On Tuesday evening, hours after the Dow Jones stock index had closed — falling several hundred points for the second day straight in response to the U.S. imposing high tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China — Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress and declared a new “golden age of America.” In two days, global stock markets have shed trillions of dollars in value, far more than the U.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On 26 August the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) monitoring site NKNews.org reported a Russian government Tupolev Tu-154 VIP passenger jet taking off from Vladivostok airport shortly after 07:00 and landing in Pyongyang two hours later. The aircraft was the second flight of this type in August – carrying what was reported as a […]
The post Putin ‘Horse Trades’ With Kim Jong-Un for Weapons appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
South Korea’s Defense Acquisition and Program Administration (DAPA) has launched development of the next generation long-range surface-to-air missile (L-SAM) system called the L-SAM II. DAPA said in a 15 January statement that a ₩567.7 billion (US$389.8 million) investment will be earmarked for the L-SAM II development through 2028, and will also involve the state-run Agency […]
The post South Korea launches L-SAM II development appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
COMMENTARY: By Maire Leadbeater
Aotearoa New Zealand’s coalition government has introduced a bill to criminalise “improper conduct for or on behalf of a foreign power” or foreign interference that echoes earlier Cold War times, and could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”.
It is a threat to our democracy and here is why.
Two new offences are:
Offence 78AAA — a person thus charged must include all three of the following key elements — they:
Offence 78AAB – a person thus charged must commit:
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
New Zealand’s “interests” include its democratic processes, its economy, rights provisions, as well as its defence and security. A “Foreign Power” ranges from a foreign government to an association supporting a political party; “relevant benefit to a foreign power” includes advancing “the coercive influence of a foreign power over persons in or outside New Zealand”.
The bill also extends laws on publication of classified information, changes “official” information to “relevant” information, increases powers of unwarranted searches by authorities, and allows charging of people outside of New Zealand who “owe allegiance to the Sovereign in right of New Zealand” and aid and abet a non-New Zealander to carry out a “relevant act” of espionage, treason and inciting to mutiny even if the act is not in fact carried out.
Why this legislation is dangerous
1. Much of the language is vague and the terms subjective. How should we establish what an individual ‘ought to have known’ or whether he or she is being “reckless”? It is entirely possible to be a loyal New Zealand and hold a different view to that of the government of the day about “New Zealand’s interests” and “security”.
How should we distinguish “foreign interference” from the multitude of ways in which other states seek to influence our trade, aid, foreign affairs and defence policies? It is not plausible that the motivation behind this legislation is to limit Western pressure on New Zealand to water down its nuclear free policy.
Or to ensure that its defence forces are interoperable with those of its allies and to be part of military exercises in the South China Sea. Or to host spyware tools on behalf of the United States. Or to sign trade agreements that favour US based corporates.
The government openly supports these activities, so it seems that the legislation is aimed at foreign interference from current geostrategic “enemies”. Which ones? China, Russia, Iran?
The introduction of a bill to criminalise foreign interference has echoes of earlier Cold War times as it has the potential to criminalise members of friendship organisations that seek to improve understanding and cooperation with people in countries such as China, Russia or North Korea.
It is entirely possible that their efforts could be seen as engaging in conduct “for or on behalf of” a foreign power.
There is also real concern is that this legislation could capture critics of New Zealand’s foreign and defence policy, especially if they liaise with a “foreign country”. There is a global movement of resistance to economic sanctions on Cuba and other countries including Venezuela, and North Korea.
Supporters are likely to liaise with representatives of those countries, and perhaps circulate their material. Could that be considered harming New Zealand’s interests? The inclusion of such vague wording (Clause 78AAB) as “enhancing the influence” of a foreign power is chilling in its potential to silence open debate, and especially dissent or protest.
The legislation is unnecessary
Existing law already criminalises espionage which intentionally prejudices the security or defence of New Zealand. There are also laws to cover pressurising others by blackmail, corruption, and threats of violence or threats of harm to people and property.
It is true that diaspora critics of authoritarian regimes come under pressure from their home governments. Such governments seek to silence their critics who are outside their jurisdiction by threatening harm to their families still living in the home country.
But it is not clear how New Zealand law could prevent this as it cannot protect people who are not within its jurisdiction. This is something which diaspora citizens and overseas students studying here must be acutely conscious of. This issue is one for diplomacy and negotiation rather than law.
A threat to democracy
The terms sedition and subversion have gone into disuse and are no longer part of our law.
They were used in the past to criminalise some and ensure that others were subject to intrusive surveillance.
In essence both terms justified State actions against dissidents or those who held an alternative vision of how society should be ordered. In Cold War times the State was particularly exercised with those who championed communist ideas, took an interest in the Soviet Union or China or associated with Communists.
Those who associated with Soviet diplomats or attended functions at the Soviet Embassy would often be subject to SIS surveillance.
Maire Leadbeater is a leading activist and author of the recently published book The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article is based on a submission against the bill and was first published in The Daily Blog.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Since his Dec. 3 attempt to impose martial law, mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people involving the most important labor unions and popular organizations from around the country came out in the streets of Seoul demanding that South Korean President Yoon Seok-Yeol be deposed.
After a popular rebellion repulsed Yoon’s Dec. 3 coup attempt, the National Assembly reversed the call for martial law, and Yoon was forced to retreat – but refused to step down. Following continuous popular demonstrations, the National Assembly finally voted on Dec. 14 with more than the needed two-thirds majority to impeach Yoon.
The post South Korea’s Problem: The United States appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
As South Korea’s political crisis continues following President Yoon’s failed attempt to declare martial law on December 3, new details are emerging in the country’s legislature that suggest the full scope of Yoon’s coup plot may have included plans to trigger a “limited war” with North Korea. Planning documents circulated among accomplices prior to the martial law order also demonstrate that Yoon and former Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun looked to past martial law orders as precedents, including those issued prior to the Gwangju Massacre and the Jeju Massacre.
The post Was South Korea’s Coup An Attempt To Restart The Korean War? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
A bid to impeach South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol over his short-lived imposition of martial law failed Saturday after lawmakers from his conservative party left the National Assembly chamber and refused to take part in the vote. Supporters of impeachment needed at least eight members of Yoon’s People Power Party (PPP) to support removing the president, who apologized to the nation in a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Friday 29 November 2024 in a ceremony held at the Agency for Défense Development in Daejeon The Republic of Korea (RoK) Ministry of Defence announced the successful completion of the ten-year domestic development program of the Long-Range Surface-to-Air Missile (L-SAM). L-SAM fielding will fill a critical need in the country’s layered air defence coverage. […]
The post South Korea Announces L-SAM Development Complete appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
The Republic of Korea Navy (RoKN) is set to receive the first of three new 8,200-ton Aegis guided missile destroyers ordered under the Gwanggaeto III Batch II programme (or KDX III Batch II) in late November, the Yonhap News Agency reported. The impending addition of the future ROKS Jeongjo Daewang (Jeongjo the Great) to the […]
The post South Korea readies first KDX III Batch II Aegis destroyer for delivery appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
Swedish defence prime Saab announced on 2 October that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) to address South Korea’s ongoing Airborne Early Warning & Control II (AEW&C II) programme as well as future domestic opportunities. The MoU, which was signed at the Korea Army International Defense Industry Exhibition […]
The post Saab teams up with KAI for South Korean AEW&C II programme appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
politicians can’t stop talking about Kim Jong Un. The two major party conventions have come and gone, with both presidential candidates mentioning the North Korean leader by name. At the Republican National Convention (RNC), Donald Trump claimed Kim had endorsed him, adding, “He misses me.” Just weeks later at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Kamala Harris alluded to her opponent’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.
This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.
For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.
Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.
Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.
How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?
The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.
Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.
Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).
No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.
The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.
The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.
How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?
Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.
For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.
Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.
While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.
Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.
Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.
Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:
Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.
This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.
For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.
Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.
Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.
How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?
The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.
Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.
Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).
No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.
The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.
The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.
How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?
Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.
For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.
Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.
While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.
Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.
Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.
Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:
Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A Dutch frigate operating in the East China Sea in support of a multinational coalition enforcing United Nations sanctions on North Korea – the Pacific Security Maritime Exchange (PSMX) – was allegedly harassed by Chinese military aircraft, the Dutch Ministry of Defence (MoD) said in a 7 June announcement. According the MoD, the two Chinese […]
The post Netherlands accuses China of unsafe conduct towards frigate appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
Japan and the United States signed an agreement on 15 May to jointly develop the Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI), a next-generation missile defence system capable of defeating hypersonic missiles that are deployed by China and Russia and being developed by North Korea. The GPI Cooperative Development Project Arrangement was initially agreed between Japan’s Prime Minister […]
The post Japan and US commit to hypersonic weapon co-development appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 26, 2024. Photo: Xinhua
A foreboding article was published on April 24. It was pointed out that China had provided a berth to a Russian ship Angara that is purportedly “tied to North Korea-Russia arms transfers.”
Reuters cited Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) – that boasts of itself to be “the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank” – which claims Angara, since August 2023, has transported “thousands of containers believed to contain North Korean munitions,” [italics added] to Russian ports.
Container ships transport containers, and along the way they dock in certain harbors. Until satellite photos have X-ray capability any speculation about what is inside a container will be just that: speculation. Discerning readers will readily pick up on this.
Despite China repeatedly coming out in favor of peace, Reuters, nonetheless, plays up US concerns over perceived support by Beijing for “Moscow’s war” (what Moscow calls a “special military operation”) in Ukraine.
And right on cue, US secretary-of-state Antony Blinken shows up in Beijing echoing a list of US concerns vis-à-vis China.
Blinken had public words for China: “In my meetings with NATO Allies earlier this month and with our G7 partners just last week, I heard that same message: fueling Russia’s defense industrial base not only threatens Ukrainian security; it threatens European security. Beijing cannot achieve better relations with Europe while supporting the greatest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. As we’ve told China for some time, ensuring transatlantic security is a core US interest. In our discussions today, I made clear that if China does not address this problem, we will.”
It would seem clear that the Taiwan Straits is a core China interest, no? Or is it only US core interests that matter?
Blinken: “I also expressed our concern about the PRC’s unfair trade practices and the potential consequences of industrial overcapacity to global and US markets, especially in a number of key industries that will drive the 21st century economy, like solar panels, electric vehicles, and the batteries that power them. China alone is producing more than 100 percent of global demand for these products, flooding markets, undermining competition, putting at risk livelihoods and businesses around the world.”
It sounds like sour grapes from the US that China’s R&D and manufacturing is out-competing the US. Take, for example, that the US sanctions Huawei while China allows Apple to sell its products unhindered in China. China has hit back at the rhetoric of “overcapacity.”
Blinken complained of “PRC’s dangerous actions in the South China Sea, including against routine Philippine maintenance operations and maritime operations near the Second Thomas Shoal. Freedom of navigation and commerce in these waterways is not only critical to the Philippines, but to the US and to every other nation in the Indo-Pacific and indeed around the world.”
Mentioning freedom of navigation implies that China is preventing such. Why is freedom of navigation in the South China Sea critical to the US? Second Thomas Shoal is a colonial designation otherwise known as Renai Jiao in China. The “routine Philippine maintenance operations and maritime operations” that Blinken speaks of are for a navy landing craft that was intentionally grounded by the Philippines in 1999. Since then, the Philippines has been intermittently resupplying its soldiers stationed there.
Blinken: “I reaffirmed the US’s ‘one China’ policy and stressed the critical importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
How does the US stationing US soldiers on the Chinese territory of Taiwan without approval from Beijing reaffirm the US’s commitment to a one-China policy? The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 states “the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position.”
Blinken: “I also raised concerns about the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy and democratic institutions as well as transnational repression, ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, and a number of individual human rights cases.”
Evidence of human rights abuses in Xinjiang? This is a definitive downplay from the previous allegations of a genocide against Uyghurs. It would be embarrassing to continue to accuse China of a genocide in Xinjiang due to a paucity of bodies which is a sine qua non for such a serious allegation as a genocide; meanwhile the US-armed Israel is blowing up hospitals and schools with ten-of-thousands of confirmed Palestinian civilian bodies. Even if there are human rights abuses in Xinjiang (which should be deplored were there condemnatory evidence), the US would still be morally assailable for its selective outrage.
Blinken: “I encouraged China to use its influence to discourage Iran and its proxies from expanding the conflict in the Middle East, and to press Pyongyang to end its dangerous behavior and engage in dialogue.”
Is the US militarily backing a genocide of Palestinians a “conflict.” Are US military maneuvers in the waters near North Korea “safe behavior”?
Blinken responded to a question: “But now it is absolutely critical that the support that [China’s] providing – not in terms of weapons but components for the defense industrial base – again, things like machine tools, microelectronics, where it is overwhelmingly the number-one supplier to Russia. That’s having a material effect in Ukraine and against Ukraine, but it’s also having a material effect in creating a growing [sic] that Russia poses to countries in Europe and something that has captured their attention in a very intense way.”
Are the ATACMS, Javelins, HIMARS, Leopard tanks, drones, artillery, Patriot missile defense, etc supposed to be absolutely uncritical and have no material effect on the fighting in Ukraine? And who is posing a threat to who? European countries are funding and arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia not vice versa? It sounds perversely Orwellian.
*****
From Biden to Harris to Yellen to Raimondo to Sullivan to Blinken, US officials again and again try to browbeat and put down their Chinese colleagues.
At the opening meeting on 18 March 2021 of the US-China talks in Anchorage, Alaska, the arrogance of Blinken and the US was put on notice by the rebuke of Chinese foreign affairs official Yang Jiechi: “[T]he US does not have the qualification to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” It doesn’t seem to have sunk in for the American side.
The Russia-China relationship is solid. China’s economy is growing strongly. Scores of countries are clamoring to join BRICS+ and dedollarization is well underway. Yet, the US continues to try to bully the world’s largest – and still rapidly growing – economy. This strategy appears to affirm the commonly referred to aphorism about the definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
The post Is US Officialdom Insane? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By Eleisha Foon, RNZ Pacific senior journalist
Pacific nations and smaller states are being urged to unite to avoid being caught in the crossfire of a possible nuclear conflict between China and the US.
On the cusp of a new missile age in the Indo-Pacific, a nuclear policy specialist suggests countries at the centre of the brewing geopolitical storm must rely on diplomacy to hold the superpowers accountable.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Ankit Panda said it was crucial smaller states and Pacific nations concerned about potential nuclear conflict “engage in meaningful risk reduction, arms control and broader diplomacy to reduce the possibility of war.”
“States [which] are not formally aligned with the United States or China were more powerful united,” and this “may create greater incentives for China and the United States to engage in these talks,” the think tank’s nuclear policy program Stanton senior fellow said.
North Korea and the United States have been increasing their inventories of short- to intermediate-range missile systems, he said.
“The stakes are potentially nuclear conflict between two major superpowers with existential consequences for humanity at large.”
The US military’s newest long-range hypersonic missile system, called the ‘Dark Eagle’, could soon be deployed to Guam, he said.
Caught in crossfire
A report issued by the Congressional Budget Office last year suggested the missile could potentially reach Taiwan, parts of mainland China, and the North Korean capital of Pyongyang if deployed to Guam, he said.
“Asia and Pacific countries need to put this on the agenda in the way that many European states that were caught in the crossfire between the United States and the Soviet Union were willing to do during the Cold War,” Panda said.
In 2022, North Korea confirmed it had test-launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of reaching Guam.
Guam is a US Pacific territory with a population of at least 170,000 people and home to US military bases.
Guam’s unique position
Panda said it could be argued that Guam’s unique position and military use by the US as a nuclear weapons base makes it even more of a target to North Korea.
He said North Korea will likely intensify its run of missile tests ahead of America’s presidential election in November.
“If [President] Biden is re-elected, they will continue to engage with China in good faith on arms control.
“But if [Donald] Trump gets elected then we can expect the opposite. We’ll see an increase in militarism and a race-to-arms conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
South Korea’s general election will be held on April 10, as candidates compete for the 300 seats in the country’s unicameral National Assembly. The latest polls show a neck-and-neck race between President Yoon Suk-yeol’s right-wing ruling People Power Party (PPP) and the main opposition “liberal” Democratic Party which currently holds a majority. This election will serve as a referendum on Yoon’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
President Biden used the bully pulpit of the annual State of the Union Address to describe a world that significantly differed from the picture presented just a month earlier in the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community.
Information fed to the general public is deliberately spun to sell the imperial project. In contrast, intelligence assessments for elite policy makers are designed to sustain the endeavor. That the president’s pronouncements diverge from the conclusions reached by his own intelligence community highlights the chasm between what is foisted on the public compared to what is understood within the bowels of the state.
Unlike Biden’s bullish and bellicose pronouncements about “our leadership in the world,” the Assessment’s view was less triumphal. It states: “The United States faces an increasingly fragile global order.”
The fraying US-imposed “rules based order” and its discredited neoliberal economic system are more and more being challenged by “states engaging in competitive behavior,” according to the Assessment. The report adds, fallout from the Gaza crisis, in particular, serves to “undermine” the US.
Both pronouncements, however, have similar biases. Biden’s address to the nation was overtly political, accusing Trump of “bowing down” to Putin. But the supposedly neutral and objective “collective insights of the Intelligence Community” were likewise predisposed in favor of Democratic Party memes. Both blame Russian electoral interference for Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office in 2016. As proof, the so-called intelligence community again offered nothing more than its own assessment, lacking better evidence.
“Ambitious” China
Biden bragged in this address: “For years, all I’ve heard from my Republican friends…is China’s on the rise and America is falling behind. They’ve got it backward!” Contrary to his bravado about “we’re in a stronger position to win the competition for the 21st Century against China,” the World Bank predicts 4.5% GDP growth in China compared to 1.6% for the US in 2024.
China has surpassed the US as the largest world economy by purchasing power parity. The Assessment forecasts slowed – but still greater than for the US – economic growth in what it labels as an “ambitious” China.
The Assessment reports that China “now rivals” the US in DNA-sequencing and is the “world leader” in voice and image recognition and video analytics. Biden’s claim that, “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” is contradicted by the Assessment’s finding that China is “making progress” in producing advanced chips on its own.
The Assessment notes: “China views Washington’s competitive measures against Beijing as part of a broader US…effort to contain its rise.” In this context, the Chinese perceive an increased likelihood of a US first-strike nuclear attack, according to the Assessment. Nevertheless, China has shown growing “confidence” in its nuclear deterrent capabilities against US aggression, also according to the Assessment.
China is disadvantaged militarily, according to the Assessment, because it “lacks recent warfighting experience,” something the US has in excess. US intelligence estimates that China will only “fully modernize” its national defense by 2035 and will not become a “world-class military” until 2049.
The Assessment anticipates increased Chinese push-back over Taiwan. Although Biden claimed that the US is “standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the US has done the opposite by continuing to destabilize and militarize the region. To wit, Biden said in his address, “I’ve revitalized our partnerships and alliances in the Pacific.”
“Confrontational” Russia
The Assessment labels Russia “confrontational,” projecting Washington’s own posture. In a fit of made-for-popular-consumption Russophobia, Biden warned in his address: “Putin of Russia is on the march…If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not!”
While the Assessment warns of many threats, Russian expansionism – as Biden fear mongered – is not one of them. In fact, the Assessment notes that Russia stepped down from intervening in neighboring Azerbaijan regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. The Assessment assures us: “Russia almost certainly does not want a direct military conflict with US and NATO forces.”
The Assessment notes that Russia “maintains the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile.” But it adds that Russia sees its stockpile as “necessary for maintaining deterrence” (presumably from a US first strike). The Assessment, while describing Russia as a “capable and resilient adversary,” takes the contrary view to Biden’s, seeing Russia’s posture as mainly “defensive.”
As the US proxy war against Russia drags on, Biden continues to campaign for expanding the US funding for Ukraine with no hint of a peace. For its part, the Assessment does not contest what it describes as Putin’s belief that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine.
Rather, the Assessment sees no victory in sight for the US: “This deadlock plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.” Not surprisingly, this huge admission of the futility of the US war effort in Ukraine coming from its own intelligence institutions has not been prominently reported by the follow-the-flag corporate press.
The Assessment describes how Russia is strengthening and leveraging ties with China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia is mitigating the impacts of US-led sanctions, while “rebuild[ing] its credibility as a great power.” Russia’s deepening ties with China in particular have afforded it significant “protection from future sanctions.”
Despite US-led coercive economic measures, the Assessment projects “modest” Russian GDP growth. Moscow has “successfully diverted” its oil exports and largely evaded the US/G7 price caps, retaining “significant energy leverage” as the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to Europe. In short, Russia is “offsetting its decline in relations with the West” with a pivot to the Global South.
Other global flashpoints
Biden’s policy of “containing the threat posed by Iran” is elaborated in the Assessment. US-led sanctions are credited with putting “brakes on” Iran’s economy. In response, the Assessment reports, Tehran has “expanded its diplomatic influence” by improving ties with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
The Assessment correctly notes that Iran uses its nuclear program “to build negotiating leverage and respond to perceived international pressure,” pointing out that Iran would “restore JCPOA limits if the United States fulfilled its JCPOA commitments [emphasis added].”
On the one hand, the Assessment preposterously accuses Iran of seeking to “block a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.” On the other, Iran is absolved of orchestrating or having any foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on Israel. This is a notable admission.
The Gaza conflict, according to the Assessment, poses the “risk of escalation” into regional interstate war. Uncle Sam’s “key Arab partners,” the Assessment laments, face hostile domestic sentiment because their citizens (correctly) see the US and Israel as responsible for “the death and destruction.” Although the US is recognized as the “power broker” that could “end the conflict,” the Assessment (also correctly) implies that the US has not played that role.
The Assessment foresees Israel needing to confront “armed resistance from Hamas for years to come.” While acknowledging that Hamas enjoys “broad support,” the Assessment questions Israeli President Netanyahu’s “viability” and “ability of rule.”
Similar to the case of Iran, the Assessment explains, North Korea’s nuclear program is pursued as a “guarantor of regime security” and to “deter outside intervention.” North Korea’s missile launches, the Assessment admits, are responses to counter hostile US-South Korea military exercises. North Korea’s development of nuclear capabilities, the Assessment further acknowledges, are defensive to “enhance second-strike capabilities” in the contingency of a first strike by the US and its allies.
In regard to immigration, Biden touts his “comprehensive plan to fix” our system. Given the current dysfunction on the US border, claiming credit there sounds more like a Republican talking point than one favoring the incumbent. Largely ignored in Biden’s address, the Assessment is concerned with global warming and its potentially destabilizing effect on the US-imposed global order by generating climate refugees.
“Poor socioeconomic conditions and insecurity” further drive cross-border migration, warns the Assessment. While admitting that “lack of economic opportunities” are among the factors that drive Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan emigration, the Assessment incredulously rejects blaming US sanctions for driving people away from their homelands.
Conclusion
Unlike the upbeat “greatest comeback story never told” of the State of the Union address, the Assessment cautions:
“Strains in US alliances and challenges to international norms have made it more difficult…to tackle global issues…. The world that emerges from this tumultuous period will be shaped by whoever… [is] most effective at advancing economic growth and providing benefits for more people, and by the powers…that are most able and willing to act on solutions to transnational issues and regional crises.”
Meanwhile, the Assessment reports that Putin’s “Russia has increased social spending…and increased corporate taxes.” Also reported, Xi’s China is prioritizing “a more equitable distribution of wealth – replacing the focus on maximizing GDP growth.” Back home, Biden promised in his address “to end cancer as we know it” and prophesized that he will “save the planet from the climate crisis.” (For starters, I would settle for just stopping the genocide in Palestine and a negotiated peace in Ukraine.)
The post Biden’s State of the Union Address Exposed by US Intelligence Threat Assessment first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) announced that “Beyond Utopia,” a BAFTA-nominated and du-Pont-Columbia Award-winning film that follows the harrowing journeys of several individuals as they attempt to escape North Korea, is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube. Pastor Seungeun Kim, who has made it his life’s work to rescue North Koreans. Over the past 23 years, he has saved more than 1,000 people through a network of smugglers and activists. As the film depicts, Pastor Kim frequently risks his own life by joining defectors on parts of their treacherous journey to safety, a trek that spans thousands of miles through jungles and rivers. Dubbed “an astonishing, real-life geopolitical thriller” by The Hollywood Reporter and “a staggering look at the nightmare of North Korea and the brave souls who tried to escape it” by Variety, the film has already received critical acclaim. It won the Audience Award for US Documentary at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, received a du-Pont-Columbia Award, has been nominated for the 2024 British Academy Film Award for Best Documentary, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Oscar for Best Documentary. Stream “Beyond Utopia” today on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube.
https://mailchi.mp/hrf.org/beyond-utopia-shortlisted-for-2024-oscars-290552?e=f80cec329e
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
Pyongyang must be prepared to seize South Korean territory in the event of an “emergency,” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said.
In a speech marking the 76th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean Army on Friday, Kim praised the military for “firmly protecting the sovereignty and dignity of the country” from “imperialist military threats, blackmail, and the risk of war.”
Commenting on the increasingly tense relations with Seoul, the North Korean leader said his country has “summarized the history of our people’s division and confrontation and defined [South] Korean puppets as the most harmful and unchangeable enemy” of Pyongyang.
Against this backdrop, Kim stated that in the event of an “emergency,” North Korean policymakers had “made a national decision to occupy and pacify [South Korean] territory.”
The warning comes after the North Korean leader ruled out reunification between Pyongyang and Seoul in late December, arguing that the two neighbors adhere to diametrically opposed principles. Last month, Kim also called on the national parliament to label South Korea the “number one hostile country.”
Pyongyang and Seoul never signed a peace treaty after the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, which divided the peninsula, and tensions remain high. In recent months, North Korea has conducted numerous missile launches while criticizing its southern neighbor for holding joint military drills with the US, which has some 30,000 troops stationed on the peninsula.
Citing US officials, the New York Times reported in January that Washington is worried that North Korea could “take some form of lethal military action” against Seoul. The paper’s sources, however, doubted that Pyongyang would risk anything resembling a full-scale attack.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
North Korea has tested a solid-fuel ballistic missile armed with a hypersonic warhead, the Korean Central Telegraphic Agency (KCTA) reported on Monday.
The launch was conducted amid growing tensions with Pyongyang’s southern neighbor, after Seoul recently conducted military drills with the US near the North’s border.
“On January 14, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s [DPRK] Missile General Bureau performed a test launch of a solid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missile with a hypersonic maneuverable warhead,” the KCTA said, adding that the launch was successful.
The test launch had no impact on the security of neighboring countries and had nothing to do with the “regional situation,” according to the news agency.
Last week, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un accused Seoul of being “most hostile” and of trying to overthrow the leadership in Pyongyang.
South Korea had earlier ordered the evacuation of some of its border islands as North Korea conducted live-fire drills near their volatile maritime border. The maneuvers came shortly after joint US-South Korean drills in the region, which the North called “reckless.”
Seoul’s Defense Ministry condemned the recent launch, saying South Korea would provide an “overwhelming response” if the North commits a “direct provocation.”
The ministry also noted that as part of joint efforts to counter Pyongyang’s military threats, Seoul, Washington, and Tokyo are exchanging real-time data on the North’s missiles. Pyongyang conducted a series of weapons tests in 2023, including its first solid-fuel ICBM.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) announced in early January that it is accelerating development of the Low-Altitude Missile Defence (LAMD) system – nicknamed the “Korean Iron Dome” by some observers – by a year as a countermeasure against North Korean long-range artillery. DAPA noted that further development and production of the LAMD system […]
The post South Korea increases pace on missile shield development appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said it is impossible to achieve reunification between Pyongyang and Seoul because South Korea’s principles are directly opposed to those of his country.
Addressing a meeting of the ruling Workers Party, Kim said the two states’ relations had become “hostile to each other” and no longer “consanguineous or homogeneous,” the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Sunday.
Kim declared Pyongyang’s approach to national reunification based on “one nation and one state with two systems” to be in sharp contradiction with Seoul’s “unification by absorption” and “unification under liberal democracy.”
South Korea is currently a “colonial subordinate state” whose politics are “completely out of order” and whose defense and security are totally dependent on the US, the agency said, citing Kim.
Kim said Washington had turned Seoul into its military base and nuclear arsenal, and that the number of joint military exercises between the US, South Korea and Japan in 2023 had doubled from last year. He said this fact “clearly shows” that the US is aiming for military confrontation.
Kim argued that “war may break out” on the Korean Peninsula at any time due to the “enemies’ reckless moves.” If Washington and Seoul attempt a military confrontation with Pyongyang, its “nuclear war deterrence will go over to a grave action without hesitation,” Kim stressed.
The remarks followed North Korea’s statement on Wednesday that the military situation on the Korean peninsula had become “extreme” because of “unprecedented” confrontational moves by the US and its regional allies.
In 2018, North and South Korea signed the Comprehensive Military Agreement (CMA), agreeing to “completely cease all hostile acts against each other.” However, last month, Seoul suspended part of it and resumed aerial surveillance. In response, Pyongyang vowed to restore all measures suspended since 2018.
The Korean Peninsula was divided in 1953 after an armistice was signed, halting the hostilities between North and South that had begun three years before. Technically, Pyongyang and Seoul still remain at war.
The post Korean Unification “Impossible” – Kim first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Human rights in North Korea are currently in the spotlight. In addition to a recent conference on North Korean human rights held in Honolulu, there’s also a new documentary, Beyond Utopia, about North Korean defectors that is receiving Oscar buzz. We can expect to hear more about North Korea human rights in 2024, the 10-year anniversary of the United Nations Report of the Commission of Inquiry on…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As peer-level adversaries develop and deploy hypersonic weapons while the United States and its allies look to match and counter those capabilities, a new frontier in strategic weapon systems is emerging. Hypersonic weapons – typically glide vehicles deployed by ballistic missile or cruise missiles that exceed Mach 5 – have emerged as the latest technological […]
The post High-End Threat: The Accelerating Pace of Hypersonic Weapons appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
While largely unnoticed by the US public, the trilateral summit between Japan, South Korea, and the US that took place at Camp David this August sent shockwaves throughout East Asia.
US President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio punctuated the end of the three-day summit by releasing a joint declaration rife with the kinds of diplomatic ambiguities and appeals to vague principles typical of this sort of affair. The three leaders pledged their support for a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” for an international “rules-based order,” and for “peace and stability” around the world. But, of course, the historic significance of the summit had less to do with the rhetoric and more to do with the concrete commitments made by the three governments.
The Pacific today looks a lot like Europe on the eve of the First World War—a hotbed of military powers sharply divided into opposing blocs driven by irreconcilable interests, ready to be pulled into war at a moment’s notice.
For the first time, South Korea, Japan, and the US pledged to share data on North Korean missiles, coordinate joint military responses to threats in the region, and host a new annual trilateral military exercise.
These outcomes indicate a realignment of forces in East Asia that significantly raises the risks of potential major power conflict with China. Japan and South Korea have been individual allies of the US for decades—but the three have never before been part of a shared military structure. Now, with an agreed-upon “commitment to consult,” tighter military integration and coordination between the three countries than ever before is assured.
While there is no treaty to bind this budding alliance together yet, the unprecedented “trilateral security cooperation” born from the Camp David summit is a sure step towards achieving one of Washington’s long-standing goals: establishing an Asian equivalent to NATO as a bulwark to protect US interests in the Pacific. The result, which is already manifesting, is a much more divided and hostile region than existed before—where the possibility of great power conflict between nuclear states seems to be more a matter of time than a mere hypothetical.
Roping South Korea into an alliance with Japan has been an aim of US policymakers since the Korean War, when then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson sought to weld South Korea and Japan together into an economic bloc that could revive Japanese industry post-World War II and ward off communist influence in Asia. In recent years, however, the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, coupled with the nuclearization of North Korea, has brought renewed urgency to this long-sought objective.
For years, Seoul proved to be a slippery fish in Washington’s net. Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-In, delicately navigated support for US military expansion in Korea without making ironclad commitments to insert South Korea into an anti-China bloc.
To put it simply, the US needs South Korea to succeed in containing China far more than South Korea needs to participate in this conflict.
The reasons for South Korea’s previous ambiguity lay in a divergence of interests between Seoul and Washington in light of a rapidly changing world. China overtook the US as South Korea’s primary trade partner almost 20 years ago, and South Korea’s largest corporations depend on China for labor, production, and markets. While South Korea’s capitalists also benefit from the US military occupation of the peninsula, there are few benefits to them in picking sides in a zero-sum conflict between the US and China.
This is all rather inconvenient for those in Washington intent on preserving US hegemony indefinitely. South Korea is not only geostrategically important in a conflict against China—it also has the largest military of any US ally in the region, and is also a crucial producer of advanced technologies which US corporations and the Pentagon depend on. To put it simply, the US needs South Korea to succeed in containing China far more than South Korea needs to participate in this conflict.
Then there’s the other, far thornier issue of Japan’s 35-year colonization of Korea and the deep imprint it has left—and continues to have—on Korea. Japan has yet to fully acknowledge, apologize for, or offer satisfactory compensation for its many colonial crimes against the Korean people. This matter remains an open wound on the Korean psyche, and a thorn in the side of Tokyo and Washington.
The litany of Japanese atrocities in Korea are too many to name here, but the most prominent issue at the moment concerns Japan’s forced conscriptions of Koreans during WWII. From 1939 to 1945, Japan forcibly conscripted hundreds of thousands of Koreans to fight its wars, and mobilized more than 3 million Koreans as forced laborers throughout its empire. Among the most heinous and best known of these crimes was the conscription of an estimated 200,000 Korean women into sexual slavery for Japan’s military—a program euphemistically known as the “comfort women” system.
In 2018, the South Korean Supreme Court ordered Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi, which profited from wartime forced labor, to pay reparations to their surviving victims. This incident set off a diplomatic row that escalated to the level of a trade dispute that lasted for years.
For Washington, the renewed push to force Japan to address and atone for these historical injustices could not have come at a more inconvenient time. Just a year before, in 2017, India, Australia, Japan, and the US had revived the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad—a military alliance intended to serve as the main axis of a new anti-China bloc.
The Trump administration was keen to rope South Korea in as a fifth member of the Quad, but this goal never materialized. Entering any kind of explicit alliance with Japan was, and still is, politically toxic in South Korea. Moreover, as the world enters a new era where the US is losing its footing as the globe’s preeminent military and economic power, South Korea, among other nations, was quite sensibly reading the room and attempting to hedge its bets.
Upon entering office, Biden’s administration set achieving a trilateral partnership between the US, Japan, and South Korea as a high priority, seeking to accomplish what its predecessor could not. The Camp David summit represents a major step towards achieving this goal. While the White House and its cheerleaders have already claimed this as a victory for deft diplomacy, there is another cause that deserves significantly more credit: For the past year, current South Korean President Yoon Seok Yeol has waged a ruthless war on the sections of South Korean civil society standing in the way of Washington’s agenda, attacking labor, peace groups, and the general public.
Despite less than 18 months in office, Yoon has earned the dubious distinction of being South Korea’s least popular head of state ever—not to mention one of the most maligned leaders in the world. His administration has been pilloried by civil society groups and the main opposition Democratic Party for its corruption and ineptitude, while simultaneously characterized as a “prosecutor’s dictatorship” where escalating abuses of executive power are interpreted by many as signs of backsliding towards South Korea’s days of autocratic rule.
Domestically, the Yoon administration has declared war against its political enemies, particularly against the labor movement. In January of this year, hundreds of police officers raided the offices of multiple progressive organizations, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which represents over 2 million workers.
Yoon’s domestic crackdown isn’t taking place in a vacuum separate from the formation of the trilateral alliance. These repressive measures are the necessary internal complement to an international agenda primarily determined not in Seoul, but in Washington.
Wielding trumped-up charges ranging from racketeering to spying on behalf of North Korea, the Yoon administration has weaponized law enforcement to continue its crackdown on labor and progressive organizers throughout this year. Over 1,000 members of the Korean Construction Workers Union alone are currently under federal investigation, and more than 30 are now in jail. One local KCWU leader, Yang Hoe-dong, died by self-immolation in protest of these charges—transforming himself into a martyr for the movement to rally around.
It’s not just labor unions that have found themselves in Yoon’s crosshairs. The 6.15 Committee has also been the target of official persecution. Originally founded in 2000, the 6.15 Committee has chapters on both sides of the Korean peninsula and overseas that work towards building support for Korean peace and reunification through people-to-people exchanges. At the same time that the KCTU’s offices were raided, members of the 6.15 Committee in Jeju province were arrested on espionage charges. The evidence? They had previously hosted a public screening of a North Korean film.
Perhaps most brazenly, the Yoon administration has also escalated attacks on the media. Two news outlets, Newstapa and the Joongang Tongyang Broadcasting Company, were raided by prosecutors on Sept. 14, 2023, for publishing a story in 2022 spotlighting Yoon’s alleged participation in an illegal loan scheme. Press freedom has never stood on firm ground in South Korea, even after the supposed era of “democratization” in the 1990s. Ousted former President Park Geun-hye notoriously maintained a blacklist banning thousands of artists considered unfriendly to her government. Yet no other president since the days of military dictatorship ever dared to use state security forces against a media office, until Yoon.
Yoon’s domestic crackdown isn’t taking place in a vacuum separate from the formation of the trilateral alliance. These repressive measures are the necessary internal complement to an international agenda primarily determined not in Seoul, but in Washington.
As president, Yoon has overseen several dramatic changes in South Korean foreign policy that benefit US interests and require the repression of internal dissent to achieve: scuttling relations with North Korea, joining US attempts to technologically isolate China, and reconciling with Japan to clear the way for the Camp David summit.
Since coming into office, Yoon has overseen a drastic escalation in the frequency and intensity of joint military exercises between South Korea and the US. These military exercises began in the 1970s as annual affairs—now, there are more than 20 planned for 2023 alone. These war drills routinely rehearse invasions of North Korea within miles of the DMZ, the de facto border that has divided Korea since the 1953 armistice.
The KCTU and other labor groups have provided some of the most stalwart opposition to these war games. Last year, in response to the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, the KCTU joined hands with the more moderate Federation of Korean Trade Unions to deliver a joint statement denouncing war maneuvers—a statement that was, significantly, also signed by their union umbrella counterpart in North Korea.
Predictably, Yoon and Biden’s acts of aggression have prompted parallel North Korean shows of force, which then provide the pretext for Washington, Seoul, and, increasingly, Tokyo to escalate in turn. The Biden administration deployed two US nuclear submarines to Korea for the first time in 40 years this summer, and the US and South Korea warned in a joint statement that “Any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.”
Labor repression within South Korea also plays a significant role in facilitating Washington’s aims to technologically and economically isolate China, a crucial pillar of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s “New Washington Consensus.” Here, the intersection of technological and military power are key. US domination of tech patents is one of the pillars of its premiere position in the global economy—a position it can only hold so long as Chinese attempts to develop domestic tech production capacity are foiled.
South Korean labor is one of the only organized obstacles within the US-led bloc to Washington’s economic offensive against China. Crushing the unions means clearing the way for the unhindered reengineering of South Korea’s economy in Washington’s vision.
Maintaining US dominance of the tech market also has more obvious military implications for Washington, which depends on semiconductors produced in South Korea and Taiwan to operate its weapons of mass destruction. Gregory C. Allen, an analyst with the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, describes Washington’s tech offensive against China as “actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry—strangling with an intent to kill.”
Attempts to “strangle” Chinese tech have escalated sharply under the Trump and Biden administrations. Two of the clearest and highest-profile examples of this have been US attempts to sanction Huawei, going as far as to coordinate the arrest of the company’s CFO during a visit to Canada, as well as the push to ban TikTok, which culminated in a bizarre and ridiculous Senate hearing earlier this year.
But the war on Chinese tech goes beyond targeting individual Chinese conglomerates. Under Biden, a strategy has slowly taken shape to attempt to bring as much high tech production back to the US as possible while simultaneously taking measures to exclude China from existing international supply chains that rely heavily on production in Taiwan and South Korea. Two of Biden’s biggest legislative wins, the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, contain provisions that effectively force South Korean companies to abandon their investments in China in favor of building electric vehicle and semiconductor factories in the US. South Korean EV battery makers have already committed $13 billion to build new plants and expand existing ones in seven US states.
This has all come at a steep cost to South Korea. South Korean technology exports to the Chinese market plummeted in the wake of the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts. From 2022 until June 2023, South Korea suffered the most severe trade deficit in its history, hemorrhaging some $47.5 billion in 2022 alone. By far, the leading cause of this deficit was the sudden reversal in trade with China.
Squeezed between rising inflation and spiraling economic prospects, South Korea’s workers are bearing the brunt of this economic realignment. At the same time, the Yoon government is scrambling to find some way to reverse its poor economic performance without making concessions to workers. Hence, Yoon’s war on trade unions—the only vehicles available for the working class to organize independently and fight back. As President Yoon himself put it, the crackdown on unions is necessary “so that corporate value can rise, capital markets can develop, and many jobs can be created.” South Korean labor is one of the only organized obstacles within the US-led bloc to Washington’s economic offensive against China. Crushing the unions means clearing the way for the unhindered reengineering of South Korea’s economy in Washington’s vision.
Amid this political and economic chaos, Yoon was able to broker a new understanding with Tokyo that put an end to years of diplomatic and economic clashes. In a move many critics described as unconstitutional, the Yoon administration unilaterally modified the 2018 Supreme Court decision ordering restitution from Japanese companies for Korean survivors of wartime forced labor. Instead, the survivors will now be compensated from a fund paid into by South Korean corporations, letting their Japanese counterparts off the hook. Despite being opposed by some 60% of South Koreans, this arrangement allowed for a thaw in Seoul and Tokyo’s relations, which, in turn, set the stage for the summit at Camp David this August.
Analysts have also warned of the possibility that the trilateral alliance could be used as a mechanism to draw South Korean forces into US wars abroad—including in the Taiwan Strait.
The specter of North Korean nuclearization was presented as the primary justification for the Camp David summit and the resulting trilateral security cooperation alliance. But the outcomes of Camp David were not exclusively military in nature. Japan and South Korea also pledged to share data on critical supply chains with the US.
Domestically, Yoon’s participation in the Camp David Summit was widely lambasted as a betrayal of South Korea’s interests. The summit has not only heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula; it has also done significant damage to South Korean relations with Russia and China, although China’s Xi Jinping seems determined to maintain cordial relations. Analysts have also warned of the possibility that the trilateral alliance could be used as a mechanism to draw South Korean forces into US wars abroad—including in the Taiwan Strait.
The Camp David Summit has only brought more darkness to the political climate in South Korea. Days before he left for the US, Yoon gave a national address for Liberation Day, which marks the anniversary of the end of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Rather than offer reflections on the human toll of the colonial period or the legacy of the Korean independence movement, Yoon fixated on a different target: “The forces of communist totalitarianism have always disguised themselves as democracy activists, human rights advocates, or progressive activists while engaging in despicable and unethical tactics and false propaganda,” he said. “We must never succumb to the forces of communist totalitarianism.”
In South Korea, anticommunism and state repression have gone hand-in-hand since the “Republic of Korea” was first established in a widely opposed, US-sponsored election process in 1948. Before the Korean War officially began in 1950, a mass uprising on the island of Jeju against Korea’s division ended in the slaughter of between 30,000 and 60,000 people. In the early days of the Korean War itself, the South Korean government massacred between 100,000 and 200,000 political dissidents that had previously been forced to register in the so-called National Guidance League.
Throughout the long night of South Korea’s military dictatorships, which lasted from the end of WWII to the 1990s, strikes were broken, activists tortured and disappeared, and families of the massacred and vanished were silenced and surveilled in the name of suppressing the communist threat. When the city of Gwangju took up arms in 1980 to demand democracy and appealed to the US to intervene, President Jimmy Carter greenlit the deployment of South Korean paratroopers from the DMZ to butcher as many as 2,000 of the city’s residents. In the aftermath, the Chun Doo Hwan regime blamed the events in Gwangju on North Korean infiltrators and communists.
For now, the Yoon administration has limited the scale and brutality of its crackdown to incarcerations and prosecutorial witch hunts. But the echoes of Korea’s recent history leave many wondering if, or when, the bloodletting will return. For its part, the Biden administration has followed in the footsteps of every previous administration by refusing to acknowledge the political repression unfolding under Yoon’s South Korea. Corporate media, in turn, has largely ignored the outcry against the Camp David summit by South Koreans themselves.
The joint statement delivered at Camp David cast the new US-Japan-South Korean axis in terms of a partnership based on a mutual desire for global peace and prosperity. But the immediate consequences of the summit strongly indicate that things are, in fact, moving in the opposite direction.
Rather than deescalating military tensions and breaking down barriers to international cooperation, the Camp David Summit signals an escalation of military threats coinciding with the tightening of a US-led hegemonic bloc in the Pacific. Every action has a reaction, and the reaction here is coming in the form of a consolidated counter-bloc between Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing.
For the time being, the two Korean states have aligned with opposing global interests. The possibility of reunification and reconciliation, which seemed so tantalizingly close just a few years before, now appears to be far out of reach.
The reestablishment of cooperative relations between North Korea, China, and Russia has been a long time coming. Relations between the three countries turned cold after the destruction of the Soviet Union. For decades, Russia and China acquiesced to UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea—something which they no longer are willing to abide.
In recent years, Beijing and Moscow have increasingly turned to each other, and to Pyongyang, as fellow targets of US sanctions, military encirclement, and propaganda. For all its bombastic proclamations about protecting peace and freedom around the world, Washington has created the conditions for a new unity of interests to emerge among those states it names as its enemies.
Pyongyang, Beijing, and Moscow were all united in their alarm and rejection of the Camp David Summit—and not without reason. All three countries were explicitly named in the Camp David Principles and Joint Statement as problems to be managed by the self-appointed triumvirate. China and Russia also share borders with Korea, which will be the primary site of military escalation by Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul. Beijing and Pyongyang swiftly denounced the new bloc. Moscow even suggested the start of trilateral naval exercises between the three countries as a counter to US-led military maneuvers.
On Sept. 12, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un boarded an armored train for the Russian Far East in his first foreign visit as head of state since 2019. In a meeting with Vladimir Putin, Kim expressed his government’s full support for Russia in its conflict against NATO, and received pledges to assist with developing space technologies from Moscow.
For the time being, the two Korean states have aligned with opposing global interests. The possibility of reunification and reconciliation, which seemed so tantalizingly close just a few years before, now appears to be far out of reach. Yet even as the currents of world politics pull Korea apart once again, opportunities for a different future remain.
South Korea, which ascended economically for decades on Washington’s coattails, now finds itself on the side of a declining power. Already, Seoul is being forced to choose between its objective interests in closer ties with its neighbors and Washington’s contravening political preferences. The result appears to be a declining trend in South Korea’s fortunes—something key stakeholders in the country may not tolerate forever.
North Korea, isolated and encircled for so long, now has a wide and reliable rearguard of support in Moscow and Beijing. As the center of economic gravity pivots towards China, opportunities for North Korea’s advancement will only proliferate. The unintended result in the not-too-distant future could well be two Koreas that can stand on truly equal footing and finally become one, ending the division of Korea and the centrality of that division in manufacturing regional conflict.
But perhaps such predictions are too optimistic for the present moment. After all, Korea must survive intact for such a future to be possible. The Pacific today looks a lot like Europe on the eve of the First World War—a hotbed of military powers sharply divided into opposing blocs driven by irreconcilable interests, ready to be pulled into war at a moment’s notice. That war was so cataclysmic that for a generation it could only be remembered as The Great War. The war to come will be even more vicious, and so far, it’s being served to us with a smile.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
I first visited North Korea in 2009. I remember feeling nervous and anxious in the days and weeks leading up to the trip. I had grown up thinking of only the south as my homeland, and the north seemed remote and foreign. This was also the same year that United States journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee had been detained in North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)…
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on July 27, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
July 27 marked 70 years since the signing of the armistice that halted—but did not end—the Korean War. Since then, the divided Peninsula has been locked in a perpetual state of war that grows ever more dangerous.
In recent weeks, the U.S. has flown nuclear-capable bombers, launched nuclear war planning talks with South Korean officials, and sent a nuclear-capable submarine to South Korea for the first time in 42 years.
This followed the largest-ever live-fire military drills near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divides Korea. North Korea has responded with missile tests—and recently threatened nuclear retaliation.
To avert nuclear war and protect our environment, Americans must demand an end to the growing U.S. military presence around the world and rein in our nearly $900 billion military budget.
As a Korean American with family ties to both sides of the DMZ, I know that as long as this war continues, everyday people—Americans as well as Koreans—pay the steepest price. The Korean War inaugurated the U.S. military industrial complex, quadrupled U.S. defense spending, and set the U.S. on a course to become the world’s military police.
While much attention is paid to North Korea’s nuclear program and aggressive rhetoric, Americans also need to understand how the U.S. government’s actions exacerbate tensions—and why we have a critical role to play in ending this war.
To start, we must remember the central role of the U.S. in the Korean War—and just how destructive the fighting was.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has described the war as an example of what a “successful” U.S. war can “achieve.” Other talkingheads have made similarclaims, offering the war as a model for how to proceed in Ukraine. This revisionism is dangerous.
The Korean War killed over 4 million people, more than half of them civilians. From 1950 to 1953, the U.S. dropped 32,000 tons of napalm and 635,000 tons of bombs—more than were dropped in the Pacific theater in World War II. The U.S. military showed “next to no concern for civilian casualties,” historian Bruce Cummings notes, burning 80% of North Korea’s cities to the ground.
Even after this mass destruction, the Peninsula is still at war today—with ongoing consequences for Koreans on both sides of the DMZ.
The U.S. has evicted families from their homes in South Korea to build military bases, while chemicals leaking from bases have poisoned local environments and contaminated drinking water. The Biden administration continues to enforce a Trump-era travel ban keeping Korean Americans separated from their loved ones in North Korea, while sanctions hinder the delivery of essential aid to the country.
U.S. taxpayers bankroll this devastation, spending $13.4 billion to maintain 28,500 troops in South Korea between 2016 and 2019.
Unless we act, our communities and environment will suffer devastating consequences as our military presence expands across the Pacific.
For example, the Defense Department recently announced a missile-defense system to be built on Guam, comprising up to 20 sites across the island and billed as a response to “perceived threats from potential adversaries like China and North Korea.” This plan, like many in the past, will destroy precious landscapes.
In Hawai’i, leaking jet fuel from Navy storage tanks has contaminated drinking water for thousands of families. And next year, the U.S. will hold the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), the largest annual maritime warfare exercise, in the state. Past exercises killed untold scores of marine life.
To avert nuclear war and protect our environment, Americans must demand an end to the growing U.S. military presence around the world and rein in our nearly $900 billion military budget. Our grassroots peace movement continues to grow, leading to the introduction of the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act (H.R. 1369), which now has nearly 40 co-sponsors.
To end the Korean War, we need individuals with all skill sets—storytellers, community builders, healers, and more—working in concert. We must educate our communities, fight for change, and together build peace in Korea and across the world.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, which brought a cessation of hostilities between the opposing parties, but left the peninsula locked in a permanent state of war. Article IV of the armistice stipulates: “Within three months after the Armistice Agreement is signed and becomes effective, a political conference of a higher level of both sides beheld by representatives…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.