Hope on the Korean Peninsula

War appears to be our only future, unless the United States can somehow be knocked off its hegemonic throne without blowing the planet to kingdom come.

A hopeful development in this regard has been the tentative movement toward rapprochement  between the governments of the two Koreas. Choe Sang-Hun writes in "Kim Jong-un Invites South Korean Leader to North for Summit Meeting":

North and South Korea marched under one flag at the Olympics’ opening ceremony. Some South Koreans hope it is a symbol of a peaceful unification. Others fear it is an omen of larger political ambitions of the North.

Mr. Pence, by contrast, avoided speaking with North Korean officials on Friday, and he and his wife did not stand, as most spectators did, when the athletes from both Koreas marched together under a flag representing a unified Korea. Earlier Friday, Mr. Pence met with defectors from the North and invited them to tell their stories of repression under Pyongyang.

Mr. Moon would like to bring both North Korea and the United States to the negotiating table. China has suggested that talks could start if the United States suspended its regular joint military exercises with South Korea, and if North Korea reciprocated by shelving nuclear and missile tests.

But both sides have held their ground. North Korea has said that its nuclear weapons are not for bargaining away. In a speech that Mr. Kim gave on New Year’s Day, in which he first raised the possibility of the North participating in the Olympics, he vowed to “mass-produce” nuclear weapons and missiles.

Mr. Pence reiterated on Friday that the North must “put denuclearization on the table and take concrete steps with the world community to dismantle, permanently and irreversibly, their nuclear and ballistic missile programs.”

“Then, and only then, will the world community consider negotiating and making changes in the sanctions regime that’s placed on them today,” Mr. Pence said after a meeting with Mr. Moon.

“Kim Jong-un has no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons,” said Cheon Seong-whun, a former presidential secretary for security strategy and now a visiting research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “With his summit proposal, he seeks to incite friction between Seoul and Washington by widening their policy gap.”

Mr. Moon cannot rush for a summit meeting given Washington’s deep misgivings and because “South Koreans are not as enthused about another summit meeting with North Korea as they used to,” Mr. Cheon added.

A senior analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, Cheong Seong-chang, agreed that Mr. Kim’s latest overtures were aimed at easing its isolation and the impact of sanctions. But South Korea also needed to ease tensions, especially given Mr. Trump’s threat to take a military option, he said.

“It will not be wise for President Moon to reject dialogue with the North and do nothing but stick to sanctions for the sake of the alliance with the United States,” Mr. Cheong said. “South Korea will suffer the most if miscalculation or hostility drives the North and the United States into an armed clash.”

The main political opposition, the conservative Liberty Korea Party, warned that Mr. Moon was duped by the North’s “false peace offensives.” But Mr. Moon’s governing Democratic Party heartily welcomed the prospect of an inter-Korean summit meeting.

A party spokeswoman, Kim Hyo-eun, went so far as to call for the reopening of a joint factory park in the North Korean town of Kaesong. Mr. Moon’s conservative and impeached predecessor, President Park Geun-hye, shut down the park two years ago. Washington says that the reopening of the park would violate sanctions — a concern Mr. Moon shared.

The United States has also opposed suspending its joint military exercises with the South, though it agreed to delay drills scheduled for February until the Olympics are over. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, asked Mr. Moon on Friday to hold the exercises soon after the Games end, but Mr. Moon told Mr. Abe not to meddle in South Korea’s “sovereignty and internal affairs,” South Korean officials said.

On Saturday, members of the small progressive Minjung Party held a rally near an Olympic site, condemning Mr. Pence and Mr. Abe for committing “diplomatic discourtesy” and “ruining South Korea’s party.”

It's not been a good games so far for the United States and Japan. NBC shit-canned an analyst after he praised Japan, saying “Every Korean will tell you that Japan is a cultural and technical and economic example that has been so important to their own transformation.”

I guess the analyst doesn't read newspapers.

U.S. policy on North Korea is geared toward conflict. The two options boil down to harsh sanctions and first strike, as Ben Norton of FAIR reports in "Vox’s US Government-Linked Experts Present Options for Korea: Sanctions or War."

These two options don't offer much to the Korean people. So expect Moon to keep moving toward peace. The U.S. no doubt would love the conservatives to return to power. But that's not going to happen in the near future, particularly now that Samsung scion Jay H. Lee got a get-out-of-jail prematurely card. It was a corruption scandal involving Park Geun-hye and Samsung that allowed Moon to enter the Blue House on a wave of people power. Elections do matter.

Japan's Re-Militarization: Obama to Make Comfort Women of Us All

At work I have a little cubicle. I wish I were there more often. The way my position has developed I backup or assist, or so it seems, just about everyone in an office of approximately 20 people. So I am constantly, depending on who is out sick or on vacation -- really, even if everyone shows up to work -- bouncing from one desk to another. It is stressful. Arriving at someone else's desk you have to determine where everything is and then what work needs to be expedited; you have to be familiar with another person's process.

At this job, and at the job, where I worked as a dispatcher, at the union local prior to this one, I likened myself to a "comfort woman." The union members would come in to "fire off their guns" and I would absorb the salvos.

So I always felt some sort of solidarity with the old Korean women trying to hold Japan accountable for its Imperial past. During World War Two Japan established a brothel system of sexual slavery in territory it had conquered. As Japan, under prime minister Shinzo Abe, moves to shed itself of its pacifist constitution, Abe has been reluctant to express contrition to the comfort women.

This week Abe has come to the United States on a state visit, the first by a Japanese leader in nine years, in order to confer with the White House on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and the re-militarization of Japanese society as part of Obama's "pivot to Asia."

Last night there was a state dinner. Some organizations had been demanding that Abe acknowledge the comfort women and apologize to them. According to the account in this morning's paper by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, "No Deal, but Progress on Trans-Pacific Trade, Obama and Shinzo Abe Say After Meeting," Abe sidestepped the issue:

If Mr. Abe’s visit carried powerful historic significance and the promise of closer ties with the United States, it was also plagued by longstanding controversy. Korean-Americans and several members of Congress pressed him to use the occasion to make an official apology for the use of so-called comfort women in wartime military brothels. 

Mr. Abe did not offer one.

“I am deeply pained to think about the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering as a result of victimization due to human trafficking,” Mr. Abe said in response to a question about whether he would apologize. “This is a feeling that I share equally with my predecessors.” 

He said he stood behind previous government apologies for the issue, and noted that Japan had provided $12 million last year for international efforts to eliminate sexual violence during conflicts and would provide $22 million more this year. 

That fell far short of the personal apology activists have sought. 

In a statement, Korean American Civic Empowerment, a nonprofit group, called Mr. Abe’s words “gravely offensive to the victims of the Japanese comfort women system.” 

The group called the previous apologies to which Mr. Abe referred “not clear” and “not acceptable to the victims,” and said it was enraged by the prime minister’s mention of how much money he has devoted to the issue. 

“The comfort women survivors are only asking sincere acknowledgment and apology, not money,” the statement said.

What is important to note, and what is not part of the reporting in the mainstream press about Abe's scrapping Japan's pacifism, is that it is being done at the behest of the United States. How else to interpret Monday's story by Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Gordon, "Japan and U.S. Set New Rules for Military Cooperation"?

On the eve of a formal state visit by Mr. Abe to the White House, American and Japanese officials announced an agreement on Monday that would expand the reach of Japan’s military — now limited to its own defense — allowing it to act when the United States or countries American forces are defending are threatened. 

The agreement reflects worries about North Korea and, especially, China, whose territorial claims in the South China Sea and growing military spending have upset its neighbors. 

“With China’s growing assertiveness and North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Japan, like a lot of allies, wants to be there for us so we’ll be there for them,” said Michael J. Green, the senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It allows the U.S. military to plan Japan in, so that when we turn to them and say, ‘Can you deal with our left flank?,’ the Japanese, in principle, now can do that.”

***

The military agreement announced on Monday replaces guidelines geared exclusively toward the defense of Japan with new rules that eliminate any geographic restriction. 

Now Japanese forces also could aid American ships involved in missile-defense activities in the region, or Japan could intercept a missile heading for the United States. “That is a very big change from being locally focused to being globally focused,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said at a joint news conference in New York with Secretary of State John Kerry and their Japanese counterparts. 

Sheila A. Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations called the deal a “very significant transformation” between the United States and Japan. “It’s about deterrence and de-escalation, to guard against the risk that something small could quickly become a major armed conflict.”

As Ukraine readies itself for another failed offensive against Novorossiya, it is important to remember that the New Cold War encompasses not just Russia by the Chinese Dragon as well. Just as the U.S. is fanning the flames of neo-Nazism in Ukraine, it is relaunching Japanese militarism -- all under the watch of the Nobel Peace Prize winning POTUS. Surely, for those of us who thought for a moment that Obama might actually be a candidate of "Hope and Change," he has made comfort women of us all.