Congress political party in December 1885, his calls for India to be “a self-governing and prosperous nation” were tempered by concessions that Indians would still be “loyal to the British throne.” For all his many ties to progressive individuals and movements in India, Britain and elsewhere—and these included women suffragists, Irish nationalists (for whom he had a particular fondness), black Americans like Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois, and workers’ unions—he was a gradualist. He preferred suasion, not boycotts, debate not defiance. He held to these views to the end of his life—he died in Bombay in 1917, at the age of 91—even as the independence movement in India became fiercely (if nonviolently) radical.

For all his fidelity to the core ideas of Indian nationalism, it is perhaps fitting that Naoroji’s election to the House of Commons—in an age when such a thing was seen as outlandish—is regarded as his most enduring political contribution. No less a personage than Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, exclaimed at a political rally in 1888 (four years before Naoroji’s victory at the polls) that no British borough would ever elect “a black man” to Parliament. Salisbury was widely pilloried in Britain for his coarseness, which had the effect of raising Naoroji’s profile and contributing to his victory. Today around 10% of the House of Commons traces its descent to Britain’s former colonies, and the house would appear to be more welcoming of candidates from outside the age-old Britannic mainstream than India’s own parliament is of religious minorities. One has to think that Naoroji, today, would be more at home in cosmopolitan Britain than he would be in his independent—but increasingly intolerant—India.

—Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

North Koreans Also Have Human Rights

By Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of the Global Social Action Agenda of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Greg Scarlatoiu executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) and APP member.

Jewish Journal, June 11, 2018

For almost three decades, U.S. administrations have tiptoed around the egregious human rights violations perpetrated by the Kim regimes in North Korea. But U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo already has changed the equation, by succeeding in securing the release of American detainees Kim Dong-chul, Kim (Tony) Sang-duk, and Kim Hak-song. A reminder to us and the world that the United States still has the clout to move the needle on human rights.

On the eve of the Singapore summit on denuclearization, we urge President Donald Trump to put the release of Japanese, other foreign and South Korean abductees, the reunion of separated Korean families, and the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of the North Korean political prison camps, as the bill the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must foot to become a normal and responsible member of the international community.

Three generations of the Kim family regime have continued to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles at the expense of the human security of North Koreans, and to egregiously violate the human rights of its citizens. In order to tackle North Korean threats, the Trump administration has applied three of the four fundamental elements of national power (diplomatic, information, military, economic power — DIME): economic power through the strengthening of the international sanctions regime; military power through the deployment of assets to the region and the reaffirming of U.S. commitment to our Korean and Japanese allies; and diplomatic power, employing for the first time summit diplomacy, made possible by the maximum economic and military pressure and the resuscitation of inter-Korean dialogue, starting with the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.

Kim Jong-un wants security guarantees, but history has taught time and again that liberal democracies shouldn’t try to guarantee the survival of a regime that runs political prison camps and commits crimes against humanity. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his key advisers represent a generation of progressive intellectuals who helped democratize their nation. Their lasting legacy however, will be ultimately defined by their stance on North Korean human rights. Will they appease tyranny and lead the Republic of Korea (South Korea) down the path of catastrophic compromise? Or will they become the heroes who brought freedom and human rights to both Koreas, thus decisively opening the path of unification under a truly democratic and prosperous Republic of Korea?

Time will tell. But early signs are not encouraging. The recent ban on leaflet balloon launches and loudspeaker broadcasting into North Korea is one reason for concern. North Korean escapees in South Korea give voice to silenced millions. At this critical crossroads in history, the South Korean administration must protect these heroes and ensure their voices are heard, not muffled.

All this puts the spotlight on the United States’ summit diplomacy. Will it be a historic achievement for President Trump or just another déjà vu North Korean scam?

Under any conceivable outcome, in order to achieve ultimate peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in Northeast Asia — a fundamental U.S. security interest — the nature of the Kim regime and its horrific human rights abuses must remain in focus.

Human rights cannot be treated as a sidebar issue, possibly sacrificed for a wink and a nod and photo-op with Kim. Human rights must not be abandoned to appease the Kim regime.

Human rights cannot be postponed until an ever-elusive future scenario in which the Kim regime miraculously agrees to protect the rights of its citizens. Despots do not give away human rights out of the goodness of their hearts. Human rights always are achieved and protected through struggle.

Can the U.S. remove a nuclear threat and guarantee human rights and dignity simultaneously?

President Trump, please take note: America already did it and with a much more dangerous foe. During the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan and then-Secretary of State George Shultz used the issue of freedom for Soviet Jewry as the litmus test for Soviet intentions on nuclear disarmament. Eventually, human rights prevailed and the communist system dissolved without a shot being fired.

The U.S. should counter Kim’s cycle of “charm offensives” not through appeasement but through verifiable changes in North Korea. It is important to witness the blowing up of one nuclear test site. Of equal importance will be the dismantling of Kim’s gulag. When that occurs — and only then — can the world be assured that the two estranged Koreas are on the path to a peaceful reunification and a hopeful future for all.

Will Greater Gender Equity Bring Higher Productivity?

Japan's Cabinet on May 18th approved a resolution to encourage gender equality in politics. At the same time, however, the Cabinet issued a cabinet decision saying that sexual harassment is not a crime. The ruling said "under the current legal system, 'criminal sexual harassment' does not exist." This essentially makes Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso's similar statement now government policy. It should be noted that the Kono Statement, the 1993 putative apology to the Comfort Women for sex slavery does not have the official imprimatur of a cabinet decision.

To address much of Japan's gender inequality, the Diet is deliberating laws to reform working life. Commenting on this is APP Board Member and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley Steven K. Vogel in the Toyo Keizai, May 17,2018

As the Diet continues deliberation on the detailed provisions of the Work Style Reform bill, it is easy to miss the bigger picture. But Japan has a unique opportunity to remedy some of the worst flaws of its employment system, such as blatant gender discrimination, while boosting productivity at the same time.

There is no guarantee that Japan will achieve such a “win-win” outcome, but that is all the more reason for Japan’s political leaders, ministry officials, company managers, union representatives, workers and citizens to keep their eye on the prize.

Japan is unique among the advanced industrial countries in the degree to which its government is now focused on labor market issues. The Abe administration has declared this to be the “Work Style Reform Diet,” and it has also launched a major effort to rethink education and training, the so-called “human resources revolution” (hitozukuri kakumei).

So in Japan the questions are not ones of political will, but of policy substance and workplace-level implementation. Can the government get it right? And will employers follow through?

The transition from labor surplus to labor shortage presents the perfect opportunity to address the systemic gender discrimination embedded in Japan’s starkly tiered employment system. The trend has become unmistakable over the past few years, as unemployment dipped to 2.5 percent and the job offers to applicants ratio surged to 1.6:1 as of March this year.

The government and industry have responded by shifting their goals from the zero-sum enterprise of shedding workers and lowering labor costs toward the positive-sum mission of increasing female workforce participation and enhancing labor productivity.

Just consider this: Japan now has a conservative ruling party that is promoting social democratic goals like equal pay for equal work and lower working hours. True, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is not advocating these measures for the same reasons as the left opposition, and it will not implement them in the same way. It is more concerned about increasing the labor force, enhancing productivity, stimulating consumption, and boosting the birth rate than in promoting equal rights per se.

Nonetheless, the LDP and the opposition parties agree on the most important elements of labor reform. As one labor union representative lamented to me: “The LDP leaders are clever. They want to win elections. So they take the best ideas from the opposition and they make them their own.”

This is actually a classic LDP strategy. LDP leaders adopted opposition proposals for stronger environmental protection and higher social welfare spending in the 1970s. Prime Minister Koizumi assumed the opposition’s critique of his own party as clientelistic and corrupt in the 2000s. And now Prime Minister Abe has embraced the empowerment of women and the improvement of working life.
Gender Equality as a “Win-Win” Proposition

Promoting gender equality and improving worker welfare should encourage more women to join the workforce and enhance labor productivity overall. Companies will be able to recruit more women by providing a better work environment, including day care facilities, child and elder care leave, more limited working hours, and greater opportunities for advancement.

Greater gender equality should increase productivity for the simple reason that discrimination means that companies are under-utilizing a key pool of talent. Hitotsubashi University Economist Kyoji Fukao notes that Japan ranks at the top among rich countries in literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving, yet it stands out in its low usage of the skills of females at work.

And Isamu Yamamoto of Keio University finds that Japanese listed firms with higher shares of female regular workers are more profitable. In pursuing gender equality, moreover, the government will also address other pressing social problems, including childcare and elder care, economic inequality, and the lack of flexibility in career choices.

The equal pay for equal work provisions in the reform bill are critical to addressing the gender gap. Of course, Japan formally committed to gender equality with the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1986.

But companies have preserved discrimination in practice via separate career tracks: a permanent track (seiki), primarily for men, and a “temporary” track (hiseiki), primarily for women. They have justified differences in pay, benefits, and job security on the basis of different levels of “constraint” (kousokusei).

That is, the permanent workers were obligated to accept overtime hours, geographical transfers, and new job assignments whereas the temporary workers were not. The current bill and implementation plans begin to address this problem by prohibiting the most blatantly unjustifiable discrepancies in compensation.

For example, employers will not be able to offer different commuter allowances for regular workers versus non-regular workers, because they cannot justify this difference by the different levels of obligation to accept assignments in the two categories.

Evaluating the Work Style Reforms
I have been struck in my field research on this topic that Japanese government officials are fully aware that simply declaring gender equity and diversity as a goal will not suffice. They are consciously designing mechanisms to monitor progress at the firm level, to reward companies that comply and punish those that do not.

On gender equity, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare devised a star (eruboshi) system to recognize companies for their effort, with three levels of achievement based on five criteria: female hiring, job tenure, work style (including working hours), share of executives, and multiplicity of career courses.

It is easy to make fun of this point system, given that it lacks an enforcement mechanism. But at least it represents a large-scale effort to influence practices at the workplace level, which is the ultimate goal, after all.

On equal pay for equal work, ministry officials took the unusual approach of issuing detailed guidelines before passing the reform law. They cannot impose penalties for non-compliance, but they can issue administrative guidance (gyousei shidou). And companies will have an incentive to comply with the guidelines because judges might refer to them in the case of disputes.

There are some real signs of progress, albeit modest ones. Female workforce participation has increased from 63.4% in 2012 to 68.2% in 2016. The female share of corporate executives increased steadily from a low base from 2012 to 2016, from 14.4% to 18.6% for subsection chief (kakarichō), from 7.9% to 10.3% for section chief (kachō), and from 4.9% to 6.6% for department chief (buchō), according to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare.

An assessment of work style reform boils down to the proverbial glass half empty versus glass half full. Given the glacial pace of Japan’s shift toward gender equity in the workplace over the past 30 years, and the bias toward employer-friendly reforms over the past 20 years, I view the current reform efforts as a welcome change, both in pace and direction.

Those frustrated by the limitations of the current bill should direct their efforts to ensuring that the government enforces the provisions and that industry changes its practices accordingly. And then they should aim yet higher in the next stage of reform.

The U.S and North Korea: Headed To War or Dialogue?

By Daniel Sneider, Lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford University and APP member.

Tokyo Business Today, October 3,2017

Governments around the globe, from Berlin to Beijing, and not least of all, in Pyongyang, have been desperately trying to figure out what the United States is going to do in North Korea. Is it headed for war or for dialogue?

Senior Japanese officials, according to multiple sources, decided to ignore the twitter feed of President Donald Trump in trying to discern American policy. Instead they rely on the words, in private and public, of the responsible figures in his administration – Defense Secretary James Mattis first of all, followed by National Security Advisor Lt. General H.R.McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The events of the past week have demonstrated how difficult it is to actually operate on that basis. Secretary Tillerson garnered headlines when he told reporters in Beijing, after meetings with senior Chinese officials, that the U.S. was in direct contact with North Korea through multiple channels.

A day later, the President tweeted out that Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man” and that he should “save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done,” read as yet another threat to take military action.

Who to believe? In reality, the Trump administration has been pursuing a policy that combines escalating sanctions and pressures on the North Korean regime, including consciously evoking threats of military action, at the same time that has engaged the Pyongyang regime in attempts at dialogue.

Tillerson’s admission of this in Beijing was not a surprise to those closely following North Korea policy – it was meant more for the purpose of giving Xi Jinping something to offer the upcoming Communist Party gathering as evidence of his ‘success’ in getting the Americans to engage in serious dialogue with North Korea.

Contact with North Korea has been ongoing for months, mainly by the State Department’s Amb Joseph Yun, the Special Representative for North Korea policy, through the North Korean mission to the United Nations. Amb Yun, according to people familiar with his thinking, has been looking for openings to hold serious talks with Pyongyang.

In May, on the sidelines of a non-official dialogue held in Norway, Yun met with Choe Son-hui, the director of the North American department in the North Korean Foreign Ministry. Yun had hoped to open a broader discussion but Tillerson and the White House limited him to first dealing with the fate of several Americans held captive in the north. Yun traveled to Pyongyang which led to the release of the student Otto Warmbier the following month, though he died within days of his return to the U.S.

Early in September, a similar meeting took place in Switzerland, attended by experts from the U.S., South Korea, Japan and elsewhere and by a North Korean delegation led by Choe Kang Il, the deputy director of the North American division. For the North Koreans it was more of a fact-finding effort, trying to understand where U.S. policy was headed, and delivering a rather tough message about their willingness to talk.

“The North Koreans are also interested in talks and they know the need for talks,” one participant told me. “But they want to make sure that U.S. hostilities toward North Korea are stopped for talks to be resumed.”

For Pyongyang, the participant said, this means the U.S. halting the threat of use of nuclear weapons, dropping its sanctions policy, and ending U.S. military exercises it regards as threatening, particularly those aimed at operations to target the North Korean leadership. Any discussion based on the goal of denuclearization, he said, is not on the current Pyongyang agenda.

Trump senior officials have repeatedly signaled, in some detail, their readiness to talk but only on the basis of the previous commitments to denuclearization. In a rare semi-public appearance on September 25 at the Institute of the Study of War, National Security advisor McMaster acknowledged there was no quick military solution – “there’s not a precision strike that solves the problem,” he said, reported DefenseOne.

Talks are possible, he went on, but not if Pyongyang continues to develop its missile and nuclear weapons capability, indicating that a halt in testing was a first goal. He further described confidence-building steps the North Koreans could take – though he said they were not preconditions for talks – including accepting inspections of its nuclear facilities and a declaration of its eventual willingness to give up its nuclear weapons, Bloomberg reported.

Those steps are already considered unacceptable to Pyongyang. “The problem is not sitting down for talks,” observes David Straub, currently the Sejong-LS Fellow at Seoul’s influential Sejong Institute. “The problem is what you talk about.”

Straub, a 30-year veteran of the U.S. State Department who participated in the 6-party negotiations with North Korea, is deeply skeptical about the prospects for talks, concerned that they will inevitably lead to defacto acceptance of North Korea’s status as a nuclear power, deeply undermining the U.S. alliances with South Korea and Japan, not mention its broader non-proliferation policy toward Iran and other aspirants for nuclear weapons status. “I don’t believe any talks with North Korea that I can imagine would be of any use.”

A former senior U.S. government official with long experience with North Korea shares these concerns. “I’m concerned that, based on where we are now, the only thing worse than not having a dialogue is having a dialogue, since it would probably be about the things that the North Koreans want to talk about, and definitely not about denuclearization,” he told me. “The North Koreans are deeply dug in and determined to remain a nuclear-weapon state, at almost all costs.”

Such experienced North Korea policy hands welcome the Trump administration’s efforts to vastly tighten sanctions, particularly the flow of money through China, Russia and other venues, as part of a broader strategy of containment and deterrence. But it requires consistency and patience to carry out.

“I’m not sure this U.S. Administration has the bandwidth, the moral authority, the international respect, and the belief in U.S. international leadership necessary to effectively pursue this course,” says the former senior U.S. government official. “At the end of the day, they will either blink or go to war. And if they blink, they will lose credibility and scare the hell out of our allies. And since allies mean little to this President, I fear that is what he may do.”

The fear of war, triggered by miscalculation and misreading, fed by the rhetoric from both leaders, is widespread in Washington, and beyond, including in Tokyo. Among the allies, however, there are some differences. The South Korean government of Moon Jae-in would likely welcome any talks as it would confirm its own desire for engagement with Pyongyang. “Moon wouldn’t worry about what the conditions were,” says a close Western observer of South Korea.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has staked his own re-election campaign on a tough stance toward North Korea, would likely find any move toward talks, particularly in the short term, a problem. But Japan cannot afford to publicly take a stance different than the Trump administration.

The question at hand is whether there is any way to get around the contradictory conditions from both sides. “If this is the core issue,” says the former senior U.S. official, “then the solution is to arrange a dialogue with no pre-set agenda and with the only ground rule being that each side is free to raise any issue it wishes.”

An additional idea would be to carry out initial talks on a military to military basis, in the form of a discussion of “confidence building measures,” so-called CBMs, an instrument used for dialogue in the Cold War. These could deal with measures such as reducing military exercises on both sides, or procedures to declare tests of missiles.

According to the participant in the Swiss talks, this idea was raised with the North Koreans and elicited a positive response. On the U.S. side, this would put management of the dialogue firmly in the hands of the military, led by Secretary Mattis, working closely with McMaster and the NSC. Given the weak leadership from an understaffed State Department, this may be preferable to the Trump administration.

But this is a difficult and narrow road to talks. “The North Koreans have never been willing to let us talk to their military,” notes Straub, though a senior North Korean military leader did visit Washington in the closing days of the Clinton administration.

An intriguing route to dialogue may lie via Moscow. The senior North Korean diplomat who heads the North American division, Choe, who was the interlocutor with Amb Yun, spent extended hours last week in Moscow. Sources familiar with Russian thinking point out that the North Koreans probably find it easier to talk to them than to the Chinese, though Moscow is unlikely to act without consulting Beijing. The Russian channel may pose difficulties for Trump officials, however, due to the scrutiny of their ties to Russia these days.

There is considerable momentum in Washington policy circles in favor of talks with North Korea, most of all to avert conflict that arises out of lack of communication. Despite Trump’s tweets, the U.S. government has been pressuring non-government groups that have hosted dialogues with the North Koreans to hold off in order to maximize the prospects for official talks, a well-informed source told me.

But before these glimmers of an opening can have a chance, Pyongyang will have to desist from further provocative demonstrations of its nuclear prowess. South Korean intelligence officials predict some kind of missile test or similar action to coincide with two upcoming North Korean anniversaries, on October 10 and 18th. A U.S. aircraft carrier is being moved into position in the Sea of Japan in time for possible tests.

If the past is a guide, Kim Jong Un, with a little push from Donald Trump, will sabotage the fledgling efforts at diplomacy.

Trump's Zig-Zag China Policy Is Confusing U.S. Allies

The president has a famously limited amount of patience and a habit of changing his mind.

By Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and a Senior Fellow at Asia Policy Point

The National Interest, July 19, 2017

President Trump has proven as unpredictable on his East Asia policy as he has on a number of other policy issues during his first almost six months in office. In December, prior to his inauguration, Trump made an unprecedented decision to accept a congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen—the first such call since the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979 as a prerequisite for the establishment of Washington’s embassy in Beijing.

Then, after the April summit in Mar-a-Lago with China’s Xi Jinping, who seemed to be his best new buddy, President Trump made an about-face and told Reuters that he would want to speak with Xi first before any further telephone conversations with Tsai. “I really feel that he is doing everything in his power to help us with a big situation (North Korea),” Trump said. “So I wouldn’t want to be causing difficulty right now for him.” He added that he thought Xi was “doing an amazing job as a leader and I wouldn’t want to do anything that comes in the way of that. So I would certainly want to speak to him first.”

In response to Trump’s remarks, Taiwan’s presidential office was quoted by Newsweek as stating that it had no plans “at this stage” to hold a call, and that it understood the United States had priorities in handling regional affairs. President Tsai had previously told Reuters that Taiwan’s ties with the United States have been improving. “Taiwan may need to buy from its sole arms supplier the F-35 fighter jet, the most advanced stealth warplane in the U.S. arsenal. We have the opportunity to communicate more directly with the U.S. government,” Tsai said. “We don’t exclude the opportunity to call President Trump himself, but it depends on the needs of the situation and the U.S. government’s consideration of regional affairs.”

Concern over maintaining America’s steadfast commitment to Taiwan—as stipulated in the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) and the “Six Assurances” of President Ronald Reagan—arose afterwards, especially when Trump told the Wall Street Journal in a January 13 interview that “everything is under negotiation, including (the) ‘one China’ (policy).” The fear was that Trump might consider making concessions to Beijing at Taiwan’s expense.

In the Trumpian era of “Art of the Deal” diplomacy, there was speculation that a more favorable trade deal for China with the United States could become an enticement for soliciting Beijing’s cooperation on North Korea, as some previous tweets have suggested. An even greater fear was that the security of Taiwan, as one of Beijing’s self-declared “core interests,” could be bartered for progress on the North Korean nuclear imbroglio. This was despite the fact that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had publicly testified at his Senate confirmation hearing that “the people of Taiwan are friends of the United States and should not be treated as a bargaining chip. The U.S. commitment to Taiwan is both a legal commitment and a moral imperative.”

But, then again, not so fast. The new American president has a famously limited amount of patience. President Trump tweeted on June 20, the day after the death of Otto Warmbier, the U.S. student who was held captive in North Korea for over a year in a coma that Chinese help with North Korea “has not worked out.” (One could almost feel sorry for Xi Jinping as he was apparently given only two months after Mar-a-Lago to solve the intractable North Korean nuclear issue.) This was followed at the end of June by the announcement of a new $1.4 billion arms sales package for Taiwan and a U.S. Treasury Department announcement of sanctions on China’s Bank of Dandong for, according to CNN, serving “as a pipeline to support alleged illicit North Korean financial activity.” The policy zig back toward Taiwan definitely caused major displeasure in Beijing. The Chinese Embassy in Washington released a statement asserting that the sale of arms to Taiwan “grossly interferes” in China’s domestic affairs.

Taipei is not the only American friend in East Asia to be befuddled by the zigs and zags of U.S. policy in the Trump era. The new president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, arrived in Washington just as President Trump was again talking tough on Pyongyang in the aftermath of Otto Warmbier’s tragic death, stating U.S. patience with the North Korean regime “is over.” However, when Moon Jae-in was elected in May as an advocate of a renewed “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea, he seemed to be in sync with the latest Trump administration diplomacy. On May 1, just nine days before Moon Jae-in’s election, President Trump told Bloomberg News that he would be willing to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “under the right circumstances” and that “I would be honored to do it.”

Moon Jae-in himself then said, after taking the oath of office, “If the conditions shape up, I will go to Pyongyang.” But Moon apparently spoke too soon, during a brief Trump zig toward Pyongyang before the zag again away following North Korea’s July 4 intercontinental ballistic missile test. President Trump then tweeted a decidedly different tune declaring that it was “hard to believe South Korea and Japan will put up with this much longer.” So it seems neither Donald Trump nor Moon Jae-in will be breaking bread in Pyongyang (or sharing a bowl of rice) with Kim Jong-un any time soon.

A final issue of allied concern in the East Asia region is freedom of navigation in the South China Sea following Beijing’s arms buildup in the area on man-made islands. This has continued unabated despite a stunning rebuff to Chinese territorial claims just a year ago by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), which left Beijing’s “nine-dash line” in tatters. That July 12, 2016, ruling was a decisive victory for Manila and previous Philippine president Benigno Aquino, whose administration brought the suit to the Hague in 2013.

New Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, however, has indicated that the Hague ruling could “take a back seat” to reopened bilateral negotiations with China—which prefers, as the self-proclaimed “big country,” to pick off “small country” South China Sea territorial claimants one at a time. In conjunction with Duterte’s visit to Beijing last fall, where he received applause in the Great Hall of the People for calling for “separation” from the United States, the Philippines Defense Minister announced that plans with the United States “for joint patrols and naval exercises in the disputed South China Sea have been put on hold.”

The released transcript of an April 29 phone call between Presidents Trump and Duterte, as reported in the New York Times, records no mention at all of the South China Sea issue—Manila’s number one national-security threat as well as a major concern for its Washington treaty ally. Instead, the pair discussed Duterte’s controversial anti-drug campaign involving extrajudicial killings—Trump reportedly praised him for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem”—as well as the North Korean nuclear threat. The later point of discussion caused some confusion among area experts as America’s Philippine ally, unlike South Korea and Japan, lies hundreds of miles away from North Korea.

The South China Sea territorial question remains the key issue, however, for not only the Philippines but for other Association of Southeast Asian countries. U.S. freedom of navigation (FON) operations in these waters, which occurred with regularity under the Obama administration, did not take place during the first four months of the new Trump administration. This was possibly due to the administration’s attempts to curry favor with Beijing on the North Korean nuclear issue. Then, however, on May 24, according to a report by CNN, in an apparent policy zag back to more orthodox U.S. Navy operating procedure in the South China Sea, “the USS Dewey sailed within twelve miles of Mischief Reef, in the Spratly Island chain, on Wednesday in a ‘freedom of navigation operation.’” A complication is that Mischief Reef has been the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute between Beijing and America’s Philippine ally. Thus, if the Duterte administration decides not to press the issue with the Chinese, the United States could run the risk of appearing more Catholic than the Pope in pursuing freedom of navigation near Mischief Reef.

This first Trump administration FON was followed by another in early July when the USS Stethem sailed within twelve nautical miles of Triton Island. The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement claiming that the U.S. vessel had “trespassed” in China’s territorial waters, further noting “its behavior has violated Chinese law and relevant international law, infringed upon China’s sovereignty, disrupted peace, security and order of the relevant waters and put in jeopardy the facilities and personnel on the Chinese islands; and thus constitutes a serious political and military provocation.”

Thus, all the zigging and zagging of Trump administration East Asia policy in its first months, especially with regards to issues of concern to potential regional rival China, has caused confusion in Allied capitals and consternation in Beijing. It seems related to the rather unrealistic hope that China will provide assistance as its North Korean ally advances toward development of a nuclear delivery capability that could strike the American homeland. As the reality sets in that the Chinese cavalry is not about to ride to the rescue of Americans facing an escalating North Korean nuclear threat, a more traditional East Asian policy approach may emerge in the months ahead. One can only hope.

Japan’s constitutional rebirth or reincarnation?

By Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan. APP Member, Japan Times, May 13, 2017

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has boldly promised to revise the Constitution by 2020, to coincide with the Tokyo Summer Olympics, saying “That will be a year when a newly reborn Japan begins to move strongly forward.” However, the public doesn’t share his enthusiasm.

In terms of revising the Constitution, opposition is highest (50 percent) in the Asahi poll, followed by Nikkei’s 46 percent, Kyodo’s 37 and NHK’s 34. Support for revision ranges from 60 percent in the Kyodo poll (combining “necessary” or “somewhat necessary”) to 45 percent according to Nikkei, 43 percent from NHK (down 15 percent from 2002) and 41 percent in the Asahi. The Asahi Shimbun also reports that half oppose any revision at all under Abe.

For the war-renouncing Article 9, Asahi reports 63 percent as being opposed to revision; NHK gives 57 percent and Kyodo 47 percent. Those in favor of revising Article 9 range from 49 percent in the Kyodo poll to 29 percent in the Asahi and NHK’s 25 percent, down from 30 percent in 2002. NHK also reported that 82 percent found Article 9 very or somewhat useful for maintaining peace and security. Regarding the Self-Defense Forces, NHK found that 62 percent regard their existence as constitutional while 11 percent don’t, and 87 percent think that Japan is currently threatened, especially by North Korea and China.

Public attitudes may be discrepant, but Abe has an unprecedented opportunity to secure the two-thirds approval he needs in both houses of the Diet to set the stage for a public referendum, in which he would need only a simple majority to realize his long-standing dream.

The referendum law stipulates that a simple majority of votes cast can pass a revision, but it does not specify a minimum turnout of voters to validate a plebiscite. For example, revisions could be approved with the support of about 25 percent of eligible voters — about what the Liberal Democratic Party garners in national polls, in which turnout recently has hovered at just over half of eligible voters.

Abe hopes that this legacy project can be achieved by 2020, and with the “help” of Beijing and Pyongyang he might just pull it off. Coalition partner Komeito seems on board, but may prove difficult if Abe pushes for more on security than he is currently revealing.

Abe explained that he won’t get rid of Article 9, the provision of the Constitution that has talismanic significance for many Japanese despite successive LDP-led governments reinterpreting it over the decades to ease constitutional constraints on the SDF. These efforts culminated in the April 2015 U.S.-Japan Defense Guidelines and later that summer in Abe’s collective self-defense legislation. That sequencing says a lot about Abe’s priorities, in that he sealed the deal with Washington first in a manner that subordinated the Diet’s role.

Abe hopes to add a proviso to Article 9 that would acknowledge the constitutionality of the SDF. In his opinion, it is deplorable that some constitutional scholars have cast doubts about whether the SDF are constitutional; they cite paragraph 2, which explicitly prohibits maintaining any armed forces or war potential. Whether they recognize the SDF or not, nearly all of Japan’s constitutional scholars believe Abe’s collective self-defense (CSD) legislation is unconstitutional. During Diet deliberations about the CSD legislation, even the LDP’s handpicked constitutional scholars raised such doubts — awkward testimony that nevertheless failed to deter Abe from his mission.

But since Abe is seeking clarification about the SDF in Article 9, shouldn’t he also include specific reference to the right to CSD and the three vague principles that ostensibly constrain Japan’s military actions? These principles grant the PM considerable discretionary authority to deploy the military if he alone determines that: 1) Japan or a country closely related with Japan is under military attack, which poses a threat to Japan’s existence and puts Japanese nationals’ lives, freedom and their right to pursuit of happiness in clear danger; 2) there are no other means to overcome the above-mentioned danger so as to ensure the existence of Japan and the protection of Japanese nationals, and; 3) the military engagement is limited to the “minimum necessary use of force.”

In focusing debate on declaring the SDF constitutional, Abe is avoiding the much more contentious issue of CSD and the new powers he gained to deploy troops overseas at Washington’s behest.

I have heard non-Japanese advocates of revision suggest that retaining Article 9 keeps Japan subordinate to the U.S., and thus it is crucial to revise it so that Japan can become an autonomous sovereign nation. I have no beef with Japan revising the Constitution according to the principles laid out in Article 96 for doing so. I think it is preferable to pursue formal revision rather than surreptitiously bypass such procedures as Abe has done. But will revising Article 9 really give Japan more autonomy? It seems more like Abe is kowtowing to the U.S. in order to bolster an alliance in which Japan gets its marching orders from Washington.

The other trial balloon released by Abe was his proposal to make free higher education a constitutional right, pandering to the opposition and public opinion to offset concerns about amending Article 9. But surely Abe must have more up his sleeve than this gimmick if Japan is to be reborn in 2020.

It is significant that Abe’s May 3 announcement was delivered at a Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi) event. This ultra-conservative lobby group is extremely influential in the Diet and its members have dominated Abe’s cabinets. They want to restore the Emperor’s political power and revise Article 24 of the Constitution, which protects gender equality and other individual rights. These conservatives argue disingenuously that gender equality is undermining traditional values and is thus responsible for Japan’s current social ills. Defining family values and obligations based on their antediluvian preferences would impose conformity at odds with Japan’s growing diversity and prevailing norms and values, while trampling on many citizens’ human rights.

Looking back at the LDP’s 2012 draft constitution, I wonder if Abe will preside over Japan’s rebirth or a reincarnation of pre-1945 Japan? For example, this draft version imposes extensive obligations and duties on citizens; privileges public order over individual rights; seeks to remove the preamble based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; mandates respect for the national anthem and flag; allows the prime minister to declare a state of emergency and bypass the Diet; requires family members to help each other; and designates the Emperor as head of state.

This is what Abe means when he pledges to overturn the postwar order. The stakes are high as Japanese consider his backward-looking vision for the future.

Are Fears of Trump giving China free rein in East Asia misplaced?

APP member Daniel C. Sneider, an associate director of research for Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and an authority on US, Japan and Korea relations thinks we might be overreacting.

He outlines his views in a recent interview in the Asia Times with DOUG TSURUOKA, published February 24, 2017.

Q: On a long strategic view, can China and Japan ever get on the same page? For that to happen, does the US have to get out of the middle?

While I think rivalry fundamentally remains the driver of relations between China and Japan, framing that story only in terms of rivalry is inconormplete. The Chinese are trying to assert that they are the dominant power in the region. There’s almost a psychological element to this — to remind the Japanese that they are the inferior party and to drive wedges between Japan and the US. A Japan that’s isolated from the US is exactly what China seeks. It’s a Japan that’s more likely to bandwagon with China and it weakens the American strategic posture in the region.

The Japanese are desperate to preserve their alliance with the US. It’s the only guarantee of Japanese security. Unless the Japanese are willing to go nuclear — they can’t ever afford to give [that alliance] up, and I don’t think the Japanese are ever going to go nuclear — though they retain that latent capability.

But does that mean the China-Japan relationship means only rivalry? Of course not. These are two countries that are intertwined with each other in countless ways, not just the economic one. It’s not wholly a hostile relationship. They have a lot of overlap. So can they ever get on the same page? No. But they could be reading the same book now and again.

Q: Is it possible that China will be given the run of the region under Trump?

In Japan there is this worry, and I’ve heard it repeatedly in Tokyo, about a G2 redux — the idea that Trump will make a deal with the Chinese and that this is why he fleetingly put the One-China policy on the table. The Japanese think this because Trump is a guy who believes that he’s a great dealmaker. The fear is that he would be willing to sit down with the Chinese and that part of that deal would be a kind of let’s talk about [dividing] East Asia between us. The Japanese have this fear of abandonment. It’s deep-seated in Japanese strategic thinking.

But do I believe that the Chinese will be handed the keys to the palace? I think that if Donald Trump ever tried to do that it would probably trigger a coup d’etat in the United States, I just don’t see that.

Q: What are Trump’s options on North Korea following Pyongyang’s February 12 missile test and what is he likely to do?

I think the options regarding North Korea today are no different than they were under the Obama administration, or for that matter, the Bush administration. It’s an unpalatable set of limited options. It’s the same options that are on the table and being considered by the Trump administration.

The first is the broad engagement option — let’s go back and resume negotiations with the North Koreans with the aim of gaining some form of freeze on the missile and nuclear programs. Then there’s the let’s get the Chinese to do it option; let’s persuade the Chinese or pressure the Chinese to pressure the North Koreans to whatever end, whether it’s a freeze or something more ambitious than that. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raise the same argument to his Chinese counterpart recently, saying, ‘we would like the Chinese to put more pressure on the North Koreans.’

The other two options are the ones that make most people uncomfortable. But they are the ones to which we’re heading for lack of anything else. One is the military option. That is, responding to the possible test of a North Korean ICBM missile by either attempting to take it out on the launch pad or shoot it down through anti-missile defense systems which hopefully might work, though we don’t know that they will. Or some form of fostering regime change. I prefer the word regime “transformation.” Some way of trying to bring about internal change in North Korea that makes it more likely they’ll give up their nuclear option.

Q: What are the other options?

The last option is the one that I wish we were thinking about more, and more creatively. It could include elements of engagement, but also pressure. Sanctions, for example, have encouraged the forces of change from within North Korea by forcing them to pursue economic reforms that they’d have to do if they were really cut off from sources of capital and trade on the outside.

Q: Did Trump discuss North Korea with Abe during their summit and how aware is Trump of the North Korean nuclear issue?

I don’t know what [Abe and Trump] talked about. But I do know this — the president and people around him — if they weren’t aware that the North Korean nuclear missile program was a serious security issue when they were campaigning, they became aware of it very quickly after the election was over. I think from [Trump’s] first meeting with president Obama it was conveyed that this was going to be a problem that it would be pretty much at the top of his agenda. I believe that Trump made some reference to North Korea after that meeting — almost with surprise.

I don’t think [Trump] had thought much about the issue until then. I have the sense from conversations I’ve had that [the administration] was mainly worried that North Korea was going to force them to respond to some kind of provocation and disrupt their planning for other things regarding their foreign security policy.

Q: Is Trump mulling a policy change toward North Korea?

There was a report that [the administration] has ordered a review of North Korea policy, but I see no evidence of a review going on. When you do a review, you have a sense that it’s going on because experts on the outside are being drawn in. But to my knowledge, it hasn’t taken place.

This should be a very important element. Most importantly, it should be part of our review of our overall force posture in the Western Pacific. It relates to the problem of base issues in Japan — the still determined effort by the US with the support of the Abe government to relocate the Marine air station at Futenma to another part of Okinawa.

Q: What are the military steps, in concert with Japan and South Korea, that Trump should take to strengthen deterrence against North Korea and a Chinese military buildup in the region?

I think it’s high time that we looked at the foreign base issue in Japan in a broader context. The problem is we have an inertia about an investment we’ve made in fixed facilities that is hard to change. If you look at the base structure in Japan and South Korea, it’s pretty much unchanged since the Cold War.

The people I talk to who think about these issues have brought up whether we want to augment our naval and air forces based in Japan and Korea, [as opposed to] preserving our ground presence, even a Marine infantry presence in Okinawa. The purpose would be to make more credible our extended deterrence commitments to both Japan and South Korea.

For instance, there is the idea of adding a second carrier battle group to be home ported in the Western Pacific — that’s a big shift and we’re probably talking about Japan. We’re already increasing somewhat our nuclear-powered submarine basing in Japan, and that is an area from a deterrence point of view where we should be thinking of adding capability. [That would include] attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines.

We should think about adding an entire strike fighter wing to the air base in Misawa, Japan, which has a capacity to take an added presence. That would give us added capability against both China, North Korea and also to deal with increased activity by the Russian Air Force in that area.

This would, in some ways, compensate for a decision I would like to see to finally take most of the 3rd Marines out of Okinawa and move them to Guam. That’s a long-delayed move that needs to be accelerated. The obstacle to that reflects an inability of our services to cooperate with each other rather than any technical or even political problem on the island. We need to re-think more broadly where our force structure ought to be.

Q: Will anything of substance replace TPP?I don’t know what Trump is likely to do. Is [THAAD] something he would trade off for something else? 

I have no idea. [Secretary of Defense James] Mattis during his brief visit to Seoul reiterated the US desire to and commitment to go ahead with the THAAD deployment. The latest missile tests show the North Koreans want to demonstrate a survivable capability to deliver nuclear weapons. The logic of deploying THAAD is even stronger than it was before.

I noticed in an Abe-Trump joint statement [after the summit] that they referred to discussions, both on a bilateral basis as well as some regional framework. I gather from friends that that was language the Japanese wanted in there. This was to give the Japanese the freedom to continue to pursue a TPP without the US or a revival of the TPP with the US , or [in the context of] other regional trade structures.

The Japanese feel very strongly that TPP without the US is useless, so the big question is can you find other kinds of formulations that would be politically acceptable to Trump? The door is open for some kind of bilateral discussion. [But] I don’t see much enthusiasm in Tokyo for a full-scale, bilateral Free Trade Agreement.

Q: Can you give an example of something that might replace the TPP?

There could be a mini-lateral structure, for example, one that could include Vietnam and Japan. I hope somebody is thinking creatively about this.

Q: What stands out about the recent Trump-Abe summit?

I was frankly stunned that Abe comes to Washington and you have these people [on the US side] who had said, ‘We want to raise currency manipulation and market-access issues.’ They signaled this, including the president, and they did nothing. From what I’m told, the Japanese came prepared and were ready to talk about currency issues, for example and they were surprised that nobody [on the US side] raised it. Even on something where the Trump administration seemed to have a cogent policy view — there was no implementation.

Abe and Putin May Finally End World War II Next Week

Abe and Putin May Finally End World War II Next Week

A hot springs summit might solve the 70-year dispute over an isolated string of islands that Russian and Japanese nationalists both claim as their own.

BY DANIEL SNEIDER (APP member), NOAH SNEIDER
Foreign Policy, December 8, 2016

If all goes according to plan, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will slip into a steaming bath next week with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a hot spring in Abe’s hometown of Nagato, which faces Russia across the Sea of Japan. Abe’s goal in hosting Putin at a traditional onsen, as such hot spring baths are known, is nothing less than making history — to persuade the Russian leader to finally sign a peace treaty that would formally settle World War II. This deal has eluded Russian and Japanese leaders many times since their first failed attempt in 1956, always foundering on a dispute over a string of islands that run within miles of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido and were seized by the Red Army in the last days of that war.

For Abe, this onsen summit is both personal and strategic. He has invested an unprecedented amount of political capital and personal time building a rapport with Putin, holding more than a dozen meetings with the Russian leader since Abe took office some four years ago. His foreign and economic ministers have been shuttling back and forth to Russia to lay the groundwork for the summit, making a final visit this past weekend.

Reportedly, Abe yearns to fulfill the dream of his father, Shintaro Abe, also a leading conservative politician for more than three decades going back to the late 1950s. In the 1980s, when he was foreign minister, the elder Abe spent years forging ties with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in hopes that a peace deal would make him prime minister. His son also wants to drive a geopolitical wedge between Russia and China and assert Japan’s ability to forge its own foreign policy beyond the boundaries of the alliance with the United States.

Putin also has much at stake at the hot springs. He hopes to get Japan to break ranks with the West’s post-Crimea sanctions regime, attract a flow of Japanese investment, especially into the dilapidated Russian Far East, and, not incidentally, send a small message to Beijing that Russia has other benefactors in Asia.

Not in the bath, but bubbling beneath the surface, is a third actor in this drama: the newly elected U.S. president, Donald Trump. His seemingly benign view of Putin gives Abe much greater leeway to forge a settlement that Washington has actively blocked in the past, going back to the abortive talks in 1956. But Trump’s deal-making attitude may have a double-edged effect. If Putin has reason to believe that Western unity on Russian sanctions will soon crack on its own, he has less incentive to be conciliatory with Abe in the form of territorial concessions.

It could come down to that hot spring bath — and whether Putin and Abe enter it truly intending to strike a deal.

To understand this moment, you must first put yourself on the fog-shrouded island of Kunashir. Along with the islands of Iturup, Shikotan, and the Habomai group, this is territory claimed by both countries. For Russia, these are the “Southern Kurils,” a part of the Kuril island chain once taken by imperial Japan and “liberated” during World War II. Japan gained control of the islands in an 1855 treaty and expanded its hold in the region to include the southern half of Sakhalin as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. When World War II started, some 17,000 Japanese lived on the islands.

A red stone monument on Kunahsir pays tribute to the Red Army soldiers who fell in those final days of the war. Today, Russian border troops are stationed on the islands, which form a picket fence along one side of the Sea of Okhotsk, a bastion for Russian ballistic missile submarines. Hokkaido is visible across a narrow channel.

But for many Japanese, that channel doesn’t mark the boundary of their territory. The Russian-controlled islands, for them, are the “Northern Territories,” Japanese lands that the Soviets illegally seized. The failure to resolve this dispute has left the two countries, more than 70 years later, without a peace treaty to formally end their war.

If the islands are of great strategic significance, it was hardly evident during a visit to Kunashir in 1991 just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The dreary port town of Yuzhno-Kurilsk was then home to just 7,000 fishermen and their families, bringing crab, salmon, and other seafood from the rich waters around the islands to a run-down canning factory. Aircraft landed on a strip surfaced in corrugated metal sheets, an airport originally built under Japanese rule, and visitors traveled on packed earth roads. Visitors to this remote corner of the Russian Empire were — and remain — rare, and the islanders privately complained about Moscow’s neglect.

In those days, the islanders were mainly interested in attracting Japanese tourists and investors and spent their evenings peering eagerly into the strange world of late-night Japanese television shows with scantily clad women — then an exciting novelty amid the tedium of Soviet programming. In recent years, the Russian government has made a show of interest in the islands, sending senior leaders and announcing new investment in housing and defense facilities. But the total population has not changed much — there are reportedly some 19,000 people on all four islands, including Kunashir — and the region remains underdeveloped.

As during the perestroika era, Russians have dangled a bargain on the territorial issue in exchange for an influx of Japanese investment. The reference point for a deal is a 1956 agreement in which the Japanese government accepted the position that the return of the two smaller islands — Shikotan and the uninhabited Habomai islets — would be sufficient to conclude a peace treaty.

The last serious negotiation effort took place in 2000-2001, early in Putin’s rule. According to Kazuhiko Togo, who headed the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s negotiating team in 2000, the Japanese side pushed the idea of delayed sovereignty — suggesting that the Japanese would regain control of the two larger islands at an undetermined future point. The Russians rejected that idea, but they did put back on the table the possibility of returning to the 1956 offer of the two smaller islands. Since then, Japanese and Russians have talked about a “two plus alpha” deal, with “alpha” meaning something beyond the 1956 terms but not necessarily the entire territory. The quid pro quo always has involved Japanese investment in Russia. When Putin, a judo aficionado, returned to the presidency in 2012, after serving one term as prime minister, he famously declared that he was prepared to accept a hikiwake, a judo term for a draw — and a seeming reference to the territorial offer from the previous decade.

Abe also returned to power as prime minister in 2012, after a brief, failed stint in 2006-2007. He has a well-deserved reputation as the standard-bearer of conservative nationalists, for whom returning the islands is a potent symbol of the restoration of pride and dignity lost at the end of the war.

Abe immediately embarked on a concerted campaign to woo Putin, responding to his talk of a “draw.” In April 2013, Abe brought a large economic delegation to Moscow, and in February 2014, he was pointedly among the few world leaders to attend the Sochi Olympics and sit by Putin’s side. The efforts foundered after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine — Japan formally joined ranks with the West in imposing sanctions on Russia (though the Japanese measures were much softer than others). But Abe returned to the suitor’s role this year, heading to Sochi in May for a visit that included a closed-door meeting without aides.

For Japan, Russia in itself is no longer a direct security threat, observes Tokyo-based professor James Brown, who has closely studied the Russo-Japanese relationship. “However, a quasi-alliance between Russia and China is a strategic concern for Japan, especially if it is accompanied by a reduced U.S. commitment to East Asia,” says Brown. The goal is not to form close ties with Moscow but rather to prevent it from being drawn totally into Beijing’s aims in the region. Japanese officials have continued to insist that they will accept nothing less than the return of all the islands. But, says Togo, the former Japanese diplomat, “now there is a new strategic logic for Japan — a response to the rise of China. Abe understands this logic.” A territorial deal “will force China to take Japan more seriously,” adds Togo, who is among the most prominent advocates of a compromise.

The U.S. election opened more space for a possible deal. Abe believed that he could use the possibility of Japan making a de facto break from the Western sanctions regime as leverage for a better deal, Japanese analysts say. The election of Trump would seem to offer an even greater opportunity, with a distracting transition and an administration friendly to Putin.

But in recent weeks, at least on an official level, there has been an effort to dampen expectations. “It is widely believed in Japan that Putin simply wants to wait and see how Trump approaches Moscow after coming to office, and that’s why he lost his appetite to craft a deal with Tokyo for the time being,” says Junji Tachino, a veteran foreign-policy writer at the leading Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun. “If Trump moves to fix the relationship with Moscow, then Putin’s motivation to use Japan as a potential crack in the sanctions regime will diminish.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sounded a pessimistic note after the final pre-summit talks with his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, in Moscow on Saturday. “It’s not easy to bridge the gap in the principal positions of both sides,” Lavrov said. By the time Kishida had returned home, even Abe’s optimism seemed deflated. “This is not an issue that can be resolved in just one meeting,” Abe told Japanese officials on Monday.

In the run-up to the summit, Russia made its inflexible stance on the territorial issue clear. At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin told Bloomberg that Russia does not “trade territories.” In late November, Russian armed forces moved anti-ship missiles onto the Kurils, a demonstrative step that drew rebukes from Tokyo. In Moscow, the scales are weighted heavily against compromise: For the Russian elite, “there’s not a clear answer to why Russia needs Japan,” says Alexander Panov, a former Russian ambassador to Japan, who notes that Putin is personally more inclined toward a deal than his advisors.

Russian analysts say the only possible formula lies in the 1956 agreements. But even if Abe were to concede to accepting the two smaller islands (a step few Russians expect), Russia still may not budge. “The biggest intrigue is what Russia would do if Japan agrees to the ’56 conditions,” says Dmitry Streltsov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. “It would be a moment of truth.”

Even if a deal can be struck, it may be hard to sell to the Russian public.Even if a deal can be struck, it may be hard to sell to the Russian public. The islands have symbolic weight as part of the country’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War” (as Russia calls World War II), a sacred pillar of national identity that is central to Putin’s ideology. Hard-liners argue that the islands’ rich fishing grounds are too economically valuable to give up and that handing over any of the territory would threaten the Sea of Okhotsk’s use as a staging ground for Russian nuclear submarines. Plus, argues Anatoly Koshkin of Moscow’s Oriental University, a hawkish opponent of compromise: “No one can promise that American military infrastructure won’t appear on the islands.”

The optics also present a significant obstacle for Putin. Despite viewing Japan positively, an overwhelming 78 percent of Russians are against giving the islands to Japan, while only 7 percent favor doing so, according to a May survey by the Levada Center, an independent pollster. Seventy-one percent was also against a compromise deal involving the transfer of the two smaller islands. A concentrated propaganda campaign on state television could help shift views, notes Streltsov. But even then, it would be a tough sell for a leader who has staked his authority on being the protector of the Russian people. “Especially after Crimea, Putin has an image as the collector of Russian lands,” says Koshkin.

Putin may have been more willing to take that risk when he met Abe in Sochi in May and faced a stagnating economy, a surprisingly resilient sanctions regime, and the prospect of a hostile Hillary Clinton administration. But seven months later, he is looking less like the pariah of world affairs and more like the vanguard of ascendant populist and nationalist movements across the globe.

France’s presidential elections next year will feature a roster of Moscow-friendly candidates open to lifting sanctions. Trump’s praise for Putin, while no guarantee of better relations once he takes office, at the very least offers Moscow a tantalizing opportunity. Now Abe is the one worrying about his relationship with Washington, as evidenced by his recent short-notice visit to the president-elect’s gilded tower in New York.

Abe will face his own nationalist backlash if he concedes too much to Putin. “Accepting a deal that could have been had in 1956 would be tantamount to recognizing that the last 60 years of efforts had been entirely meaningless,” says Brown, the Tokyo-based professor. “A Japanese leader adopting this brave stance would be ravaged by the right-wing and much of the press.”

Even without an immediate breakthrough on the island dispute, both sides will be keen to demonstrate progress. Turning the tide on trade — down 30 percent in dollar terms in 2015 after the oil price collapse and another 28 percent through September of this year — is the obvious place to start. Panov, the former ambassador, expects some 10 deals to be signed at the summit. Japan has already made a string of early overtures, with the state-run Japan Bank for International Cooperation announcing a planned $211 million loan to a major liquefied natural gas project in the northern Yamal region led by Russia’s Novatek. Two major Japanese banks are also reportedly discussing an $845 million loan package with Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom, and the prospect of a pipeline project from Russia’s Sakhalin to Tokyo has resurfaced. “Both sides used to talk about [the islands] because there was no other agenda,” says Igor Dyachenko, the executive director of the Russian-Japanese Business Council. “Now business is forming a positive agenda.”

With both Putin and Abe eyeing terms that could extend well past 2020, there is plenty of time for a slow courtship. Abe hopes his gestures, and his yen, will eventually earn Putin’s trust. He has taken care to craft his economic proposals to address Russian needs beyond traditional energy interests, including health care, urban development, industrial production, and technology. Dyachenko touts a pilot project for improving city planning and housing will launch next year in Voronezh, some 290 miles south of Moscow. Putin will certainly not turn away the investment or the geopolitical returns. “Putin is in no rush,” says Alexander Gabuev, the chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Russia in the Asia-Pacific program. “He thinks he can use the Japanese fear of China.” The onsen may prove to be merely a prelude. Perhaps next year Putin will summon Abe for a summit in the banya.

Japan's path to the terrors of the past

The pretext of counterterrorism covers many sins
By Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies, Temple University Japan and APP member

The Japan Times, Mar 19, 2016

The Japanese government’s track record on respecting civil liberties and the rule of law is suspect, as I detailed in last week’s Counterpoint.

In 2002, the former Defense Agency, which is now a full-fledged ministry, spied on people who filed information disclosure requests, while the police and courts railroaded antiwar protesters on dubious charges of trespassing after they passed out flyers encouraging members of the Self-Defense Forces to oppose deployment in Iraq as war raged there in 2004.

These weren’t the only cases. A Buddhist priest was also apprehended while passing out antiwar flyers (imagine that, a peace-loving monk!), and the police kept a tail on one civil servant so they could catch him distributing copies of the Communist Party newspaper — arresting him even though it was on his day off. Don’t the cops have anything better to do than harass ordinary citizens exercising their constitutional rights? Is this how they pretend to keep the nation safe from terrorists?

In any society governed by the rule of law, it is essential to protect civil liberties by applying reasonable limits to police surveillance powers. In battling terrorism, such limits are portrayed by critics as handcuffing the police and other security agencies and thus endangering public safety. Unlike despotic societies defined by tyranny and the denial of human rights, however, democracies depend on ensuring that civil liberties are not trampled and human rights are respected. Debating the balance between an individual’s privacy and the state’s desire to pry strengthens a democracy and the rule of law — but this is a project that is never fully realized and depends on constant vigilance and an ongoing commitment.

As Japan wades ever further into the “war on terror,” it is important to ask what protections should be accorded to ethnic and religious minorities. It is evident that the police have zeroed in on Japan’s tiny Muslim community, seeing it as a potential hotbed of terrorism. But can this profiling of an entire community based on religious belief be justified? Is it not a violation of fundamental rights such as freedom of religion and privacy? Are such discriminatory practices consistent with democratic norms?

The it-can’t-be-helped school of thought asserts that terrorists don’t abide by any rules, so democratic societies are vulnerable and therefore sometimes need to curtail civil liberties and discriminate for the greater good.

Germany, however, has found that such blunt instruments are ineffective. According to a report by the U.N. Human Rights Commission, a German profiling program known as Rasterfahndung gathered information on 32,000 Muslim residents in Germany, but failed to identify any suspected terrorists.

There are an estimated 100,000 Muslims in Japan and it has been reported that the government has compiled dossiers on 70,000 of them. It has so far failed to identify a single terrorist, but has succeeded in indiscriminately invading privacy. The courts have sided with the police, affirming their right to conduct surveillance based on profiling alone without an iota of evidence suggesting criminal activities or terrorist inclinations.

Back in 2010 there was a leak of documents from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department that revealed just how intrusive this surveillance is, prompting a lawsuit that accused the police of violating constitutional rights to privacy and religion, and protections against discrimination. In 2014 the court awarded token damages for the leak of personal information, but dismissed the constitutional claims and held that the police surveillance was necessary and inevitable. This means it is open season for the police to collect personal information and conduct surveillance of designated groups of people based on ethnicity or religion, absent any concrete evidence justifying intrusions of their privacy and human rights.

So, with judicial backing, the police can take the picture of everyone who enters a mosque in Japan and intercept the communications of any resident solely based on the individual’s faith. As Japan boosts tourism in the run-up to the 2020 Olympics it is attracting many Muslim tourists, but are they all being tracked as potential terrorists? Can customers of halal restaurants expect special scrutiny? That’s a sinister twist on the welcoming spirit of omotenashi.

You only need to look at South Korea for an example of a nation struggling to prevent the wholesale expansion of police powers under the pretext of cracking down on terrorism. President Park Geun-hye’s ruling Saenuri Party is pushing through an antiterrorism bill that would give her country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) sweeping new powers that are “justified” by the “security emergency” associated with North Korea’s recent nuclear test — despite a lack of concrete evidence that shows Pyongyang is preparing terrorist attacks on South Korea.

There are concerns that the law would primarily serve to repress internal dissent in line with Park’s efforts to tame the press and intimidate critics, including educators. Opposition parties tried to block the new law by mounting a record-breaking filibuster because there is no pressing need to expand the extensive snooping powers the NIS — an organization indelibly associated with terrible excesses under a succession of authoritarian governments — already enjoys.

Moreover, the NIS has been implicated in a dirty tricks campaign that helped Park win elections in 2012 by a slim margin, and oversight mechanisms remain feeble. One can understand why security agencies seek indiscriminate authority to collect intelligence, tap wires, conduct investigations, track financial transactions, delete online posts and impose travel bans — that is the nature of the beast. But giving them a blank check is perilous to civil liberties and constitutional rights. Rather than unleashing the NIS, it needs to be reformed and subject to more extensive monitoring to prevent abuses. As Japan ratchets up its counterterrorism capabilities, the NIS provides a worrying example.

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi has gained notoriety for her comments warning that the government could suspend broadcasting rights if programs are deemed “politically biased. “Problematically, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s idea of bias seems to be defined as criticism of its policies — an essential element of democratic societies. So it’s not enough that media firms have ousted several newscasters critical of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s policies, or that they have hired relatives of Abe (a nephew at Fuji TV) and Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso (a nephew at TBS), now they are being warned that in the coming battle over revising the Constitution, the government is taking off the gloves.

These developments are having a chilling effect on freedom of the press and expression in Japan, and raise real concerns about expanding police powers under the guise of counterterrorism. Attempts to muzzle the media while subverting the public’s right to know through the new state secrets law imperils democratic freedoms and highlights the need to strike a virtuous balance between ramped-up counterterrorism, civil liberties and accountability.